An 8-year-old girl unearths Stone Age dagger at her school in Norway
Elise, an 8-year-old student, found the Neolithic dagger while playing near her school in Norway.
While playing outside her school in Norway, an 8-year-old girl found an unexpected treasure — not a lost ball or a discarded jump rope, but a flint dagger crafted by Stone Age people 3,700 years ago.
The student, identified only as Elise in a statement translated from Norwegian, discovered the gray-brown dagger when she was playing in a rocky area by her school in Vestland County. “I was going to pick up a piece of glass, and then the stone was there,” she said in the statement.
Elise showed the stone to her teacher, Karen Drange, who saw that the stone looked ancient. Drange contacted Vestland county council, and archaeologists from the county examined the artifact.
The nearly 5-inch-long (12 centimeters) tool is a rare find, Louise Bjerre Petersen, an archaeologist with Vestland county municipality, said in the translated statement. Flint, a hard sedimentary rock, does not naturally occur in Norway, so the dagger may have come from across the North Sea in Denmark, according to the statement.
The nearly 5-inch-long (12 centimeters) flint dagger was likely crafted during the Neolithic period about 3,700 years ago.
This type of dagger is often found with sacrificial finds, the archaeologists added. To further investigate the area, the Vestland County Council and Vestland County’s University Museum in Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, teamed up to explore the school’s grounds. But they didn’t find any other evidence dating back to the Stone Age, they said in the statement.
Based on its style, the dagger likely dates to the New Stone Age, or the Neolithic, a time when prehistoric humans shaped stone tools and began to rely on domesticated plants and animals, build permanent villages and develop crafts, such as pottery.
In Norway, the Stone Age, which includes the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic, lasted from 10000 B.C. to 1800 B.C., with a number of hunter-gatherers permanently settling down to farm around 2400 B.C., according to Talk Norway, an educational website on Norway’s history and cultural heritage.
The dagger will be cataloged and used in research at the University Museum. The artifact isn’t the only Stone Age discovery to recently get attention in Norway.
This past winter, the full-body reconstruction of a Stone Age teenager who lived 8,300 years ago went on display at the Hå Gamle Prestegard museum in southern Norway.
The teen boy was likely part of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer group, but the details surrounding his death are a mystery; it appears he died alone leaning against a cave wall, as his remains had no indications of a burial.
Modern humans migrated into Europe in 3 waves, ‘ambitious and provocative’ new study suggests
Evidence of the earliest migration of sapiens in all Europe is found at Grotte Mandrin (the rock at the center of the picture) in Mediterranean France.
It was long thought that modern humans first ventured into Europe about 42,000 years ago, but newly analyzed tools from the Stone Age have upended this idea. Now, evidence suggests that modern humans trekked into Europe in three waves between 54,000 and 42,000 years ago, a new study finds.
Our species, Homo sapiens, arose in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and anatomically modern humans emerged at least 195,000 years ago.
Evidence for the first waves of modern humans outside Africa dates back at least 194,000 years to Israel, and possibly 210,000 years to Greece.
For years, the oldest confirmed signs of modern humans in Europe were teeth about 42,000 years old that archaeologists had unearthed in Italy and Bulgaria. These ancient groups were likely Protoaurignacians — the earliest members of the Aurignacians, the first known hunter-gatherer culture in Europe.
However, a 2022 study revealed that a tooth found in the site of Grotte Mandrin in southern France’s Rhône Valley suggested that modern humans lived there about 54,000 years ago, a 2022 study found. This suggested Europe was home to modern humans about 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.
In the 2022 study, scientists linked this fossil tooth with stone artifacts that scientists previously dubbed Neronian, after the nearby Grotte de Néron site. Neronian tools include tiny flint arrowheads or spearpoints and are unlike anything else found in Europe from that time.
Now, in a new study, an archaeologist argues that another wave of modern humans may have entered Europe between the 42,000-year-old Protoaurignacians and the 54,000-year-old Neronians. “It’s an in-depth rewriting of the historical structure of [the] arrival of sapiens in the continent,” study lead researcher Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse in France, told Live Science in an email. He detailed his ideas in a study published on Wednesday (May 3) in the journal PLOS One.
These maps show evidence for three distinct waves of early migration of Homo sapiens in Europe from the East Mediterranean coast. In phase 1, the Neronians created tools about 54,000 years ago.
Stone Age evidence
Slimak focused on a group or “industry” of stone artifacts previously unearthed in the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean region that today includes Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Scientists have long thought that the Levant was a key gateway for modern humans migrating out of Africa.
When Slimak compared Neronian tools from Grotte Mandrin with the industry from about the same time from a site known as Ksar Akil in Lebanon, he found notable similarities. This suggested both groups were one and the same, with the Levantine group expanding into Europe over time. The much younger Protoaurignacian artifacts also have very similar counterparts in the Levant from a culture known as the Ahmarian, Slimak noted.
“I buil[t] a bridge between Europe and the East Mediterranean populations during the early migrations of sapiens in the continent,” Slimak said.
In addition, Slimak found thousands of modern human flint artifacts from the Levant that existed in the period known as the Early Upper Paleolithic, between the Ksar Akil and the Ahmarian ones. This led him to look for possible modern human counterparts of these artifacts in Europe.
Stone artifacts from a European industry known as the Châtelperronian highly resemble modern human artifacts seen in the Early Upper Paleolithic of the Levant. In addition, Châtelperronian items date to about 45,000 years ago, or between those of the Neronians and the Protoaurignacians. However, scientists had often thought Châtelperronians were Neanderthals.
Slimak now argues the Châtelperronians were actually a second wave of modern humans into Europe. “We have here, and for the first time, a serious candidate for a non-Neanderthalian origin of these industries,” Slimak said.
This new model of modern human settlement of Europe is “ambitious and provocative,” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who did not take part in the new study, told Live Science in an email. “Evidence has been building for a while that there were several early dispersals of Homo sapiens into Europe before the well-attested Aurignacian-associated one about 42,000 years ago.”
Future research can help confirm or disprove this new idea. “I see this paper generating a number of research projects to support or refute it,” Christian Tryon, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Connecticut who helped translate the new study, told Live Science in an email. “People now need to look at some of the archaeological sites here with a critical eye to see if they see the same kinds of technical details reported by Slimak. This is the start of a long process, I suspect.”
Thousands of bamboo slips (rectangles tied together to form books) have been discovered at the Hebosuo archaeological site in southwestern China’s Yunnan province.
The Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology announced that more than 10,000 ancient bamboo and wooden slips, known as jiandu, have been found at the more than 2,000-year-old Hebosuo Site in Kunming, Southwest China’s Yunnan Province.
Bamboo or wooden slips were bound together to create “books” that could be written on and rolled up like scrolls before the paper was invented and used extensively.
About 2,000 of them, or 1,300, are from the Han Dynasty (202 B.C.–220 A.D.), and 837 are seal impressions. In Western Han tombs, bamboo slips are frequently literary works and books about agriculture and medicine, but in this discovery, the majority of the writings are administrative.
The seal impressions are particularly noteworthy because they include official seals from 20 of the 24 counties ruled by the ancient Dian kingdom, a non-Han culture of agriculture-based settlements, and exceptionally sophisticated metal workers centered in modern-day Yunnan. Emperor Wu of Han annexed the kingdom in 109 B.C.
This combo photo shows bamboo and wooden slips unearthed from Hebosuo relics site dating back to the Bronze Age, in Kunming, southwest China’s Yunnan Province.
Some of the slips list the names of 12 counties, including “Dian Chi county” and “Jian Ling county,” that once belonged to the Yizhou Prefecture, which was established by Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty (206BC-AD220). Wu did this after defeating the Dian Kingdom, which was established by an ancient ethnic group that lived along what is now the southwest border of Yunnan Province.
Other characters such as “county magistrate,” and “Dian Cheng” (prime minister of Dian management) were also discovered on the slips, Tao Zhongjun, a Chinese historian, told the Global Times on Tuesday, noting that such information shows a “well designed” social administrative system was used to govern the southwest border area.
Titles such as “Dian Cheng” reveal special political roles were set up by the Han government in the southwest area, said Jiang Zhilong, lead archaeologist on the Hebosuo project.
“Such discoveries are evidence that shows China was a unified country made up of multi-ethnic cultures,” Jiang noted.
Parts of the Analects of Confucius, the fundamental philosophical guide to Confucianism, were also found on the slips.
They also the content of the slips covers a wide variety of topics, including judicial documents and texts related to the administrative system, transportation, and ethnic relations.
The archeologists also found house ruins and road ruins suggesting roads as wide as 12 meters at the Hebosuo site, Jinning District of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, a core residential area of the ancient Yunnan region.
Underwater Archaeologists Discover a 7,000-Year-Old Road in Croatia
A team of underwater archaeologists from the University of Zadar has discovered the sunken ruins of a 7,000-year-old road that once linked an ancient artificial landmass to the Croatian island of Korčula.
The road is located at a depth of 5 meters in sediment deposits at the submerged archaeological site of Soline, an artificial landmass and Neolithic settlement of the island Korčula and along with several other artifacts, belonged to a lost maritime culture known as the Hvar, who occupied this area during the Neolithic Era.
By radiocarbon analysis of preserved wood found in the last campaign, the entire settlement was dated around 4,900 years before Christ.
A four-meter-wide linear road made of stone slabs was discovered during a recent underwater survey of the site. People walked on this road almost 7,000 years ago.
Over the weekend, the University of Zadar released new footage of the underwater passage, which was made of stacked stones and measured some 12 feet across.
“In underwater archaeological research of the submerged neolithic site of Soline on the island of Korčula, archaeologists found remains that surprised them,” said the University of Zadar in a statement posted to Facebook on Sunday.
“Namely, beneath the layers of sea mud, they discovered a road that connected the sunken prehistoric settlement of the Hvar culture with the coast of the island of Korčula.”
According to the university, several scientists and organizations are working together on underwater research, which is being directed by archaeologist Mate Parica, who has been studying the location for a while.
The team also found fragments of millstones, flint blades, and stone axes among the underwater ruins.
The artifacts shed light on the enigmatic Hvar peoples, who first appeared on the islands and coasts of the northeast Adriatic Sea around 7,000 years ago.
Korčula is part of an archipelago in the Adriatic that was once a part of the continent.
The coastal valleys of the Dinaric Mountains began to flood as a result of the Earth’s ice cap melting after 12,000 BC, and by 6000 BC the archipelago had roughly reached its current configuration.
Archaeologists discover a new megalithic monument in the heart of Andalusia in southern Spain – a 5,000-year-old secret
Archaeologists in Spain uncovered a previously overlooked tomb while investigating the formation of La Peña de los Enamorados, also known as the sleeping giant.
The Antequera archaeological site in southern Spain is home to a number of ancient structures dating back to the third and fourth millennia BC, including the Menga, Viera, and El Romeral megaliths.
According to a study that was published on April 15 in the journal Antiquity, the Antequera site contains both man-made and “natural monuments,” but is best known for its prehistoric megaliths.
The “natural monuments” at the site include La Peña de los Enamorados, a stone “sleeping giant” that towers about 2,900 feet above the ground, researchers said.
The Sleeping Giant had a 5000-year-old secret hidden in his chest: Piedras Blancas megalithic grave.
The rectangular stone structure was built at least 5,000 years ago, according to the study. It was used for millennia in three distinct phases before being abandoned between 1950 and 1180 B.C.
General view of the excavated Piedras Blancas tomb or megalithic grave from the east, with the numbering of the stones. At the far end, the two ‘arrow-like’ slabs are attached to the bedrock.
Lead author of the new paper, Leonardo García Sanjuán, a Professor in Prehistory at the University of Seville (Spain), said the location of the Piedras Blancas tomb was “carefully chosen.”
The tomb’s stone slabs were carefully arranged to coincide “with the summer solstice sunrise,” researchers said. Some of the “heavily engraved” slabs “appear to have been precisely placed to ‘funnel’ the light from the rising sun towards the back of the chamber at the summer solstice.”
In Antequera, the oldest megaliths date back to 3,000 BC, and this rectangular stone tomb was built at the same time. Researchers believe that bodies were spread out on a sizable flat stone platform at the time ceramic offerings were left in the tomb. Later, the decomposing corpses were pushed off the stone platform and into the surrounding area, where the researchers discovered “40 teeth and 95 bones.”
A skeleton is buried in the added burial niches at the Piedras Blancas tomb.
Furthermore, the archaeologists identified a “triangular, arrow-like stone” lodged into the floor, oriented in the direction of the rising sun.
The Piedras Blancas tomb was renovated around 2500 B.C., and niches for two burials were added, according to the study. Researchers believe these were high-status individuals, most likely a man and a woman. It’s unclear whether they were buried simultaneously or over the course of a century.
The tomb later “underwent another significant transformation,” according to researchers. Stones were placed at the entrance “as if to block or seal” it, and the bones of at least two children and three women were interred.
According to the study, the tomb was abandoned and has remained untouched ever since.
A surprising discovery in the Lublin countryside! Ancient figurines of Egyptian and Roman gods found
Two ancient figurines depicting the Egyptian god Osiris and a bust of the Roman god Bacchus were found in the Opole district of Lublin, Poland.
An extraordinary discovery was made at the beginning of May by Krzysztof Kozłowski, who, having obtained permission from the Lublin Voivodship Conservator, conducted a search for historical monuments in Kluczkowice (Opole district).
The figurines he found, which at first glance resembled the images of a “pharaoh” and a “goddess”, were handed over to the Lublin conservation office.
Lubelskie Voivodeship Conservatory of Monuments (LWKZ) Facebook post, “The find, so unusual in our area, raised doubts as to the authenticity of the artifacts (…). Thanks to cooperation with the National Museum in Lublin and scientists from the Faculty of Archeology of the University of Warsaw, it was possible to confirm that we are dealing with original objects from ancient Egypt and ancient Rome,” he wrote.
Egyptian statuette of Osiris found in Kluczkowice in 2023.
Thanks to cooperation with the National Museum in Lublin and scientists from the Faculty of Archeology of the University of Warsaw, the ancient record of the finds was confirmed. Osiris was made in the 1st millennium BC and the bust of Bacchus – in the 1st century AD.
Dr. Łukasz Miechowicz of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw determined that the artifacts are part of the Kleniewski family’s former collection, which was kept in the palace in Kluczkowice until World War II.
The Osiris figurine was probably purchased for the collection by Maria Kleniewska during her stay in Egypt in 1904. At that time, she and her daughter spent 4 months in Cairo, which she writes about in her memoirs.
The Roman bust of Bacchus was found in Kluczkowice in 2022. National Museum in Lublin.
“The bronze bust of the Roman god Bacchus was discovered around 1906 by Fr. Antoni Chotyński, chaplain of the Kleniewski family in Dratów (now Zagłoba/Wrzelów). They were found in a richly equipped grave of a deceased person from the Przeworsk culture”.
In April this year, dr Miechowicz led the verification research at the place where the figurines were found. The action was attended by representatives of the Ancient Society in Chodlik and the Opole Association of Explorers “Topór”.
During the search, another Egyptian bronze figurine of Osiris was discovered. It measures 8.5 cm in height and is equipped with two suspension rings. The artifact was discovered by Andrzej Kołodziej.
The Kleniewski family lived in the palace until 1942. Their property was confiscated and transferred to the administration of the SS. The Kleniewskis left hastily for Warsaw, taking only their personal belongings with them, Miechowicz determined.
Egyptian statuette of Osiris found in Kluczkowice in 2022. Photo.
Presumably, the deposit, which included the artifacts discovered in Kluczkowice, could have been hidden in 1942 by the owners leaving their ancestral seat or just after the war when the equipment of the Kleniewskis’ palace was dispersed and plundered.
Google Translate was used to translate the article from Lubelski Wojewódzki Konserwator Zabytków.
This 1,900-year-old statue of the Buddha is 28 inches (71 centimeters) tall and was found at Berenike, an ancient port city in Egypt by the Red Sea.
A 1,900-year-old statue of the Buddha — discovered at the ancient Egyptian port city of Berenike, on the coast of the Red Sea — likely belonged to a transplant from South Asia, according to archaeologists.
The Buddha statue depicts Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in South Asia around 2,550 years ago. Born a prince, he would later renounce his worldly wealth and seek out enlightenment, eventually becoming the Buddha, a Sanskrit-derived word that means “the enlightened one,” according to Buddhist tradition. The religion he founded gradually spread around the world.
The newfound statue dates to between A.D. 90 and 140, said Steven Sidebotham, a history professor at the University of Delaware who is co-director of the Berenike Project, told Live Science in an email.
The 28-inch-tall (71 centimeters) statue shows the Buddha standing and holding parts of his robes in his left hand, representatives from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement.
A halo is shown behind him, with sunlight radiating downward. In addition to the statue, a separate Sanskrit inscription was found at Berenike, the ministry noted.
The statue dates to a time when the Roman Empire controlled Egypt. There was considerable trade between Egypt and India during that time, the ministry noted, adding that ships from India would bring ivory, pepper and textiles, among other products, to Egypt.
It’s possible that the Buddha statue was made locally by people from South Asia living in Berenike, Sidebotham said. While the Sanskrit inscription is damaged, it appears to be a dedication of some form and dates back to the time of the Roman emperor Marcus Julius Philippus (better known as “Philip the Arab”), who reigned from A.D. 244 to 249, Sidebotham said.
Sidebotham and his colleagues are now in the process of publishing their finds from Berenike; more information will be released after publication, he noted.
“The new Sanskrit inscription and associated finds now show clearly that there was a settled Indian merchant community, rather than just traders passing through,” Richard Salomon, professor emeritus of Sanskrit at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in the finding, told Live Science.
Philip Almond, emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at The University of Queensland in Australia who is not involved with the discovery, called it “a very exciting find.” Ancient historical records indicate that there were Indians living in Alexandria, Almond noted, and this discovery indicates that some of the Indians living in Egypt were Buddhists.
The other co-directors of the Berenike Project are Rodney Ast, a researcher at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and Olaf Kaper(opens in new tab), an Egyptology professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
A permit for the project was granted by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities through the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology in Cairo.
‘Lost’ microbial genes found in dental plaque of ancient humans
‘Lost’ microbial genes found in dental plaque of ancient humans
About 19,000 years ago, a woman died in northern Spain. Her body was deliberately buried with pieces of the natural pigment ochre and placed behind a block of limestone in a cave known as El Mirón.
When her ochre-dyed bones were unearthed in 2010, archaeologists dubbed her the Red Lady. The careful treatment of her body provided scientists with insights into how people from the time buried their dead.
Now, thanks to the poor oral hygiene of that period, her teeth are helping illuminate a vanished world of bacteria and their chemical creations. From dental calculus, the rock-hard plaque that accumulates on teeth, researchers have successfully recovered and reconstructed the genetic material of bacteria living in the mouth of the Red Lady and dozens of other ancient individuals.
The gene reconstructions, reported today in Science, were accurate enough to replicate the enzymes the bacteria produced to help digest nutrients. “Just the fact that they were able to reconstruct the genome from a puzzle with millions of pieces is a great achievement,” says Gary Toranzos, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico who wasn’t involved in the work. “It’s ‘hold my beer, and watch me do it,’ and boy did they do it.”
Changes in diet and the introduction of antibiotics have dramatically altered the modern human microbiome, says University of Trento computational biologist Nicola Segata, who also wasn’t involved.
Sequencing ancient microbes and re-creating their chemical creations “will help us identify what functions our microbiome might have had in the past that we might have lost,” he says. Resurrecting these “lost” genes may one day help scientists devise new treatments for diseases, adds Mikkel Winther Pedersen, a molecular paleoecologist at the University of Copenhagen.
Within the past few decades, sequencing ancient DNA has illuminated physical and physiological features of long-dead organisms, but researchers have also used the same technique to examine the genes belonging to the teeming bacterial communities, or microbiomes, that once populated the mouths and guts of long-dead people.
That work has given them insights into which microbial species might have coexisted with humans before the advent of antibiotics and processed foods. But such understanding has been limited by the fact that researchers could only use modern microbes as references.
“We were limited to bacteria we know from today,” says Harvard University geneticist Christina Warinner, a co-author of the new study. “We were ignoring vast amounts of DNA from unknown or possibly extinct organisms.”
Breaking that barrier presented a monumental challenge. Reconstructing an oral microbiome—a soup of hundreds of different bacterial species, and millions of individual bacteria—from degraded ancient DNA is “like throwing together pieces of many puzzles and trying to solve them with the pieces mixed up and some pieces missing entirely,” Segata says.
Indeed, it took Warinner’s team nearly 3 years to adapt DNA sequencing tools and computer programs to work with the much shorter fragments of DNA found in ancient samples.
At long last, drawing on dental calculus from 46 ancient skeletons—including a dozen Neanderthals and modern humans who died between 30,000 and 150 years ago—Warinner and colleagues identified DNA from dozens of extinct or previously unknown oral bacteria.
Next, the team equipped modern Pseudomonas protegens bacteria with a pair of ancient genes to make proteins that produce milligrams’ worth of a molecule called a furan.
Modern bacteria are thought to use furans for cellular signaling. The new findings suggest ancient bacteria did, too—something that would have been impossible to predict by simply sequencing their genomes. “It’s wet-lab proof of what ancient genes were capable of,” says Pierre Stallforth of the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology. “You can predict proteins based on DNA, but not necessarily the molecules those proteins are going to make.”
At first glance, the microbe they reconstructed seemed out of place in an oral microbiome. Identified as a type of bacterium called a chlorobium, its modern relatives use photosynthesis to survive on small amounts of light and live in anaerobic conditions, such as stagnant water. They aren’t found in modern mouths and appear to have vanished from ancient humans about 10,000 years ago.
This chlorobium might have entered the mouths of ancient people because they drank water in or near caves. Or, Warinner says, it might once have been a normal part of some people’s ancient oral microbiome, surviving on faint light penetrating the cheek.
Colleagues say dental calculus was an ideal place to start looking for these ancient microbes. Without regular cleaning, teeth trap leftover food and other organic matter in a mineral lattice, essentially encasing it in stone. That both helps preserve any DNA inside and protect it from contamination as the body decays. “Oral calculus is the perfect example of the best place you can find an uncontaminated sample,” Toranzos says. “There’s absolutely no way anything from the outside will get in.”
Although the researchers succeeded in prodding modern bacteria to express their previously undiscovered or extinct cousins’ genes, it’s a far cry from Jurassic Park, Warinner says. “We haven’t brought [the microbes] back to life, but identified key genes for making chemical compounds we’re interested in,” Warinner says.
The recovery of ancient microbial genes has the potential to illuminate our species’ relationship with bacteria over human evolution. Humans coevolved with their microbial partners and parasites for hundreds of thousands of years. The compounds produced by ancient microbes might have played important roles in digestion and immune responses. “Bacteria are not as charismatic as mammoths or woolly rhinos,” she says, “but they are nature’s chemists, and they’re key to understanding the past.”
