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A worker at a local water company in Spain discovered two gold necklaces thought to date back 2,500 years.Sergio Narciandi was working on some pipes in the municipality of Cavandi in Asturias, northwest Spain on August 29 when he spotted a gold necklace among rocks, El País reported.Picking up the gleaming object, he realized it was a torc—an ancient neck ornament similar to necklaces that was typically worn by nobles. He then discovered another similar piece of jewelry. They are thought to be from the Iron Age.According to the newspaper ‘El País’, he picked him up and called the civil...

The Early Neolithic site of KTG, located on the North African Mediterranean coast near the Gibraltar strait (Fig. 1a), predates and partly overlaps in time with IAM2 (Table 1). At KTG a full Neolithic assemblage is found, including a diversity of cultivated cereals, domestic mammals and cardial ceramics. In contrast to the people at IAM, those at KTG are genetically similar to European Early Neolithic populations...Overall, the genetic patterns of local interaction between different groups in northwestern Africa are comparable to those found in Europe: farmers assimilated local foragers' ancestry in a unidirectional admixture process. Cases of hunter-gatherer communities adopting...

Summary: Researchers have discovered what they believe is the earliest use of steel in Europe -- on Iberian stone pillars from the Final Bronze Age... Using geochemicalanalyses, the researchers were able to prove that stone stelae on the Iberian peninsula that date back to the Final Bronze Age feature complex engravings that could only have been done using tempered steel. This was backed up by metallographic analyses of an iron chisel from the same period and region... that showed the necessary carbon content to be proper steel. The result was also confirmed experimentally by undertaking trials with chisels made of...

Laser scans have revealed that what was thought to be an Iron Age hillfort in northwestern Spain is, in fact, an early medieval stronghold built in the fifth century A.D. and occupied for the next 200 years...The team found the stronghold on a hilltop in northwestern Spain by using lidar — light detection and ranging — to peer beneath a forest covering the ruins... revealed an early medieval fortress covering about 25 acres (10 hectares), with 30 towers and a defensive wall about three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) long. The fortress seems to have been built in the first...

Combing through the Amazon wilderness, archeologists made an amazing discovery: artifacts of ancient seafaring people from the Iberian Peninsula. They may have fled the carnage of the Roman Empire's war on Carthage, called by some historians the Roman holocaust. This documentary investigates the claim that South America was discovered and settled by Mediterranean peoples over 2,000 years ago.The Mystery Of Carthaginians In The Americas | Lost WarriorsTimeline - World History Documentaries | October 20, 2022

A foraging badger has uncovered a trove of 209 Roman coins dating as far back as the third century in a Spanish cave, scientists report. Hailed as an 'exceptional find', the coins include some 'from the distant mints' of London, Constantinople and Antioch, an ancient city once located in what is now modern-day Turkey. Researchers think they were hidden in the cave before the arrival of the Suebi, a Germanic people who invaded the Iberian Peninsula in AD 409, known for their infantry and ambush tactics.

...the sources of silver used to produce Roman coinage have largely been used up, making it difficult to determine which deposits Roman miners exploited...The Iberian Peninsula, which includes modern Spain and Portugal, is host to world-class silver deposits, especially in the southern region. These deposits contain galena, which is the main ore of lead and an important source of silver. To extract silver, the galena ore is smelted and purified, with refined silver for coin minting able to reach a purity of over 95%.To track the source of Roman silver, the team of researchers analyzed the silver and lead compositions...

...the new study encompasses data from nearly 300 ancient individuals and focuses specifically on the Copper to Bronze Age transition...The genomic data reveals some of the processes underlying this genetic shift. While the bulk of the genome shows that Bronze Age individuals are a mix of local Iberian Chalcolithic ancestry and a smaller part of incoming ancestry from the European mainland, the paternally inherited Y chromosome lineages show a complete turnover, linked to the movement of steppe-related ancestry that is also visible in other parts of Europe..."We also found signals of ancestry that we traced to the central and eastern...

Neanderthals lived in parts of the Middle East and Europe from 400,000 to 40,000 years ago. During that time, they left behind a lot of evidence of their existence—primarily their bones and crafted objects such as stone tools. Sometimes, though, they also left behind evidence of their activities, such as walking along a beach next to a body of water. In this new effort, the researchers have found evidence of as many as 36 individuals walking along a beach—including children.The work involved studying footprints left on Matalascañas beach, in Doñana National Park, in Spain. Prior work there had involved footprints...

In the Gravettian period (33,000-25,000 years before present), hunter-gatherers ate the food available in their local surroundings. That included mammoth in central Europe, horse and reindeer in Britain; and seafood on the Atlantic or Mediterranean coasts of what are now France and Italy. During the last glacial maximum (27,000-23,000 years ago), the very cold and dry climate forced people to retreat to southern regions. The Iberian, Italian and Greek peninsulas in particular were increasingly populated.The fossil remains of four individuals from Serinyà, Spain, were not scientifically investigated for a long time due to doubts about their age. Researchers at...

The work by the team involved studying skeletal remains found at a dig site of a settlement once known as La Hoya, in what is now Spain. The dig site was discovered in 1935, but only recently have the remains unearthed there been studied. In all, the researchers examined the skeletal remains of 13 people -- nine adults, two adolescent girls, a child and an infant girl, all of whom had died sometime between 365 and 195 BC. What was most striking was the means by which the people met their death. One of the adults had been decapitated --...

Archaeological excavations in the Perdig&otildees complex, in the Évora district, have identified "a unique structure in the Prehistory of the iberian Peninsula", Era -Arqueologia announced. Speaking to the Lusa agency, the archaeologist in charge, António Valera, said that it was "a monumental wooden construction, of which the foundations remain, with a circular plan and more than 20 metres in diameter". it is "a ceremonial construction", a type of structure only known in Central Europe and the British isles, according to the archaeologist, with the designations as 'Woodhenge', "wooden versions of Stonehenge", or 'Timber Circles' (wooden circles). The structure now identified...

Eagle talons are regarded as the first elements used to make jewellery by Neanderthals, a practice which spread around Southern Europe about 120,000 and 40,000 years ago. Now, for the first time, researchers found evidence of the ornamental uses of eagle talons in the Iberian Peninsula... "Neanderthals used eagle talons as symbolic elements, probably as necklace pendants, from the beginnings of the mid Palaeolithic", notes Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo. In particular, what researchers found in Cova Foradada are bone remains from Spanish Imperial Eagle (Aquila Adalberti), from more than 39,000 years ago, with some marks that show these were used to take...

Prehistoric Iberians created "imitation amber" by repeatedly coating bead cores with tree resins... Many studies have confirmed the ornamental and symbolic importance of amber to European prehistoric peoples. This study is the first to discuss potential prehistoric Iberian "imitation amber" beads made using the application of repeated resinite coatings on top of a bead core. The authors obtained beads from two prehistoric sites in Spain: two from a cave tomb at the La Molina site in Sevilla, dating from the 3rd millennium BC, and four from a burial site in Cova del Gegant near Barcelona, dating from the 2nd millennium...

The largest-ever study of ancient DNA from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) suggests that the Iberian male lineages were almost completely replaced between 4,500 and 4,000 years ago by newcomers originating on the Russian steppe... Most striking was an influx of new people during the later Copper Age, otherwise known as the Beaker period because of the ubiquitous presence in burials of large drinking vessels, from about 4,500 years ago. By the Early Bronze Age, 500 years later, these newcomers represented about 40% of Iberia's genetic pool - but virtually 100% of their male lineages... This is an extraordinary...

We offer here an answer to one of the most intriguing questions in ancient Mediterranean history: the timing/contexts and incentives of early Phoenician expansion to Mediterranean and Atlantic regions in Africa and Europe ~3,000 years ago. This was enabled by a rare opportunity to analyze a very large sample set of ancient silver items from Phoenicia. An interdisciplinary collaboration combining scientific methods with precise archaeological data revealed the Phoenicians' silver sources. We propose that Phoenicians brought silver to the Levant from southwest Sardinia ~200 years before they de facto settled there, and later, gradually, also from Iberia. We show that...

Coinciding with the Pit Grave culture (4200-3600 years before our era), coming from Southern Europe, the Neolithic communities of the north-eastern Iberian Peninsula started a ceremonial activity related to the sacrifice and burial of dogs. The high amount of cases that are recorded in Catalonia suggests it was a general practice and it proves the tight relationship between humans and these animals, which, apart from being buried next to them, were fed a similar diet to humans'... The study analyses the remains of twenty-six dogs found in funerary structures from four sites and necropolises of the Barcelona region, and has...

The dig is taking place underneath one of the walls of the disused bull ring, a wall which has been reinforced specifically so that the archaeologists could begin their work beneath it, and the opinion of the experts is that these rooms were used to hold gladiators and animals captive before they were released to do battle in the arena itself. Their existence was documented in the 18th century, well before the construction of the bull ring, and the roofs were re-discovered in 1999, but until now no-one was aware of how well they have survived the passing of two...

DNA samples were obtained from eight early Iberian farmers whose remains were discovered in Spain’s El Portalón cave in Atapuerca. Like populations in central and northern Europe, the Iberian farmers had traveled from the south and mixed with local hunter-gatherer groups. “The genetic variation observed in modern-day Basques is significantly closer to the newly sequenced early farmers than to older Iberian hunter-gatherer samples,” “Parts of that early farmer population probably remained relatively isolated since then (which we can still see in the distinct culture and language of Basques)

Amber and other unusual materials such as jade, obsidian and rock crystal have attracted interest as raw materials for the manufacture of decorative items since Late Prehistory and, indeed, amber retains a high value in present-day jewellery. 'Baltic' amber from Scandinavia is often cited as a key material circulating in prehistoric Europe, but in a new study published today in PLOS ONE researchers have found that amber from Sicily was travelling around the Western Mediterranean as early as the 4th Millennium BC - at least 2,000 years before the arrival of any Baltic amber in Iberia... "Interestingly, the first amber...