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The rise of farming in late Stone Age Europe was no smooth transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles but a bloody takeover that saw nomadic populations wiped out by farmer-settlers in a few generations, a new study has found.In fact, twice in just a thousand years, the population of southern Scandinavia was entirely replaced by newcomers to the area, whose remains bear next to no trace of their predecessors in DNA profiles, analyzed by an international team of researchers."This transition has previously been presented as peaceful," explains study author and palaeoecologist Anne Birgitte Nielsen of Lund University...Using a technique called shotgun sequencing,...

Researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemünde report the discovery of an ancient, 10,000-year-old massive stone wall that has remained submerged beneath the Baltic Sea for millennia.At nearly a kilometer in length, the Stone Age megastructure hidden beneath the waters of the Bay of Mecklenburg in Germany is not only one of the oldest man-made hunting structures in Europe but likely one of the oldest pieces of construction in the entire world."It was likely constructed by hunter–gatherer groups more than 10000 y ago and ultimately drowned during the Littorina transgression at 8500 y B.P.," the researchers...

Early human hunter-gatherers ate mostly plants and vegetables, according to archeological findings that undermine the commonly held view that our ancestors lived on a high protein, meat-heavy diet.The evidence, from the remains of 24 individuals from two burial sites in the Peruvian Andes dating to between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago, suggests that wild potatoes and other root vegetables may have been a dominant source of nutrition before the shift to an agricultural lifestyle...Some have previously suggested that the shift to agricultural economies was driven by over-hunting, but the latest findings raise the possibility of a more gradual transition from...

...Archaeologists already knew that the São Luís area, also called Upaon-Açu, meaning "big island" in the Tupí-Guaraní Indigenous languages, held traces of prehistoric human activity. For instance, a prehistoric jawbone was discovered at Farm Rosane in the 1970s and other artifacts found in São Luís have dated to 6,000 years ago, Wellington Lage, the lead archaeologist of the recent excavations, told Live Science. The remains were attributed to the Sambaquian peoples. This group relied on marine resources and built shell mounds with leftover food refuse that reached up to 100 feet (30 meters) high.The latest excavation, which began in June...

Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth's atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival. That's the assertion made by an international group of scientists in one of four related research papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. The papers are the latest results in the investigation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the idea that an anomalous cooling of the Earth almost 13 millennia ago...

An illustration of early humans hunting an elephant using spears. (courtesy Tel Aviv University) When elephants started disappearing from the Middle East some 400,000 years ago, it was a major crisis, and not just for the ancient elephants. Early humans across the region, including in what is now Israel, depended on elephants for their diet. Eventually, humans adapted, learning how to hunt smaller prey such as bison, deer and gazelles, until those, too, disappeared from the landscape or their numbers were too small to hunt. This forced humans to adapt to even smaller prey such as rabbits and birds, and,...

For over 150 years, researchers have been perplexed by the purpose and meaning behind the mysterious non-figurative signs found in over 400 caves, including renowned locations like Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira. However, utilizing a comprehensive database of images spanning the European Upper Palaeolithic, our guests present a groundbreaking theory on how three commonly occurring signs were actually units of communication.In this captivating discussion, we speak to Dr. Tony Freeth and Ben Bacon as they explain through extensive analysis, we propose that when these signs appear in close proximity to animal depictions, they serve as numerical representations of months. In fact,...

Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest large collection of wooden tools made by humans at a site in Schöningen, Germany. The artefacts date back to about 300,000 years ago.Included in what ancient people left behind are wooden spears and shorter throwing sticks that have been sharpened at both ends. It is unclear exactly which hominin is responsible for producing the tools, but their age suggests either Homo heidelbergensis or Homo neanderthalensis...The 300,000-year-old tools found at Schöningen were analysed using micro-CT scanning, 3D microscopy and infrared spectroscopy to better understand how they were made and their potential uses. The results are published...

New research suggests humans lived in South America at the same time as now extinct giant sloths...Scientists analyzed...pendants made of bony material from the sloths...Dating of the ornaments and sediment at the Brazil site where they were found point to an age of 25,000 to 27,000 years ago...

A Joint Project Involving the Kalispel Tribe and Archaeologists From Washington State University (Wsu) Has Led to the Discovery of 5,000‑year‑old Earth Ovens Near Newport in Washington State, United States.The ovens were found on land purchased by the Kalispel Tribe to accommodate for the construction of new housing near the tribal reservation.A team of professional archaeologists and fourth-year students from WSU is currently working to delineate the features of the ovens and investigate any potential changes in their size and shape over time...Radiocarbon dating of the ovens suggests that they are 5,000‑years‑old, with the oven contents being sent to WSU...

The four fish traps discovered by mountain hiker Reidar Marstein last summer consist of long poles that have been driven into the seabed. They form the pattern of a fence that has guided the fish into a chamber. From there, Stone Age folks could easily use a fishing net to catch the fish they needed.Each chamber consisted of around 40-50 poles, and the archaeologists have found remains that are as much as 80 centimetres long. They are so well preserved that they 'might as well have been cut last year', they write enthusiastically on KHM's Facebook page.In the Norwegian mountains,...

Based on sites excavated in the western United States, archaeologists know Paleo-American Clovis hunter-gatherers who lived around the time of the extinctions at least occasionally [emphasis added] killed or scavenged Ice Age megafauna such as mammoths. There they've found preserved bones of megafauna together with the stone tools used for killing and butchering these animals...Unfortunately, many areas in the Southeastern United States lack sites with preserved bone and associated stone tools that might indicate whether megafauna were hunted there by Clovis or other Paleo-American cultures. Without evidence of preserved bones of megafauna, archaeologists have to find other ways to examine...

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...

Fish soup. Salmon tartare with mango salsa. Sea bream a la plancha.The human genus has been eating fish since the dawn of time. Almost 2 million years ago, hominins in Kenya deboned a catfish. Around 800,000 years ago, hominins in Israel grilled a giant carp. Evidence of shellfish consumption also abounds, and it’s even been proposed that coastal Neanderthals dived for clams.It is therefore unsurprising that freshwater fish were critical resources for inland prehistoric peoples in North America, not to mention modern ones. It is surprising that archaeologists investigating their predecessors – the earliest people in Beringia (the land bridge...

La Marmotta was first discovered in 1989 beneath the waters of Lake Bracciano, a Circum-Alpine Lake of volcanic origin in the Italian region of Lazio. The lake owes its origin to intense volcanic and tectonic activity, resulting in the collapse of the magma chamber that created a depressed area now occupied by the lake.During the Early Neolithic Period, a lakeshore settlement was established which today lies approximately 300 metres from the modern shoreline, submerged at a depth of 11 metres.Underwater surveys of the settlement have documented several thousand wooden piles or support posts on the lakebed; the spatial distribution of...

Researchers announced Thursday that the timeline of Greece’s history needs to be pushed back by at least a quarter million years after a shocking discovery deep inside an open coal mine. Archaeologists uncovered the nation’s oldest archaeological site, which dates back at least 700,000 years. It is thought to be associated with some of our earliest hominin ancestors, according to The Associated Press. Although older archaeological sites have been uncovered in other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, this is the first major discovery of this age in Greece, and may completely rewrite aspects of the nation’s human history. The...

Archaeologists in Jordan and Saudi Arabia have found what they believe to be by far the world’s oldest to-scale architectural renditions. The stone engravings, which were made between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago, represent “desert kites,” landscape-scale traps built by early humans to hunt herd animals. The engravings show the Neolithic structures, which the authors say were probably crucially important to the societies that built them, with the kind of precision that would normally only be possible from the air. Both objects were found in 2015 and a study of them was published this month in the journal PLoS ONE....

Researchers in Germany have unearthed 400,000 year old wooden spears from what appears to be an ancient lake shore hunting ground stunning evidence that human ancestors systematically hunted big game much earlier than believed. The three spears, each carved from the trunk of a spruce tree, are 6 feet to more than 7 feet long. They were found with more than 10,000 animal bones, mostly from horses, including many obviously butchered. That indicates the ancient hunters were organized enough to trap horses and strong enough to kill them by throwing spears, perhaps ambushing herds that showed up for water. “There’s...

Humans have maintained a very close relationship with aurochs... since their beginnings, first by hunting them and then by breeding and selecting them. This extinct species of mammal is little known in the Peninsula because its skeletal remains are difficult to distinguish from bison. In fact, there have been references to the presence of "large bovids" in many sites because they cannot be differentiated. At a European level, there is also a lack of genetic data.An international team of scientists... analysed the remains of B. primigenius from the Chan do Lindeiro cave (Lugo). These remains were found in a chasm...

On the muddy shores of a lake in east-central Germany, Neanderthals gathered some 125,000 years ago to butcher massive elephants. With sharp stone tools, they harvested up to 4 tons of flesh from each animal, according to a new study that is casting these ancient human relatives in a new light. The degree of organization required to carry out the butchery—and the sheer quantity of food it provided—suggests Neanderthals could form much larger social groups than previously thought.The find comes from a trove of animal bones and stone tools uncovered in the 1980s by coal miners near the town of...