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Cave art depicting a hunting scene has been found in Indonesia dated to 44,000 years old, making it the oldest rock art created by humans. The painting itself is intriguing because it shows a group of figures that represent half-animal, half-human hybrids called therianthropes. The therianthropes are hunting warty pigs and dwarf buffaloes called anoas using spears and ropes. The abstract figures depict a story, which changes our view of early human cognition, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The art could even show the foundation of human spirituality, given the supernatural scene depicted. "To me,...

Ancient structures uncovered in Turkey and thought to be the world's oldest temples may not have been strictly religious buildings after all, according to an article in the October issue of Current Anthropology. Archaeologist Ted Banning of the University of Toronto argues that the buildings found at Göbekli Tepe may have been houses for people, not...gods. The buildings at Göbekli, a hilltop just outside of the Turkish city of Urfa, were found in 1995 by Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute and colleagues from the Şanlıurfa Museum in Turkey. The oldest of the structures at the site are immense...

AKSON RUSSIAN SCIENCE COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION—Russian scientists studied the Zhokhov site of ancient people, which is located in the high-latitude Arctic, and described in detail the way of life of the ancient people who had lived there. It turned out that, despite the sparsely populated area, the ancient people had communicated with representatives of other territories and had even exchanged various objects with them through some kind of the fairs. Zhokhov Island, located at 76º N in the New Siberian Islands, 440 kilometers north of the modern coast of the East Siberian Sea, belongs to the High Arctic. Here, the Zhokhov...

Clovis points are undeniably special. For one thing, they are among the oldest artifacts in America. (Some archaeologists would remove the qualification and say they are THE oldest, but the evidence and arguments for a pre-Clovis human presence in the Americas are compelling -- at least to me.) In addition to being really old, 13,000 years old give or take a century or two, Clovis points also are large, beautifully-crafted, often made from high-quality flint, and at least occasionally were used to kill mammoths and mastodons. Because a few have been found in direct association with the bones of these...

Two figurines from the New Stone Age (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B) were discovered in excavations the Israel Antiquities Authority is currently conducting at the Tel Moza archaeological site, prior to work being carried out on the new Highway 1 from Sha'ar HaGai to Jerusalem by the National Roads Company. According to Anna Eirikh and Dr. Hamoudi Khalaily, directors of the excavation at the site on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, "The figurines, which are 9,000-9,500 years old, were found near a large round building whose foundations were built of fieldstones and upper parts of the walls were apparently made of...

Prehistoric women had stronger arms than elite female rowing teams do today thanks to the daily grind of farming life, researchers have revealed, shedding light on their role in early communities. The study of ancient bones suggests that manual agricultural work had a profound effect on the bodies of women living in central Europe between about the early neolithic and late iron age, from about 5,300BC to AD100. “We think a lot of what we are seeing is the bone’s response to women grinding grain, which is pretty much seated but using your arms really repetitively many hours a day,”...

Abstract The intensification of agriculture is often associated with declining mobility and bone strength through time, although women often exhibit less pronounced trends than men. For example, previous studies of prehistoric Central European agriculturalists (~5300 calibrated years BC to 850 AD) demonstrated a significant reduction in tibial rigidity among men, whereas women were characterized by low tibial rigidity, little temporal change, and high variability. Because of the potential for sex-specific skeletal responses to mechanical loading and a lack of modern comparative data, women’s activity in prehistory remains difficult to interpret. This study compares humeral and tibial cross-sectional rigidity, shape, and...

In 1953, a significant burial site belonging to the Battle Axe Culture was found when constructing a roundabout in Linköping. 4,500 years ago, a man and a woman were buried together with a child, a dog and a rich set of grave goods including one of the eponymous battle axes. "Today, we call this site 'Bergsgraven'. I have been curious about this particular burial for a long time. The collaboration of archaeologists with geneticists allows us to understand more about these people as individuals as well as where their ancestors came from," says archaeogeneticist Helena Malmström of Uppsala University, lead...

The excavation of a Stone Age community center in Ukraine is helping explain why large groups of tens of thousands of people flourished and then fell more than 5,000 years ago. The "megastructure" excavated in Ukraine was large compared with the houses around it, though not particularly huge by modern standards. At 2,045 square feet (190 square meters), the structure was the size of a modest American home. However, some Eastern European megastructures were up to 18,000 square feet (1,680 square m) in size. Archaeologists have puzzled over these buildings, many of which have been discovered through methods that use...

A huge 9,000-year-old Neolithic settlement -- the largest ever discovered in Israel, say archaeologists -- is currently being excavated outside Jerusalem, researchers said in mid July 2019. This site, located near the town of Motza, is the "Big Bang" for prehistory settlement research due to its size and the preservation of its material culture, said Jacob Vardi, co-director of the excavations at Motza on behalf of the Antiquities Authority, according to The Times of Israel. Among the many important findings is that 9,000 years ago, the people of the settlement practiced religion. "They carried out rituals and honored their deceased...

And although the burial mound is much older than the Druids — who lived about 2,000 years ago, if they existed at all — the excavations have cast new light on the ancient inhabitants of the island of Anglesey. Overlooking the Irish Sea from the northwest corner of Wales, Anglesey is dotted with numerous Neolithic and Bronze Age stone monuments. The most famous is the 5,000-year-old passage tomb of Bryn Celli Ddu (Welsh for "the mound in the dark grove"), which has an entrance passage that aligns with the rising midsummer sun. It was archaeologically excavated in 1928 and 1929,...

The site, known as the Ness of Brodgar, was investigated by BBC2 documentary A History of Ancient Britain, with presenter Neil Oliver describing it as 'the discovery of a lifetime'. So far the remains of 14 Stone Age buildings have been excavated, but thermal geophysics technology has revealed that there are 100 altogether, forming a kind of temple precinct. Until now Stonehenge was considered to have been the centre of Neolithic culture, but that title may now go to the Orkney site, which contains Britain's earliest known wall paintings. Oliver said: 'The excavation of a vast network of buildings on...

Was Orkney the ceremonial capital of ancient Britain? STEPHEN STEWART November 03 2003 ORKNEY may have been the largest prehistoric settlement or ceremonial site in Britain, new research reveals today. Archaeologists using the latest techniques to map under the soil discovered the world heritage site covering the Ness of Brodgar in Stenness, was a massive centre of activity in Stone Age times. Orkney's landscape has largely managed to avoid the rigours of industrialised farming and may yet yield its secrets about the recently-surveyed site, which in terms of scale, puts the likes of Stonehenge, Avebury and Skara Brae in the...

Crannogs were fortified settlements constructed on artificial islands in lochs. It was thought they were first built in the Iron Age, a period that began around 800 BC. But four Western Isles sites have been radiocarbon dated to about 3640-3360 BC in the Neolithic period - before the erection of Stonehenge's stone circle... Another famous Neolithic site is Skara Brae, a village in Orkney inhabited between 3200 BC and 2200 BC... They said it was possible other Scottish crannogs, and similar sites in Ireland, were also Neolithic. Previously it was thought crannogs were built and re-used over a period of...

To arrive at these conclusions, the researchers have analysed two groups of indicators. On the one hand, life conditions and demographic aspects; and, on the other, funerary practices. In the first group, they studied factors like the sexual ratio (the demographic proportion of men to women), diet, genetic data, movement, the most common diseases and the detected stress markers. In the second, they considered data like the type of burial, the primary or secondary character of the deposit, if it was individual or collective burial, the spatial organisation of the site, the position and orientation of the bodies, the funerary...

Nearly 5000 years ago, a 20-year-old woman was buried in a tomb in Sweden... Now, researchers have discovered what killed her -- Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. The sample is one of the oldest ever found, and it belongs to a previously unknown branch of the Y. pestis evolutionary tree. This newly discovered strain of plague could have caused the collapse of large Stone Age settlements across Europe in what might be the world's first pandemic, researchers on the project say. But other scientists contend there isn't yet enough evidence to prove the case. The newly discovered Neolithic...

Çatalhöyük is one of the largest and best preserved Neolithic sites in the world. It is located southeast of the modern Turkish city of Konya, about 90 miles (145 km) from Mount Hasan. The population of Çatalhöyük were early farmers, growing crops such as wheat and barley, and herding sheep and goats. It is thought the people living at Çatalhöyük either went to the rubbish tip (midden) to open their bowels, or carried their feces from their houses to the midden in a vessel or basket to dispose of them. To look for the eggs of intestinal parasites, Dr. Ledger...

The town of Hasankeyf, Turkey, will soon be only a memory. From her front door, Fatima Salkan has a sweeping view of the fruit trees, historic ruins and tidy stone compounds that run along this stretch of the Tigris River in southeastern Turkey. She tries her best not to look off in the distance, to the right. The town on the horizon, still under construction, is where she will move when the valley is flooded by a downstream hydropower dam. “Do you see all these old places?” she asks in Kurdish. “We are the owner, but today we are homeless.”...

Even in modern times we are fascinated by crystals – from the diamonds we use as a sacred symbol of partnership, to the plethora of ‘healing’ gems that can be found in a New Age gift shop. So we can only imagine how ancient people viewed these transparent rocks with hidden structure. Evidence of the esteem in which crystals were held can be found in a “remarkable set” of ‘crystal weapons’ found in the megalithic tombs of southwestern Spain. At the site of Valencina de la Concepci
on, archaeologists have uncovered crystal arrowheads, an exquisite dagger blade, and cores used for...

It's an age often described as one of social unrest, leading to an "apocalyptic nightmare of violence, warfare, and cannibalism." A Neolithic mass grave in Germany shows the idea may not be far wrong... Christian Meyer and his fellow researchers now believe they have enough evidence to explain "conclusively" what happened at the site of a mass grave in Schöneck-Kilianstädten, near Frankfurt, around 5207-4849 BC. If they are right, their findings may help our understanding of early social unrest among the first Central European farmers of the Neolithic era... The site at Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals a "new violence-related pattern: the intentional...