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When most researchers looked at a puzzling group of artifacts discovered at French archaeological sites, they presumed these to be ornaments or clothing. But Justin Garnett saw something else."They resembled finger loops like those used by some North and South American spearthrowers," said Garnett, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Kansas.That observation led to his new article, "Exploring the Possible Function of Paleolithic Open Rings as Spearthrower Finger Loops." It examines open-ringed objects discovered in the late 19th century at Le Placard, Petit Cloup Barrat and Cave à Endives. His research hypothesizes that such rings (fabricated from...

...In Europe, it is generally accepted that fire was routinely exploited by hominins at least 350,000 years ago, with some suggestion of fire control being linked to the expansion of a particular stone tool technology known as the Acheulean... there is a concurrent rise in apparent prehistoric "fireplaces", or hearths, and burnt Acheulean artefacts, such as hand-axes made from flint and a sedimentary rock called chert, at lots of European sites dated between 450,000 and 250,000. Many of these also contain charred plant materials and bones...Before the new evidence, the oldest clear evidence of fire control in Europe came from...

...an international research team led by scientists from the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment presents the earliest human footprints known from Germany. The tracks were discovered in the roughly 300,000-year-old Schöningen Paleolithic site complex in Lower Saxony. The footprints, presumably from Homo heidelbergensis, are surrounded by several animal tracks—collectively, they present a picture of the ecosystem at that time.In an open birch and pine forest with an understory of grasses sits a lake, a few kilometers long and several hundred meters wide. On its muddy shores, herds of elephants, rhinoceroses, and even-toed ungulates...

Ancient Deer Tooth Pendant - The pierced deer tooth pendant. (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) A pendant made from a deer's tooth has turned out to be a veritable locket of genetic information left by an ancient woman who lived in Siberia some 20,000 years ago. Evolutionary anthropologists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany found a way to safely probe ancient artifacts for environmental DNA without destroying them, and applied it to a piece of jewelery found in the famous Denisova Cave in Russia in 2019. Other than the fragments of her chromosomes, no trace of the woman...

In a cave just south of Lisbon, archaeological deposits conceal a Paleolithic dinner menu. As well as stone tools and charcoal, the site of Gruta de Figueira Brava contains rich deposits of shells and bones with much to tell us about the Neanderthals that lived there—especially about their meals. A study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology shows that 90,000 years ago, these Neanderthals were cooking and eating crabs...A wide variety of shellfish remains were found in the archaeological remains Nabais and her colleagues studied, but the shellfish in the undisturbed Paleolithic deposits are overwhelmingly represented by brown crabs. Their...

A 31,000-year-old skeleton found in a remote area in Indonesia is rewriting what we know about early medicine medical procedures according to a new study published in the weekly scientific Nature journal on Wednesday. ... The oldest previous known example of a limb amputation had been a roughly 7,000-year-old skeleton from France, whose left forearm had been surgically removed and then had partially healed. This had led researchers to believe that operations of this nature took place in established agricultural societies. The latest discovery turns that notion on its head and suggests that Stone Age hunter-gathers had a far more...

years ago) shows that small, elongated, symmetrical objects (bladelets) were mass-produced on-site. Such a standardized production is in line with what archaeologists have already suggested being linked to the bow and arrow introduction.The most typical Ahmarian tool is the el-Wad point, a blade or bladelet made of flint that has an additional, intentional modification, a so-called retouch. They are one of the widespread variants of shaped spear or arrow tips of the early Upper Paleolithic. The new findings suggest that el-Wad points in Al-Ansab likely resulted from attempts to re-shape bigger, asymmetrical bladelet artifacts to reach quality standards of the...

The president of the Portuguese Association of Archeological Research (APIA), Nuno Ribeiro, revealed Monday having found rock art on the island of Terceira, supporting his believe that human occupation of the Azores predates the arrival of the Portuguese by many thousands of years, Lusa reported. "We have found a rock art site with representations we believe can be dated back to the Bronze Age," Ribeiro told Lusa in Ponta Delgada, at a presentation in University of the Azores on the topic of early human occupation of the Azores. The oldest cave art known in Europe is of prehistoric origin, dating...

Under the aegis of the University of Oslo, an international research team has extracted and analyzed plant DNA from the sediments of the Armenian "Aghitu-3" cave. About 40,000 to 25,000 years ago, the cave was used as a shelter by humans of the Upper Paleolithic. A detailed analysis of the DNA shows that the cave's inhabitants may have used numerous plant species for a variety of purposes, including for medicine, dye, or yarn. he excavations were led by the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia and the research project "The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans (ROCEEH)," which...

Meet an amazing man who has dedicated his entire adult life to stone skipping, sacrificing everything to produce world-record throws that defy the laws of physics.

Abu Hureyra is an archaeological site that was occupied for thousands of years, spanning the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding. While a large body of research has explored this transition across many archaeological sites, much remains to be determined about the specific timeline, including the full range of early animal management practices that may have preceded large-scale herding.To shed new light, Smith and colleagues turned to ancient animal dung. Specifically, they analyzed the presence of dung spherulites—tiny calcium carbonate clumps found in the dung of animals—at Abu Hureyra, and considered this evidence alongside other archaeological, archaeobotanical,...

Student’s find provides new evidence region may be one of first places early humans settled outside Africa.Archaeologists in Georgia have found a 1.8m-year-old tooth belonging to an early species of human that they say cements the region as the home of one of the earliest prehistoric human settlements in Europe, and possibly anywhere outside Africa.The tooth was discovered near the village of Orozmani, which lies about 60 miles south-west of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and is near Dmanisi, where human skulls dated to 1.8m years old were found in the late 1990s and early 2000s.The Dmanisi finds were the oldest...

The discovery of a young adult who lived for years with an amputated leg pushes back the first documented limb surgery by 20,000 years.At the beginning of the last Ice Age, 31,000 years ago, a community in what’s now Eastern Indonesia buried a young person in the dry floor of a mountainside cave painted with handprints. The people lived on the edge of what was then a low continent called Sunda, and they were likely part of the same group of early seafarers who crossed to Australia. They were sophisticated in other ways, too: According to a description of the...

Neanderthals selected rib bones from specific animals to make the lissoirs (French for 'smoothers'), which are bone tools that have been intentionally shaped and used on animal hides to make them softer and more water resistant, according to new research led by paleoanthropologists from the University of California, Davis. Scientists know that some Neanderthals produced bone tools. These include the discovery of five nearly identical fragments of lissoirs from two Paleolithic sites in southwest France: Pech-de-l'Azé I (Pech I) and Abri Peyrony. These specialized tools are often worn so smooth that it's impossible to tell which animal they came from...

A 65,000-year-old tool – a kind of ancient Swiss Army knife – found across southern Africa has provided scientists with proof that the ancestors of modern homo sapiens were communicating with each other.In a world first, a team of international scientists have found early humans across the continent made the stone tool in exactly the same shape, using the same template, showing that they shared knowledge with each other...These tools were produced in enormous numbers across southern Africa roughly 60-65,000 years ago.Because the people across southern Africa all chose to make the tools look the same, it indicates they must...

Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday.The issue had roiled the paleoarchaeology community ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva de Ardales to our extinct "cousin" species.The dating suggested the art was at least 64,800 years old, made at a time when modern humans did not inhabit the continent...A new analysis revealed the composition and placement of the pigments were not consistent with natural processes—instead, the...

Cueva de Ardales is a hugely important Paleolithic site in Malaga, Spain, owing to its rich inventory of rock art. According to new research, Neanderthals entered this cave in the Middle Paleolithic, over 65,000 years ago and left traces of symbolic practices on the cave walls; thereafter the cave was repeatedly visited by Homo sapiens all the way to the Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic period.Cueva de Ardales is the most outstanding cave with Paleolithic rock art in southern Iberia.The cave is located near the village of Ardales, in a mountain know as Cerro de la Calinoria, at 565 m above sea level...

Bacho Kiro Cave. (Nikolay Doychinov/AFP via Getty Images) Last year, a genetic analysis of bone fragments representing our earliest known presence in Europe raised a few questions over the steps modern humans took to conquer every corner of the modern world. Whoever the remains belonged to, their family background was more entwined with the East Asian populations of their day than with today's Europeans, hinting at a far more convoluted migration for our species than previously thought. Now, researchers from the Universities of Padova and Bologna in Italy have proposed what they think might be the simplest explanation for the...

Evidence of early use of pigments by humans has been found at the Xiamabei relics site in north China's Hebei Province.Xiamabei is a Late Paleolithic site located in Yangyuan County's Nihewan Basin, which is one of the best-preserved areas in East Asia in terms of paleolithic remains and cultural sequences."The earliest known evidence of ochre-processing of prehistoric humans in China and even in East Asia was recently discovered in Xiamabei, depicting a vibrant living scene of East Asian dwellers 40,000 years ago," said Wang Fagang, associate researcher from the Hebei provincial institute of cultural relics and archaeology.The remnants of ochre,...

The discovery by researchers led from the University of Toulouse–Jean Jaurès was made in the 'Grotte Mandrin', 1.5 miles south of Malataverne, in the Rhône Valley.Previously, the oldest proven examples of modern human settlements in Europe were dated back to 45,000–43,000 years ago — 10,000 years earlier.Furthermore, the Mandrin cave also provides the first clear example of a site that was alternately occupied by Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens).