Roman Incense Container Unearthed in Northern England
Archaeologists working on a Cockermouth site uncovered some “particularly spectacular finds” in the final days of their nine-week project.
The nine-strong team of experts has been working in riverside fields off Low Road and behind the Lakes Home Centre.
The Ecus team, from Barnard Castle, was called in by landowner Bob Slack who is keen to put some flood defences in the area.
In the first few weeks they discovered evidence of a Roman foundry, marching camp and small village, said Mr Slack.
They later discovered a bust, steelyard weight, coins, pottery and also the foundations of a building and flagged floors.
In the final week, they came across a copper-alloy incense container, which Ecus project officer Julie Shoemark described as “an exceptionally rare find”.
“The site has produced a wealth of information about the Roman inhabitants of the vicus and last week revealed some particularly spectacular finds,” she said.
“Firstly, we have a highly polished tiny stone figurine which has unfortunately not survived intact. What remains depicts a naked male rendered in typically ‘Romano-British’ style with simply carved large almond eyes and a distinctive spiked hairstyle.
“Secondly, a stone sculpture of a seated female figure was recovered from a rubble deposit. She has unfortunately lost her head, however, enough remains to tell us who she is.
“She wears a pattered mantle and carries a patera (a shallow bowl used for libations) in her right hand and a cornucopia containing an ear of wheat in her left. These attributes identify her as the goddess Fortuna, the goddess of luck, but also closely associated with the harvest in agricultural communities.”
The most striking find was a copper-alloy balsamarium (incense container).
“This is an exceptionally rare find, being one of only a handful excavated in Britain to date,” said Ms Shoemark.
“It is in the form of a bust of the youthful Bacchus, the god of wine, although the features appear to have been modelled after depictions of Antinous, the lover of Emperor Hadrian.
“In addition to being exceptionally rare, this artefact is in superb condition, missing only the lid which would have sat atop the head.”
The only other example of a balsamarium of similar design was recovered from the River Eden, Carlisle and is on display at Tullie House.
Landowner Bob Slack and archaeologist Eddie Dougherty on the site
Bacchus is most widely known as the god of winemaking but is also associated with agriculture, particularly orchards, and fertility.
“We previously had an exquisite steelyard weight depicting Silenus, the satyr companion of Bacchus, so we now have a nice group of finds carrying the running theme of agriculture and fertility, which would have been central to the lives of this community,” said Ms Shoemark.
“Together these and the other artefacts from the excavation are allowing us to build a picture of the history of the site and its inhabitants.
“We look forward to sharing the full results following specialist research and assessment of the assemblage in due course.”
The land, which will be covered with soil and reseeded, is in a flood zone so cannot be developed. Mr Slack has planning permission for 27 homes adjacent to the Lovells development on Low Road.
Neolithic Ritual Cache Discovered in Ukrainian Cave
Mykhailo Sokhatskyi investigating Verteba Cave: Artifacts suggest it was a hiding place because who would want to live here.
Caves have provided shelter for humans and our predecessors for at least two million years. They served as dwellings, hiding places, possibly shrines, and for the last 50,000 years, as a canvas for our art. Now new discoveries in the uninviting Verteba Cave in Ukraine bring us a new glimpse into human history, at the dawn of agriculture in Eastern Europe.
The discoveries, dating to about 5,000 years ago, were made in March by archaeologists from the Borschivskyy Local History Museum in Ukraine, led by Sokhatskyi Mykhailo, a leading scholar of the Trypillian culture and director of the museum. They shed rare light on the enigmatic Cucuteni-Trypillian culture that dominated territories in Ukraine, Romania and Moldova for over 2,000 years.
The Cucuteni-Trypillian culture is known to have been highly developed for its time, the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic. Some of their settlements were extraordinarily large; they farmed and husbanded domestic animals and had pottery and metallurgical skills.
Little however is known about their ritual life due to the scarcity of Trypillian burials. But now some hints have been unearthed at Verteba Cave – including a hidden collection of female figurines.
Beautifully ornamented Trypillian pottery found in Verteba Cave
‘Pompeii on the Dniester’
Verteba Cave is about 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) long and features occasional small stalactites and stalagmites in maze-like tunnels. Its entrance is near the village of Bilche-Zolote, north of the Dniester River in western Ukraine. In fact, the cave has been undergoing archaeological investigation since its discovery in 1829 and gained the soubriquet of “Pompeii on the Dneister” not because of volcano-stricken bodies strewn about but because of the sheer abundance of material from antiquity.
Finds over the years included elaborately ornamented pottery vessels, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic clay figurines, tools made of flint, bone, and stone, copper knives, and various ornaments made of bones and shells. Many are on display inside the cave, which has effectively become an underground museum of Trypillian culture, complete with guided tours.
The team excavating inside the cave Cave Verteba
However, the earlier excavations were not systematic. Archaeological layers got mixed in the process, and valuable data was lost. (Archaeology is the art of destruction, some say, which is why modern archaeological research never excavates whole sites but rather only a slice of them, leaving the rest for future archaeologists equipped with advanced techniques and knowledge.)
Then excavations starting in 1996 found layers undisrupted by previous research, which could be studied using modern methods, guided by almost 200 years of acquired data on the cave.
Female figurines found in previous excavations at Verteba Cave
Stressful times and ‘talking bones’
The unique quality of the Verteba Cave for scholars of the Trypillians is the discovery of three layers of the culture, each separated by a sterile layer. The research concluded that between 6,000 to 4,600 years ago, various groups associated with this culture, differentiated mainly by pottery style, used the cave intermittently, altogether occupying the cave for about 800 years.
What brought these early farmers here, to this unpleasant maze of darkness?
Dank, pitch black, and altogether unwelcoming, but also small stalactites in Verteba Cave
Verteba is not hospitable in any way. It consists of narrow pitch-black labyrinths, and is very humid. Nobody with options would have wanted to live there or stay long. The requisite conclusion, scholars suggest, is that its primary function was as a refuge; but based on the amounts and density of the materials retrieved in the cave, when people did come, it was in large numbers.
Many scholars believe that the late Trypillian period was a turbulent time and indeed the occupation layers in the cave correlate with known migrations to the area by adjacent tribes. Many Trypillian settlements from that time were fortified and surrounded by moats, or were built on high terraces next to rivers.
Cave Verteba
Moreover, the biological evidence found over the years may be scanty but it’s telling. Analysis of 21 Trypillian skulls found between 2008 to 2012 revealed that 12 had head traumas that had to have occurred at death or close to it, because they showed no signs of healing.
Theoretically, at least some of the traumas could have resulted from accidents. Still, osteological research on the position of the injuries and comparison to known markers of violent trauma says violence is the more plausible cause in most cases.
Furthermore, examination of the inhabitants’ teeth and long bones suggested they led a stressful life, at least more so than their predecessors. Their remains indicate that the Verteba cave dwellers were shorter and experienced significantly more enamel defects than Ukraine’s earlier Mesolithic and Neolithic populations, which is indicative of malnutrition and/or disease early in life, during tooth formation.
Bone plate amulet from Verteba Cave
The Trypillian economy was based on agriculture and husbandry alongside hunting and foraging. The Neolithic revolution brought a new way of life, with new stresses. As populations grew and resources became limited, the evidence indicates that people suffered from malnutrition and illness associated with living in dense conditions.
Based on all this, the archaeologists think the cave served to hide in times of conflict likely arising from migration episodes, driven partly by the new way of life. Supporting this thesis, the cave mouth is inconspicuous, at the bottom of a sinkhole in the middle of a flat plateau, making it a perfect hiding spot. Nowadays, the cave has only one entrance but Sokhatskyi and the team discovered that it had several during the Neolithic period.
The entrance to Verteba Cave
The Trypillians weren’t the only ones to hide in the cave system. Around 3,000 years later, others would find refuge in it again – Jews hiding from the Nazis during World War II. An exhibition of items they left behind, like the Trypillians before them, is in process in the underground museum in this extraordinary cave, no place to spend one’s life but a wonderful place to hole up.
An interlude with boars
All that said, hiding wasn’t the only thing the Trypillians did inside Verteba, Sokhatsky surmises. It was also a place of worship and burial. Throughout history, people have sought sanctuary in holy sites, such as churches and temples, he adds.
Among the finds in March, the archaeologists found an enormous clay storage jar with white organic material on its bottom that has yet to undergo analysis. And they noticed a niche in a wall that had been missed, a small one into which only a hand could fit.
Finding the storage jar in Verteba Cave.
Inside it they revealed five female clay figurines, placed closely together, Sokhatskyi says.
“Female figurines are not rare in Trypillian contexts, and hoards of figurines are known, but these were sheltered by the tusks of a wild boar,” he says.
Adult and baby boars in Haifa
Searching the literature produced no parallels, he says.
In general, boar remains are rare within Trypillian complexes. Their tusks have been found within some Early and Middle Trypillian graves but this culture’s rituals seemed to have been focused more on domesticated animals like cattle, sheep, goats, and dogs. When wild animals were represented, they are usually bears or deer.
Verteba is “late Trypillian” and in that context, this find is unique, the archaeologist explains. In Verteba, the team also found jewelry and tools (for pottery production) made of boar teeth, and in 2016, they found a small clay boar figurine.
Boar tusk with perforations suggesting it had been used as a pendant or other item of adornment
For some reason, the boar may have played an important role for the people in the cave. One possibility is the persistence of old traditions, also suggested by the habit of the Trypillians returning to old pottery ornamentation traditions, Sokhatskyi suggests. Perhaps it is that very thing, preserving tradition, that enabled them to preserve their culture for all these years.
Staging of religion on rock paintings that are thousands of years old in southern Egypt desert
Egyptologists at the University of Bonn and the University of Aswan want to systematically record hundreds of petroglyphs and inscriptions dating from the Neolithic to the Arab period and document them in a database.
The desert in southern Egypt is filled with hundreds of petroglyphs and inscriptions oldest dating from the fifth millennium B.C. and few have been studied.
A more than 5,000-year-old rock painting that shows a boat being pulled by 25 men on a rope among them stands out in particular.
“The first newly discovered sources shed new light on the pre-Pharaonic period of the Fourth Millennium and the importance of the socio-cultural periphery,” says Egyptologist Prof. Dr. Ludwig Morenz of the University of Bonn.
Mohamed Abdel Hay Abu Baker, who was specifically responsible for researching the rock images at the Aswan Inspectorate, among the images captured during his explorations in the field, one, in particular, stood out to the Egyptologist from the University of Bonn.
It is depicted over the bumps and edges of the rock, how a boat is pulled by 25 men with raised arms on a rope. A ritual is obviously impressively shown here – namely the great procession of an image of the gods, according to Morenz.
This is clear from image details, he said: the boat with shrine and standard and, in particular, the cattle horns, which are typical of sacred imagery. “This rock image gives us insights into the sacred design of an apparently remote landscape, the Wadi al Agebab, which is still largely unknown in research,” says the Egyptologist.
The entire later Pharaonic culture is based on the beginnings of the pictorial staging of religion. Morenz: “Here, the high importance of religion and especially the cult of the gods in the still pre-Egyptian society of the second half of the Fourth Millennium is revealed as a culture-creating factor.”
Rock image – with ruler boat procession, ca. 3200 BC, Wadi al Agebab.
Documentation
“This cultural treasure in the northeast of Aswan has been largely undocumented, let alone published,” says Egyptologist Prof. Dr. Ludwig Morenz of the University of Bonn.
The petroglyphs are found in numerous and often remote locations in dried-up river valleys, called “wadis” in Arabic. At the same time, the petroglyphs, which are sometimes inconspicuous at first glance, are under severe threat, especially from current quarrying activities in the desert.
“Especially in recent years, there has already been serious destruction of this cultural asset,” says Morenz, who is also a member of the Cluster of Excellence Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) and the Transdisciplinary Research Area “Present Pasts” at the University of Bonn.
“Such losses can hardly be prevented completely, given the vastness of the area, but all the more important is at least good documentation.”
In the course of his doctoral studies at Aswan University in Aswan, Abu Baker will now work together with the University of Bonn to create a comprehensive database with an image archive on rock images. For this purpose, the University of Excellence Bonn supports the inspector of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities for one year with a scholarship from excellence funds of the federal and state governments. Prof. Morenz is the second supervisor of the dissertation.
Some of the first humans in the Americas came from China, study finds
During the second migration, the same lineage of people settled in Japan, which could help explain similarities in prehistoric arrowheads and spears found in the Americas (pictured), China and Japan.
Some of the first humans to arrive in the Americas included people from what is now China, who arrived in two distinct migrations during and after the last ice age, a new genetics study has found.
“Our findings indicate that besides the previously indicated ancestral sources of Native Americans in Siberia, northern coastal China also served as a genetic reservoir contributing to the gene pool,” said Yu-Chun Li, one of the report authors.
Li added that during the second migration, the same lineage of people settled in Japan, which could help explain similarities in prehistoric arrowheads and spears found in the Americas, China, and Japan.
It was once believed that ancient Siberians, who crossed over a land bridge that existed in the Bering Strait linking modern Russia and Alaska, were the sole ancestors of Native Americans.
More recent research, from the late 2000s onwards, has signaled that more diverse sources from Asia could be connected to an ancient lineage responsible for founding populations across the Americas, including in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and California.
Known as D4h, this lineage is found in mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from mothers and is used to trace maternal ancestry.
The team from the Kunming Institute of Zoology embarked on a 10-year hunt for D4h, combing through 100,000 modern and 15,000 ancient DNA samples across Eurasia, eventually landing on 216 contemporary and 39 ancient individuals who came from the ancient lineage.
By analyzing the mutations that had accrued over time, looking at the samples’ geographic locations, and using carbon dating, they were able to reconstruct the D4h’s origins and expansion history.
The results revealed two migration events. The first was between 19,500 and 26,000 years ago during the Last Glacial Maximum, when ice sheet coverage was at its greatest and climate conditions in northern China were probably inhospitable.
The second occurred during the melting period, between 19,000 and 11,500 years ago. Increasing human populations during this period might have triggered migrations.
It was during this second migration that the scientists found a surprising genetic link between Native Americans and Japanese people, particularly the indigenous Ainu.
In the melting period, a subgroup branched out from northern coastal China to Japan, contributing to the Japanese people, the study said, a finding that chimes with archeological similarities between ancient people in the Americas, China, and Japan.
Li said a strength of the study was the number of samples they discovered, and complementary evidence from Y chromosomal DNA showing that male ancestors of Native Americans lived in northern China at the same time as female ancestors made researchers confident of their findings.
“However, we don’t know in which specific place in northern coastal China this expansion occurred and what specific events promoted these migrations,” he said.
“More evidence, especially ancient genomes, is needed to answer these questions.”
Excavations Continue in Middle Egypt’s Meir Necropolis
An Egyptian archaeological mission has uncovered a collection of structure relics from the Byzantine and Late Period in Meir Necropolis in the Assiut governorate.
The mission discovered the large remains of structures on two levels, with the upper level consisting of monks’ cells with a court and a number of chambers and the lower level consisting of a collection of burials.
“The discovery highlights the significance of Meir during the Old and Middle Kingdoms as well as the Late Period,” said Mostafa Waziry, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, referring to a Coptic text engraved on one of the walls of the structural remains.
The text, written in black ink, consists of eight lines of prayers to God. Above it, three clay shelves that may have been used to hold the monks’ equipment at the time or manuscripts.
The burials include a collection of coffins and human skeletons in poor condition, among them the funerary objects of an unidentified lady.
These objects consist of remains of a decorated coffin in poor condition, a funerary mask and collar, clay pots of different shapes and sizes, along with a group of blue and black faience beads and two copper mirrors, said Adel Okasha, head of the Central Archaeological Department for Antiquities in Middle Egypt.
The Meir site is located about 50 kilometres northwest of the Upper Egyptian city of Assiut. Provincial rulers, or nomarchs, were buried in tombs in the hillside.
Several of the tombs have been cleared and opened to visitors.
The necropolis has many important rock-cut tombs dating to the sixth and seventh dynasties, painted with coloured scenes depicting daily life including industries and sports with a distinct local style.
The first cancer case on record occurred 1.7 million years ago and was found in an early human relative’s toe bone.
Cancer may seem like a modern disease, but it has affected humans for eons. Scientists have discovered numerous prehistoric human remains indicating the presence of cancer. So, what’s the earliest case of cancer on record? And what’s the first time that humans wrote about it in medical texts?
The earliest evidence of human cancer comes from an early human relative who lived around 1.7 million years ago. This individual, likely of the species Paranthropus robustus or Homo ergaster, lived with a malignant tumor in their left toe bone.
Archaeologists discovered the skeletal remains inside Swartkrans cave, a limestone deposit in South Africa that’s often called the Cradle of Humankind for being home to the largest concentration of human relative remains in the world.
When researchers compared computed tomography (CT) scans of the toe bone fossil with images of modern-day cases of osteosarcoma, an aggressive form of cancer that begins in the cells that form bones, they immediately recognized the distinctive cauliflower-like appearance of an osteosarcoma, according to a 2016 study about the case published in the South African Journal of Science.
Nowadays, osteosarcoma is one of the most common bone cancers in humans and can occur at any age, although it is most frequently seen in children, teenagers and young adults who are still growing, according to the American Cancer Society. However, while this prehistoric individual’s age is unknown, it appears that they were an adult, the researchers said.
An even older benign tumor was found in a 1.9 million-year-old human relative known as Australopithecus sediba found in South Africa, according to a separate 2016 study in the South African Journal of Science.
It’s not surprising that the oldest known cancer case was in a bone, since organs, skin and other soft tissues are more prone to decay than bones are.
“Bone is one of the few tissues that can survive in the fossil record,” Bruce Rothschild, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.
However, even if cancer is present in a fossil, it often isn’t visible to the naked eye and takes further examination to find — which was the case for the toe bone.
“About one-third of cancers will show themselves,” Rothschild said. “But you would need to perform an X-ray to determine if something was hidden inside the bone. Most pathologists [today] look at an X-ray before coming up with a diagnosis of a tumor when it involves the bone.”
First written record of cancer
The Edwin Smith Papyrus from ancient Egypt is the first known text that mentions cancer.
Although the 1.7-million-year-old toe bone is the earliest known case of cancer in a hominin, a group that includes modern humans, the first written record of cancer doesn’t show up until much, much later.
In 3000 B.C. Imhotep — an ancient Egyptian mathematician, physician and architect — wrote what came to be known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus, a textbook about bodily trauma and surgical procedures. In the text, he detailed 48 medical cases, including several case studies on breast cancer.
The text was written in hieratic, an ancient Egyptian writing system, and was later translated into a two-volume English text by American archaeologist James Henry Breasted. In it, Imhotep described characteristics of different types of tumors, including “oily tumors” and “solid tumors.” He also included descriptions of a breast tumor — describing it as “bulging mass in the breast” that is cool, hard and as dense as an “unripe hemat fruit” that spreads under the skin, according to the book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” (Scribner, 2010).
While Imhotep gives a number of treatments for the other medical conditions in the text, under “therapy” for the breast tumor he wrote, “There is none.” However, he did note the best practices for binding other types of tumors, which involved creating an ointment made of grease, honey and lint, according to The Cancer Letter, which published an excerpt of the historical text.
The papyrus not only offers a glimpse of how surgical medicine was practiced thousands of years ago by ancient Egyptians, arguably some of the world’s first surgeons, but also provides some of the earliest evidence of cancer ever recorded, according to a 2016 study published in the journal Cancer.
It’s unclear how these cases of prehistoric cancer developed. Just like the humans who came before us, we’re still trying to figure out what causes many cancers and the best ways to treat them.
Archaeologists 3D map Red Lily Lagoon, the hidden Northern Territory landscape where first Australians lived more than 60,000 years ago
Archaeologists map Red Lily Lagoon, a hidden landscape in the Northern Territory where the first Australians lived more than 60,000 years ago.
Red Lily Lagoon in West Arnhem Land sits more than 40 kilometers inland, near a culturally significant rock art site, Madjedbebe. It is an important archaeological landscape with significant implications for understanding the First Australians.
Scientists at Flinders University have used sub-surface imaging and aerial surveys to see through floodplains in the Red Lily Lagoon area of West Arnhem Land in Northern Australia.
These ground-breaking methods showed how this important landscape in the Northern Territory was altered as sea levels rose about 8,000 years ago.
The researchers used a 3D model to visualize that landscape, with the findings, published in the scientific journal Plos One.
“These results show huge hidden sandstone escarpments — similar to the dramatic sandstone escarpments we see in Arnhem Land and Kakadu today — that for the majority of human occupation were actually exposed and probably habited by people,” lead researcher Jarrad Kowlessar said.
He said the underground mapping and visualization technique could be used by archaeologists to identify underground sites where First Australians may have lived thousands of years ago, and potentially left behind rock art or tools.
The findings also provide a new perspective on the region’s rock art, which is internationally recognized for its significance and distinct style.
The researchers can see how the transformation of Red Lily Lagoon had led to the growth of mangroves that have supported animal and marine life in a region where ancient Indigenous rock art is located by examining how sediments now buried beneath the flood plains changed as sea levels rose.
This transformation has, in turn, fostered an environment that has inspired the subjects and animals in ancient rock art.
In their findings published, the researchers say environmental changes at the lagoon are reflected in the rock art because fish, crocodiles, and birds were featured in the art when the floodplain transformed to support freshwater habitats for new species.
The study’s co-author, Associate Professor Ian Moffat, said the technique was a “game changer” for archaeological research.
“Instead of focusing on the archaeological sites — which is the way we normally think about archaeology — we’ve really stepped out and tried to understand the landscape in a much more holistic way,” he said.
Professor Paul Tacon, an archaeologist at Griffith University who was not involved in the research, said the technique was a “promising” use of the 3D modeling technology, but more research was needed.
Professor Paul Tacon also warned that if rock art had been painted on the sandstone cliffs, it would likely have been eroded by now.
Dr. Kowlessar, however, thinks that even if rock art had been lost to time, the method could still be used to locate locations where people may have left behind tools, furthering researchers’ understanding of Australia’s First Peoples.
A 7,000-year-old tomb in Oman holds dozens of prehistoric skeletons
The ancient tomb near Nafūn in Oman’s central Al Wusta province has been dated by archaeologists to between 6,600 and 7,000 years old. Nothing like it has been found in the region.
Archaeologists have found the remains of dozens of people who were buried up to 7,000 years ago in a stone tomb in Oman, on the Arabian Peninsula.
The tomb, near Nafūn in the country’s central Al Wusta province, is among the oldest human-made structures ever found in Oman. The burial area is next to the coast, but it is otherwise a stony desert.
“No Bronze Age or older graves are known in this region,” Alžběta Danielisová, an archaeologist at the Czech Republic’s Institute of Archaeology in Prague, told Live Science. “This one is completely unique.”
The latest excavations are part of a third year of archaeological investigations in Oman led by the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
Danielisová is leading the excavations at the tomb for the institute, which is part of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS). The tomb itself was discovered about 10 years ago in satellite photographs, and archaeologists think it dates to between 5000 B.C. and 4600 B.C.
Ancient tomb
The tomb is beneath an earthen mound and built with walls of thin stone slabs, or ashlars. It was covered by a roof, also made of ashlars, that has now partially collapsed.
Skulls and bones from more than twenty bodies have been found in the tomb; archaeologists think they were deposited there at different times, after the bodies were left elsewhere to decompose.
Czech-led scientists are also investigating ancient sites in the Rub’ al Khali desert in Dhofar province, in the South of Oman.
A report on the project said the tomb’s walls were made with rows of thin stone slabs, called ashlars, with two circular burial chambers inside divided into individual compartments. The entire tomb was covered with an ashlar roof, but it has partially collapsed, probably because of the annual monsoon rains.
Several “bone clusters” were found in the burial chambers, indicating that the dead had been left to decompose before being deposited in the tomb; their skulls were placed near the outside wall, with their long bones pointed toward the center of the chamber.
Similar remains were found in a smaller tomb next to the main tomb; archaeologists think it was built slightly later. Danielisová said there is evidence that the dead there were buried at different times, and three graves of people from the Samad culture, who lived thousands of years later, were found nearby.
The next stage will be to carry out anthropological and biochemical assessments of the human remains — such as isotope analysis, a look at the differing neutrons in the nuclei of various key elements — to learn more about the diets, mobility and demographics of the people who were buried in the tomb, she said.
The team also hopes to find a nearby ancient settlement where the people may have lived.
Prehistoric Oman
The archaeologists are also investigating inscriptions found on rock faces near the tomb, but which were made many thousands of years later.
The investigations in southern Oman include landscape features like dry riverbeds and fossilized dunes that can tell them more about how the region’s climate has changed over millennia.
The archaeologists in southern Oman have also unearthed this stone hand-ax which may date from the first migrations of early humans out of Africa between 300,000 and 1.3 million years ago.
The work on the tomb is one of several archaeological projects in Oman being led by scientists from the Czech Republic.
According to a statement from the CAS, these projects include an expedition in southern Oman’s Dhofar province that has found a stone hand ax that may date back to the first early human migrations out of Africa, between 300,000 and 1.3 million years ago.
The scientists are using dating techniques provided by the Nuclear Physics Institute of the CAS, the southern expedition leader Roman Garba, an archaeologist and physicist with the CAS, said in the statement. The same dating techniques will also be used to learn more about the roughly 2,000-year-old rows of stone “triliths” that have been found throughout Oman since the 19th century.
Although the triliths are only a few feet (less than 1 meter) tall and were built during the Iron Age, some recent news reports compared them to England’s Stonehenge.
The archaeologists are also investigating rock inscriptions near the tomb, although they were made thousands of years later, Danielisová said. Some of the symbols seem to be pictures, but others appear to be words and names. “We are still fuzzy about that,” she said.
“It’s really interesting stuff,” Melissa Kennedy, an archaeologist at The University of Western Australia, told Live Science. “It all goes to building up a better picture of what was happening in the Neolithic across the Arabian Peninsula.”
Kennedy was not involved in the latest expeditions in Oman, but she has researched “mustatils” — vast stone desert monuments of about the same age — in neighboring Saudi Arabia. Her team has also found similar tombs where several people were buried at this time, and both finds suggest that people were marking their territory from very early on.
“These kinds of tombs give us a great insight into family relationships and how they viewed death and perhaps life after death,” she said.
