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For thousands of years, different groups of people have lived in the Negev desert, building stone walls and cities that survive to this day. But how did they make their living? The current thinking is that these desert denizens didn't practice agriculture before approximately the first century, surviving instead by raising animals, said Hendrik Bruins, a landscape archaeologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. But new research suggests people in this area, the Negev highlands, practiced agriculture as long ago as 5000 B.C., Bruins told LiveScience. If true, the finding could change historians' views of the area's inhabitants, who lived...

A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found. The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome. It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or more populations acquiring the same trait independently....

(Phys.org)—As a young archaeologist, Peter Bogucki based his groundbreaking theory on the development of Western civilization on the most ancient of human technology, pottery. But it took some of the most modern developments in biochemistry—and 30 years —finally to confirm he was right. While working as director of studies at one of Princeton University's residential colleges in the 1980s, Bogucki theorized that the development of cheese-making in Europe—a critical indicator of an agricultural revolution—occurred thousands of years earlier than scientists generally believed. His insight, based on a study of perforated potsherds that Bogucki helped recover from dig sites in Poland,...

Traces of dairy fat in ancient ceramic fragments suggest that people have been making cheese in Europe for up to 7,500 years. In the tough days before refrigerators, early dairy farmers probably devised cheese-making as a way to preserve, and get the best use out of, milk from the cattle that they had begun to herd. Peter Bogucki, an archaeologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, was in the 1980s among the first to suspect that cheese-making might have been afoot in Europe as early as 5,500 bc. He noticed that archaeologists working at ancient cattle-rearing sites in what is...

Charred grains of barley, millet and wheat deposited nearly 5,000 years ago at campsites in the high plains of Kazakhstan show that nomadic sheepherders played a surprisingly important role in the early spread of domesticated crops throughout a mountainous east-west corridor along the historic Silk Road... "Ancient wheat and broomcorn millet, recovered in nomadic campsites in Kazakhstan, show that prehistoric herders in Central Eurasia had incorporated both regional crops into their economy and rituals nearly 5,000 years ago, pushing back the chronology of interaction along the territory of the 'Silk Road' more than 2,000 years," Frachetti said... ...several strains of...

Archaeological excavations have finally answered the question regarding the age and development of the mysterious prehistoric fields enclosed by earthen ridges known as ‘Celtic fields’. Using Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), a technique that dates the last exposure to light or heat sources of quartz minerals, archaeologist Stijn Arnoldussen from the University of Groningen managed to determine that these banks around the later prehistoric field plots were constructed more than 3100 years ago and remained in use for hundreds of years thereafter... The Celtic field complex targeted by the Groningen Institute of Archaeology at Lunteren measured at least 210 hectares in...

The coywolf, a mixture of western coyote and eastern wolf, is a remarkable new hybrid carnivore that is taking over territories once roamed by wolves and slipping unnoticed into our cities. Its appearance is very recent — within the last 90 years — in evolutionary terms, a blip in time. Beginning in Canada but by no means ending there, the story of how it came to be is an extraordinary tale of how quickly adaptation and evolution can occur, especially when humans interfere. Tag along as scientists study this new top predator, tracking it from the wilderness of Ontario’s Algonquin...

For some cheese lovers, the older and stinkier the cheese, the better. Well, what about a cheese that's been aging for 3,600 years? Yellow lumps, believed to be the world's oldest cheese, were found on mummies buried in the Taklamakan Desert in northwestern China. The cheese, which was found during archaeological excavations that took place between 2002 and 2004, dates to as early as 1615 BC. The cheese was found on the necks and chests of the mummies. The multiple layers of cowhide the mummies were buried in, and the dry, salty desert helped preserve the cheese....

Two researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) studied the bones of camels found in an area of ancient copper mines in the Aravah Valley, south of the Dead Sea. Using radiocarbon dating and other techniques, they determined that camels were first used in the mining operations near the end of the 10th century BC. They state that this is the first evidence of domesticated camels in ancient Israel. This would be almost 1,000 years later than the time of the patriarchs, when camels first appear in the Bible. Their study was quickly used to claim that the Bible was written...

WASHINGTON - Dairy farming became widespread in Britain as early as the new stone age — around 4,000 B.C. — a team of researchers at England's University of Bristol reports.Mark Copley, an archaeological chemist, said evidence of milk fats was found on broken pieces of pottery at several ancient sites in southern England.Using new methods of analysis, scientists have learned to differentiate between ancient residue from milk fat and other fats and oils in recent years, Copley and his team report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.Their findings provide evidence of "the earliest farming communities in Britain, though...

Gutefar - The Bronze Age Sheep of Gotland This article claims sheep of the British Isles descended from sheep from Gotland, an Island in the Baltic "...arriving in Britain between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, doubtless traveling along with the same Viking raiders that brought sheep originally to Gotland." She also claims Vikings are the ANCESTORS of the Visigoths. Only problems is that the Visigoths preceded the Vikings by about 400 years. The Visigoths sacked Rome in 451 AD and the first recorded Viking raid on the British Isles happened around 800 AD with the raid on the monastery at...

Monday, 27 January, 2003, 22:36 GMTPrehistoric Britons' taste for milk The oldest direct evidence for the existence of dairy farming has been discovered in the UK. It is based on a chemical analysis of milk fat deposits left on pottery fragments found to be 6,500 years old. It is clear that by the time farming reached Britain, milk was already an important commodity Although the practice of milking animals for food was undoubtedly developed elsewhere and then introduced into Britain, this is the earliest time for which researchers have been able to show definitively that it was going on. According...

Archaeologists from Israel’s top university have used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the arrival of domestic camels in the Middle East -- and they say the science directly contradicts the Bible’s version of events. Camels are mentioned as pack animals in the biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph and Jacob, Old Testament stories that historians peg to between 2000 and 1500 BC. But Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures say camels weren’t domesticated in Israel until centuries later, more like 900 BC. “In addition to challenging the Bible's historicity, this anachronism is...

Dogs and wolves evolved from a common ancestor between 11,000 and 34,000 years ago, according to new research. U.S. scientists said that part of the genetic overlap observed between some modern dogs and wolves is the result of interbreeding after dog domestication and not a direct line of descent from one group of wolves. They believe their research reflects a more complicated history than the popular story that early farmers adopted a few docile, friendly wolves that later became our modern canine companions. Dogs and wolves evolved from a common ancestor between 11,000 and 34,000 years ago but modern canines...

On a whim, I recently posted the image below of the frog riding the beetle irreverently entitling it as Hannibal Crossing the Carpathians. Hannibal Crosses The CarpathiansWhile it was obviously posted in jest, several comments appeared in scholarly discussion of the use of elephants in war, having come across this article thought it might be of interest.Please take note any establishment, organization involved in science will inevitably be a left-wing liberal tool, certainly so, a group with the tagline, where science meets society. War Elephant Myths Debunked by DNAThe Institute for Genomic BiologyWhere Science Meets Society Through DNA analysis, Illinois...

The country’s former newspaper of record, the New York Times, saw a big blip in their circulation yesterday when it ran with an above the fold story about Lady M’s half-century mark: On Saturday night, Mrs. Obama will celebrate her 50th birthday (which falls on Friday) with dancing and sweets throughout the state floor of the White House, drawing the nation’s attention away from her husband, at least for an evening. Guests will sip fine American wines, consume delicate macarons and be entertained — the expectation is by Beyoncé. It was a wonderful, humanizing piece: She has perfected a mean...

...The results published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) also suggest tooth decay was more prevalent in earlier societies than previously estimated. The results also suggest that the hunter-gatherer society studied may have developed a more sedentary lifestyle than previously thought, relying on nut harvesting. Dental disease was thought to have originated with the introduction of farming and changes in food processing around 10,000 years ago. A greater reliance on cultivated plant foods, rich in fermentable carbohydrates, resulted in rotting teeth.High level of decayNow, the analysis of 52 adult dentitions from hunter-gatherer skeletons found in a cave...

University of Cincinnati archaeologists are turning up discoveries in the famed Roman city of Pompeii that are wiping out the historic perceptions of how the Romans dined, with the rich enjoying delicacies such as flamingos and the poor scrounging for soup or gruel. Steven Ellis, a University of Cincinnati associate professor of classics, will present these discoveries on Jan. 4, at the joint annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and American Philological Association (APA) in Chicago. UC teams of archaeologists have spent more than a decade at two city blocks within a non-elite district in the Roman...

“Our data suggest that cats were attracted to ancient farming villages by small animals, such as rodents that were living on the grain that the farmers grew, ate and stored. “Results of this study show that the village of Quanhucun was a source of food for the cats 5,300 years ago, and the relationship between humans and cats was commensal, or advantageous for the cats. “Even if these cats were not yet domesticated, our evidence confirms that they lived in close proximity to farmers, and that the relationship had mutual benefits.” Cats have lived alongside humans for a very long...

The frozen remains of a horse more than half a million years old have reluctantly given up their genetic secrets, providing scientists with the oldest DNA ever sequenced. The horse was discovered in 2003 in the ancient permafrost of Canada’s west-central Yukon Territory, not far from the Alaskan border.And although the animal was dated to between 560,000 and 780,000 years old, an international team of researchers was able to use a new combination of techniques to decipher its genetic code. Among the team’s findings is that the genus Equus — which includes all horses, donkeys, and zebras — dates back...