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ScienceArchaeologists discover evidence of a vanished civilisation from 1300s  Lucy Pasha-Robinson,The Independent 5 hours ago  Reactions   Like   Reblog on Tumblr   Share   Tweet   Email Archaeologists may have discovered evidence of an ancient civilisation that disappeared from a corner of the southwestern US over seven centuries ago.The exodus of the Ancestral Puebloans has baffled scientists for years after they vanished without a trace from Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park in the 13th Century.One theory was the group - also known as the Anasazi - had simply migrated several hundred kilometres east.Now scientists may have found the evidence to...

Washington State University scientists... say the region saw three other cultural transitions over the preceding five centuries. The researchers also document recurring narratives in which the Pueblo people agreed on canons of ritual, behavior and belief that quickly dissolved as climate change hurt crops and precipitated social turmoil and violence... Bocinsky, WSU Regents Professor Tim Kohler and colleagues analyzed data from just over 1,000 southwest archaeological sites and nearly 30,000 tree-ring dates that served as indicators of rainfall, heat and time. Their data-intensive approach, facilitated by climate reconstructions run at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of...

"Some of these birds did not live a happy life. They were kept to produce feathers and their feathers were plucked out as soon as they grew in."...In total, at least six species of parrots originally recovered from five of the desert's archaeological sites were studied in the research, with the remains variously dating from between 1100 to 1450..."The feathers of tropical birds were one of the most significant symbols of economic, social, and sacred status in the pre-Columbian Americas," the authors write in their study."In the Andes, finely produced clothing and textiles containing multicolored feathers of tropical parrots materialized...

Historically, scarlet macaws lived from South America to eastern coastal Mexico and Guatemala, thousands of miles from the American Southwest. Previously, researchers thought that ancestral Puebloan people might have traveled to these natural breeding areas and brought birds back, but the logistics of transporting adolescent birds are difficult. None of the sites where these early macaw remains were found contained evidence of breeding—eggshells, pens or perches. "We were interested in the prehistoric scarlet macaw population history and the impacts of human direct management," said George. "Especially any evidence for directed breeding or changes in the genetic diversity that could co-occur...

New work on the skeletal remains of scarlet macaws found in an ancient Pueblo settlement indicates that social and political hierarchies may have emerged in the American Southwest earlier than previously thought. Researchers determined that the macaws, whose brilliant red and blue feathers are highly prized in Pueblo culture, were persistently traded hundreds of miles north from Mesoamerica starting in the early 10th century, at least 150 years before the origin of hierarchy is usually attributed. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the acquisition and control of macaws, along with other valued...

Papers have been flapping with new headlines about the latest in a long line of alleged dinosaur ancestors of birds. This one is claimed to be a sensational dinosaur with feathers on its hind legs, thus four ‘wings’.1 This was named Microraptor gui—the name is derived from words meaning ‘little plunderer of Gu’ after the paleontologist Gu Zhiwei. Like so many of the alleged feathered dinosaurs, it comes from Liaoning province of northeastern China. It was about 3 feet (1 meter) long from its head to the tip of its long tail, but its body was only about the size...