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Seven tiny, fragile wing-bones discovered at a prehistoric site in northern Israel turn out to have been perforated. They may have served as whistles imitating the calls of predatory birds, Israeli archaeologists reported Friday in Nature Scientific Reports...One of the flutes was discovered complete, the team says.They could have been imitating bird calls in order to attract them, as duck hunters do to this day...Eynan is associated with a Late Stone Age culture, the Natufians, pre-agricultural groups living in Israel and the surrounding region from 15,000 to about 11,700 years ago. They were hunter-gatherers but were among the earliest people...

....snip.... That’s no longer the case. Today, a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, the University College London, and the University of Cambridge released a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences detailing their discovery of 14,400-year-old crumbs from a flatbread. The archaeological site, known as Shubayqa 1, is located in the Black Desert of northeastern Jordan and was home to Natufian hunter-gatherers. The flatbread remains are not only the oldest instance of bread found to date, but also preeminent examples of how bread-making existed even before agriculture developed some 4,000 years later. “Nobody had...

The people who built the ancient structure, members of what's called the Natufian culture, struggled in a "hostile environment to gain more energy from their food," said Ehud Weiss, an archaeobotanist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel who was not involved with the study. Archaeologists found the bread remains in sediment samples at a site named Shubayqa 1 in Jordan. The structure was oval with a fireplace in the center, and its builders carefully laid stones into the ground. Arranz Otaegui said she did not know whether the building was a dwelling or had other, perhaps ceremonial, purposes. Sifting through the...

TORONTO, ON – Anthropologists at the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge have discovered the oldest cemetery in the Middle East at a site in northern Jordan. The cemetery includes graves containing human remains buried alongside those of a red fox, suggesting that the animal was possibly kept as a pet by humans long before dogs ever were. The 16,500-year-old site at 'Uyun al-Hammam was discovered in 2000 by an expedition led by University of Toronto professor Edward (Ted) Banning and Lisa Maher, an assistant professor of anthropology at U of T and research associate at the University...

Ancient Toolkit Gives Glimpse of Prehistoric Life Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Toolkit Contents Dec. 13, 2007 -- Before the end of the last ice age, a hunter-gatherer left a bag of tools near the wall of a roundhouse residence, where archaeologists have now found the collection 14,000 years later. The tool set -- one of the most complete and well preserved of its kind -- provides an intriguing glimpse of the daily life of a prehistoric hunter-gatherer. The contents, as described to Discovery News by Phillip Edwards, a senior lecturer in the Archaeology Program at Melbourne's La Trobe University, show...

Archaeologist uncovers 11,000-year-old artefacts in SyriaLatest discoveries in Syria date back to start of Neolithic era in Epipalaeolithic period. By Talal el-Atrache - DAMASCUSA small stone anthropomorphic Neolithic figurine Deep in the heart of northern Syria, close to the banks of the Euphrates River, archaeologists have uncovered a series of startling 11,000-year-old wall paintings and artefacts. "The wall paintings date back to the 9th millennium BC. They were discovered last month on the wall of a house standing two metres (6.6 feet) high at Dja'de," said Frenchman Eric Coqueugniot, who has been leading the excavations on the west bank of...

On September 19, 1997, the New York Times announced the discovery of a group of earthen mounds in northeastern Louisiana. The site, known as Watson Brake, includes 11 mounds 26 feet high linked by low ridges into an oval 916 feet long. What is remarkable about this massive complex is that it was built around 3400 B.C., more than 3,000 years before the development of farming communities in eastern North America, by hunter-gatherers, at least partly mobile, who visited the site each spring and summer to fish, hunt, and collect freshwater mussels... Social complexity cannot exist unless I it...

“In 1990 they found that the Earth goes through abrupt temperature changes from deep ice samples in Greenland of about 10,000 years ago the Earth’s temperature dropped 19 degrees” (research found by weather channel) taking 5-10 years (weather channel) but from analytical data, I intend to show this could take for the most part one year (Robert T Bailey) and more shocking a large part of the temperature change will happen this year! The End of the World as we known it is coming; an ice Age will change the face of the Earth. We have a crisis here. In...

The oldest known evidence of people keeping cats as pets may have been discovered by archaeologists. The discovery of a cat buried with what could be its owner in a Neolithic grave on Cyprus suggests domestication of cats had begun 9,500 years ago. It was thought the Egyptians were first to domesticate cats, with the earliest evidence dating to 2,000-1,900 BC. French researchers writing in Science magazine show that the process actually began much earlier than that. The evidence comes from the Neolithic, or late stone age, village of Shillourokambos on Cyprus, which was inhabited from the 9th to the...

Washington — An unusually warm period a millennium ago may have been part of a natural planetary cycle, researchers say in a study of tree rings that scrutinizes the link between human activity and climate change. The study, appearing Friday in the journal Science, analyzed ancient tree rings from 14 sites on three continents in the Northern Hemisphere. It concluded that temperatures in an era known as the Medieval Warm Period about 800 to 1,000 years ago closely matched the warming trend of the 20th century. In recent years, many climate scientists have said an unprecedented warming spell that began...

Human communities in the Levant at this time were known as Natufian. They were primarily hunters and foragers and are considered the first non-nomadic society; the semi-sedentary habits of Natufian culture were likely a precursor to humans settling down and becoming farmers. At the el-Wad Terrace settlement, the site was densely layered with animal remains, of which "a high percentage" belonged to lizards and snakes, the researchers reported in a new study, published online June 10 in the journal Scientific Reports. The quantity of squamate bones at the site was astonishing; that alone hinted at human consumption as a possible...

The slab lay over the remains of several individuals dating from 14,000 to 12,000 years ago, based on radiocarbon analysis of several of the skeletons. However, the remarkable image on the slab was only noticed some years after its discovery, while the stone was being carefully studied in the laboratories of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, Haaretz has learned. The image on the slab is an extremely rare example of an identifiable human figure made by Natufians, the researchers say. The Natufian culture existed from about 15,000 to about 11,700 years ago, and spanned from...

Study found the earliest evidence of alcohol production in a cave in northern Israel.Researchers have discovered the earliest evidence of alcohol production, from 13,000 years ago, in the Rakefet Cave in the Carmel, Haifa University announced Thursday. The discovery was made in a joint archaeological collaboration project by Haifa University and Stanford University researchers.Archaeologists analyzed three stone mortars from the 13,000-year-old Natufian burial cave site in Israel, concluding that these mortars were used for brewing wheat/barley, as well as for food storage. The researchers explained that the earliest archaeological evidence for cereal-based brewing, even before the advent of agriculture, comes...

About 15,000 years ago, in the oldest known cemetery in the world, people buried their dead in sitting positions with beads and animal horns, deep in a cave in what is now Morocco. These people were also found with small, sophisticated stone arrowheads and points, and 20th century archaeologists assumed they were part of an advanced European culture that had migrated across the Mediterranean Sea to North Africa. But now, their ancient DNA -- the oldest ever obtained from Africans -- shows that these people had no European ancestry. Instead, they were related to both Middle Easterners and sub-Saharan Africans,...

The oldest example of grave flowers has been discovered in Israel. An ancient burial pit dating to nearly 14,000 years ago contained impressions from stems and flowers of aromatic plants such as mint and sage. The new find "is the oldest example of putting flowers and fresh plants in the grave before burying the dead," said study co-author Dani Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa in Israel. snip... Past evidence suggested that humans only started using flowers in graves more recently. (A 35,000-year-old Neanderthal burial site called Shanidar Cave in Iraq contained pollen, but subsequent research revealed that...