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Tombs of Iberian prince and 24 aristocrats unearthed in Spain

Vicente G. Olaya
Archeology News Network
Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:00 UTC
Tomb Iberian
© [Credit: UCLM]Tomb of an Iberian prince found in Alarcos
The general landscape of the Iberian Peninsula in 300 BC consisted of a variety of communities that included the Celts, the Iberians, the Celtiberians and the Lusitanians, while the two main powers of Rome and Carthage fought each other to the death on their turf.

The Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca invaded Iberia in 235 BC, laying waste to the various communities that he came across. Finally, these groups banded together and waged war on him in what became known as the battle of Heliké - possibly Elche in Alicante or Elche de la Sierra in Albacete - where Hamilcar met his death in 228BC.

Last year, the archeologists and historians María del Rosario García Huerta, Francisco Javier Morales Hervás and David Rodríguez González came to the end of their research after three years excavating and two years analyzing the remains of the Iberian necropolis of Alarcos, in the Spanish province of Ciudad Real, where they unearthed 25 tombs belonging to Iberian aristocrats, including one the experts believe could have belonged to a prince, from the period when Hamilcar was killed in battle.

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Ancient skeletons with cranial deformation unearthed in Croatia

Yasemin Saplakoglu
Live Science
Thu, 22 Aug 2019 12:00 UTC
cranial deformation
© M Kavka/CC By 4.0CT scans of the skull that had a "circular-erect"deformation
Archaeologists have unearthed three ancient skeletons in Croatia — and two of them had pointy, artificially deformed skulls.

Each of those skulls had been melded into a different shape, possibly as a way to show they belonged to a specific cultural group.

Artificial cranial deformation has been practiced in various parts of the world, from Eurasia and Africa to South America. It is the practice of shaping a person's skull — such as through using tight headdresses, bandages or rigid tools — while the skull bones are still malleable in infancy.

Ancient cultures had different reasons for the practice, from indicating social status to creating what they thought was a more beautiful skull. The earliest known instance of this practice occurred 12,000 years ago in ancient China, but it's unclear if the practice spread from there or if it emerged independently in different parts of the world, according to a previous Live Science report.

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Archaeology

Armenian find shows innovation in Stone Age tools more than 300,000 years was local, not imported


Science Daily
Thu, 25 Sep 2014 17:33 UTC
ancient stone tools armenia
© Dan AdlerThis image shows stone tools found at the site of Nor Geghi, Armenia: top – biface tool; bottom – a Levallois core.
The analysis of artifacts from a 325,000-year-old site in Armenia shows that human technological innovation occurred intermittently throughout the Old World, rather than spreading from a single point of origin, as previously thought.

The study, published today in the journal Science, examines thousands of stone artifacts retrieved from Nor Geghi 1, a unique site preserved between two lava flows dated to 200,000-400,000 years ago. Layers of floodplain sediments and an ancient soil found between these lava flows contain the archaeological material. The dating of volcanic ash found within the sediments and detailed study of the sediments themselves allowed researchers to correlate the stone tools with a period between 325,000 and 335,000 years ago when Earth's climate was similar to today's.

The stone tools provide early evidence for the simultaneous use of two distinct technologies: biface technology, commonly associated with hand axe production during the Lower Paleolithic, and Levallois technology, a stone tool production method typically attributed to the Middle Stone Age in Africa and the Middle Paleolithic in Eurasia. Traditionally, Archaeologists use the development of Levallois technology and the disappearance of biface technology to mark the transition from the Lower to the Middle Paleolithic roughly 300,000 years ago.
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Sherlock

Diverse DNA deepens mystery of 800 skeletons at Roopkund lake - does folk song hold clue?

Kristin Romey
National Geographic
Tue, 20 Aug 2019 12:00 UTC
Roopkund
© Atish WaghwaseThis composite image made of multiple photographs shows Roopkund Lake and the surrounding mountains.
Roopkund, a remote lake high in the Indian Himalaya, is home to one of archaeology's spookiest mysteries: the skeletons of as many as 800 people. Now, a study published today in Nature Communications attempts to unravel what happened at "Skeleton Lake" — but the results raise more questions than answers.

In the early 2000s, preliminary DNA studies had suggested that the people who died at Roopkund were of South Asian ancestry, and radiocarbon dates from around the site cluster at 800 A.D., a sign that they all died in a single event.

Now, full genomic analyses from 38 sets of skeletal remains upend that story. The new results show that there were 23 people with south Asian ancestry at Roopkund, but they died during one or several events between the 7th and 10th centuries A.D. What's more, the Roopkund skeletons contain another group of 14 victims who died there a thousand years later — likely in a single event.

Comment: More details about the skull injuries can be found in Skeleton Lake of Roopkund, India. The surprise is what killed them ...
Analysis of skulls showed that, no matter their stature or position, all of the people died in a similar way: from blows to the head. However, the short, deep cracks in the skulls appeared to be the result not of weapons but of something round. The bodies had wounds only on their heads and shoulders, indicating the blows came from directly above. The scientists reached an unexpected conclusion: The hundreds of travelers all died from a sudden and severe freak hailstorm.
See also: And for more clues, check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Who was Jesus? Examining the evidence that Christ may in fact have been Caesar!

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Bad Guys

Epstein madam Ghislaine Maxwell's host of family skeletons

Dana Kennedy
The Daily Beast
Sun, 18 Aug 2019 20:29 UTC
ghislane maxwell family portrait
© James Andanson/GettyThe Maxwell family
Ghislaine Maxwell, 57, comes from a family by turns brilliant and accomplished, deceptive and doomed. Her backstory is full of sex and science, money and magical illusions. And today she is the world's most wanted woman — at least by the media and Jeffrey Epstein's victims.

She is the youngest child of the notorious and disgraced British media mogul Robert Maxwell, rumored after his mysterious death in 1991 to have been an Israeli spy. She was the alleged paramour-turned-pimp for Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire pedophile who reportedly committed suicide in his cell on August 10.
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8,000 year old haunting stone faces from "city" on the Danube river baffle archeologists

Sean Keach
The Sun
Tue, 20 Aug 2019 16:58 UTC
danbue figurines
© Mickey Mystique/Wikimedia CommonsThe strange statues have been declared 'fish-like'
Mysterious sculptures with "haunting faces" that date back 8,000 years have left archaeologists baffled.

The strange human figurines found in Serbia have bizarre fish-like features - but there's no telling exactly who made them, or why.

Carved by ancient Europeans on the banks of the Danube river, the sculptures represent a little-known period of history.

They were sculpted over a period of around 200 years at a long-lost Serbian settlement known as Lepenski Vir.

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Info

Humans migrated to Mongolia much earlier than previously believed says new study

Kathleen Holder
University of California, Davis
Fri, 16 Aug 2019 18:43 UTC
Tolbor Valley
© University of California, DavisAncient tools were found in a site in the western flank of the Tolbor Valley.
Stone tools uncovered in Mongolia by an international team of archaeologists indicate that modern humans traveled across the Eurasian steppe about 45,000 years ago, according to a new University of California, Davis, study. The date is about 10,000 years earlier than archaeologists previously believed.

The site also points to a new location for where modern humans may have first encountered their mysterious cousins, the now extinct Denisovans, said Nicolas Zwyns, an associate professor of anthropology and lead author of the study.

Zwyns led excavations from 2011 to 2016 at the Tolbor-16 site along the Tolbor River in the Northern Hangai Mountains between Siberia and northern Mongolia.

The excavations yielded thousands of stone artifacts, with 826 stone artifacts associated with the oldest human occupation at the site. With long and regular blades, the tools resemble those found at other sites in Siberia and Northwest China — indicating a large-scale dispersal of humans across the region, Zwyns said.
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Heart - Black

Pioneering UN leader Dag Hammarskjold was assassinated, new data suggests

Sarah Pruitt
History.com
Fri, 16 Aug 2019 12:00 UTC
bivši glavni tajnik UN-a Dag Hammarskjöld
© UNBivši glavni tajnik UN-a Dag Hammarskjöld
Updated: Aug 16, 2019, Original: Aug 16, 2019 - UN Leader Dag Hammarskjold Died in Mysterious Circumstances in 1961. What Really Happened? New evidence supports a theory that the pioneering U.N. secretary general was assassinated.

Shortly after midnight on September 18, 1961, a chartered DC-6 airplane carrying United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold on a peacekeeping mission to the newly independent African nation of the Congo crashed in a forest near Ndola, in the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

Hammarskjold and 14 other people aboard, including U.N. staffers and the plane's crew, were killed; a single survivor died of his injuries six days later. Though inquiries by colonial authorities in Africa indicated the crash had been the result of pilot error, rumors of foul play surfaced immediately — and they have not stopped swirling since.

Today, Hammarskjold's name is emblazoned on several buildings at U.N. headquarters in New York, while his death remains the biggest enigma in the organization's eventful history. In 2017, the UN commissioned a new investigation of the crash, while the 2019 documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld explores the long-running theory that Belgian or South African mercenaries may have shot down Hammarskjold's plane to stop his diplomatic activities in the Congo, possibly even with the backing of U.S. and British intelligence.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Sherlock

Bronze Age Britons were riddled with parasites but had the finest of fabrics

Phoebe Weston
The Independent
Sat, 17 Aug 2019 20:45 UTC
bronze age settlement
© (D Webb, Cambridge Archaeological Unit)People living in houses perched on freshwater marshes were infected by intestinal worms caught from foraging for food in lakes. Artifacts from the houses such as food, clothes and jewellery were preserved in the mud
Bronze Age Britons were infected with a number of parasites including giant kidney worms that could reach up to one metre in length, analysis of 3,000-year-old faeces has revealed.

Prehistoric people living in a settlement perched on freshwater marshes in eastern England were infected by intestinal worms caught from foraging for food in lakes and waterways, according to researchers from the University of Cambridge.

The 900BC Bronze Age settlement at Must Farm - located near what is now the fenland city of Peterborough - was made of wooden houses built on stilts above the water. A wooden causeway connected islands on the marsh and inhabitants used dugout canoes to travel along the channels.

Three-thousand years ago, a catastrophic fire burnt the village down, but artefacts from the houses such as food, clothes and jewellery were preserved in the mud.

Comment: These houses reflect a similar living arrangement to the Crannogs discovered in Scotland: Crannogs: Neolithic artificial islands in Scotland stump archeologists

It's curious that, while these people were seemingly ignorant - or unable to deal with - sanitation and parasites, they also had fabrics that were of the finest quality. The following article provides more details and clues on just what life was like at Must Farm: "Catastrophic" fire destroyed incredible British Bronze Age settlement a year after it was built

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Info

Lascaux Shaft Scene and cometary impacts

Dr. Martin Sweatman
Prehistory Decoded
Sat, 17 Aug 2019 19:12 UTC
The Lascaux shaft scene is perhaps the most iconic of all European Palaeolithic cave artworks (see below). It shows a bison and human, apparently both dying and normally interpreted as a hunting scene. But we now know, beyond any reasonable doubt, the animal symbols represent constellations, and the Shaft Scene in particular very likely represents a date using precession of the equinoxes.
Lascaux Shaft Scene
© Copy of the Lascaux Shaft Scene, courtesy of Alistair Coombs
Using the zodiacal method and our ancient zodiac, the date 'written' in the scene is between 15,300 and 15,000 BC (see Prehistory Decoded). The similarity of this scene to Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe suggests it documents another asteroid or comet strike, this time from the direction of Capricornus (represented by the aurochs). It so happens that the Taurid meteor stream would rave radiated from this direction at this time, suggesting this artwork memorialises another strike from the Taurid system. Given the presence of a giant comet in the inner solar system at this time, such frequent impacts are entirely expected.

Very interestingly, this time span also corresponds to a sudden temperature fluctuation in the North Atlantic region (see Prehistory Decoded), documented by a Greenland ice core, and to a major cultural transition: the Magdalenian to Azillian.
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