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Nose ornament made from human bone found at Maya archaeological site in Palenque

INAH
Heritage Daily
Sat, 02 Sep 2023 14:11 UTC
maya bone
© Carlos Varela Scherrer
Archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) have uncovered a nose ring made from human bone during excavations at the Maya city of Palenque.

Palenque, also known as Lakamha in the Itza Language (meaning "Flat-Place-River"), is located near the Usumacinta River in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

Excavations of House C, part of a palace complex built by Pakal the Great, has led to the discovery of a ritual deposit containing a nose ring made from human bone. The deposit is likely an offering to commemorate the building's completion between AD 600 and 850 during the Late Classic period.

The nose ring is made with part of a human distal tibia which forms the bony structure of the ankle joint, and has an engraved scene used to personify K'awiil, the Mayan god associated with lightning, serpents, fertility, and maize. The Maya often depicted Kʼawiil holding the promise of "Innumerable Generations" who was part of the Maya rulers ritual inauguration and accession to the throne.

Comment: One might suppose that this find isn't necessarily a grim find, what with ancestor worship and what not, except that there's evidence showing that the Mayan civilisation was rather brutal even before it began to experience other stressors, such as that brought about by an abrupt shift in climate: Also check out SOTT radio's: MindMatters: America Before: Comets, Catastrophes, Mounds and Mythology



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Info

New ancient ape from Turkey challenges the story of human origins

Sean Bettam
University of Toronto
Thu, 24 Aug 2023 03:31 UTC
Hominine Fossil
© Sevim-Erol, A., Begun, D.R., Sözer, Ç.S. et al.
A new face and partial brain case of Anadoluvius turkae, a fossil hominine — the group that includes African apes and humans – from the Çorakyerler fossil site located in Central Anatolia, Türkiye.
A new fossil ape from an 8.7-million-year-old site in Türkiye is challenging long-accepted ideas of human origins and adding weight to the theory that the ancestors of African apes and humans evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa between nine and seven million years ago.

Analysis of a newly identified ape named Anadoluvius turkae recovered from the Çorakyerler fossil locality near Çankırı with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Türkiye, shows Mediterranean fossil apes are diverse and part of the first known radiation of early hominines — the group that includes African apes (chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas), humans and their fossil ancestors.

The findings are described in a new study published in Communications Biology co-authored by an international team of researchers led by Professor David Begun at the University of Toronto and Professor Ayla Sevim Erol at Ankara University.

Our findings further suggest that hominines not only evolved in western and central Europe but spent over five million years evolving there and spreading to the eastern Mediterranean before eventually dispersing into Africa, probably as a consequence of changing environments and diminishing forests," said Begun, professor in the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts & Science. "The members of this radiation to which Anadoluvius belongs are currently only identified in Europe and Anatolia."

The conclusion is based on analysis of a significantly well-preserved partial cranium uncovered at the site in 2015, which includes most of the facial structure and the front part of the brain case.
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Info

2,000-year-old wooden bridge that once linked England and Wales discovered

Sam Tonkin
Daily Mail, UK
Wed, 30 Aug 2023 02:45 UTC
Wooden Bridge
© CAS/WALES NEWS SERVICE
An ancient bridge – believed to have been built by the Romans 2,000 years ago – was found preserved in mud in the River Wye near Chepstow
Known as the gateway to Wales, Chepstow is a border town steeped in history.

It boasts a 12th-century Norman castle overlooking the River Wye but was seen as a strategic stronghold long before those battle lines were drawn.

That's because archaeologists have previously uncovered evidence of prehistoric, Roman and Anglo-Saxon fortifications — and now something else.

It turns out the town was once home to an ancient bridge that linked England and Wales before the two countries came to be.

This wooden structure - believed to have been built by the Romans 2,000 years ago - was found preserved in mud following a race against time to uncover it during an 'extreme low tide event'.
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Info

Palaeogeneticists analyse a 3,800-year-old extended family


Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Tue, 22 Aug 2023 23:07 UTC
32 individuals from a burial site in the southern Ural region show close kinship relations / Only women came from other areas.
Ancient Skeleton
© Svetlana Sharapova
A skeleton from the Nepluyevsky site.
The diversity of family systems in prehistoric societies has always fascinated scientists. A groundbreaking study by Mainz anthropologists and an international team of archaeologists now provides new insights into the origins and genetic structure of prehistoric family communities.

Researchers Dr. Jens Blöcher and Professor Joachim Burger of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have analyzed the genomes of skeletons from an extended family from a Bronze Age necropolis in the Russian steppe. The 3,800-year-old Nepluyevsky burial mound was excavated several years ago and is located on the geographical border between Europe and Asia. Using statistical genomics, the family and marriage relationships of this society have now been deciphered. The study was carried out in cooperation with archaeologists from Ekaterinburg and Frankfurt am Main and was partly financially supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Russian Science Foundation (RSCF).

The burial mound or so-called kurgan investigated was the grave of six brothers, their wives, children, and grandchildren. The presumably oldest brother had eight children with two wives, one of whom came from the Asian steppe regions in the east. The other brothers showed no signs of polygamy and probably lived monogamously with far fewer children.
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Blue Planet

Longest stretch of Ancient Jerusalem's upper aqueduct discovered

Nir Hasson
Haaretz
Wed, 30 Aug 2023 20:23 UTC
aqueduct
© Sraya Diamant
The directors of the dig in Givat Hamatos, Dr. Ofer Sion, left, and Rotem Cohen. The ancient aqueduct was discovered during an archeological dig in East Jerusalem's Givat Hamatos, ahead of the construction of a new neighborhood in the controversial area.
An archeological salvage dig in East Jerusalem that was carried out in advance of the construction of a new neighborhood has uncovered a 3-kilometer (1.8-mile) stretch of ancient Jerusalem's upper aqueduct.

Researchers have attempted for about 150 years to decipher the secret of how the ancient city's huge water system brought water to Jerusalem during the Second Temple period (which ended in the year 70) and on into the late Roman period. In its time, it was the largest network of water infrastructure in the country.

Experts know about two aqueducts from those periods: the lower aqueduct, which supplied the Temple, and the upper aqueduct, which suppled the upper city - where the Jewish Quarter and the Armenian Quarter of the Old City are now situated. The two aqueducts carried water over considerable distances from Solomon's Pools in the Bethlehem area into Jerusalem's city walls. Small sections of aqueduct were discovered over the years, but the debate about their precise route - and particularly when they were built - continues.

Comment: Recent studies reveal that our understanding of history and religion of the area is sorely lacking: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Palette

Paleolithic artists incorporated natural rock formations into cave painting designs, stereoscopic imaging reveals

Justin Jackson ,
Phys.org
Thu, 24 Aug 2023 12:00 UTC
Paleolithic art
© amiteshikha, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Research led by Complutense University, Madrid, has discovered an array of ancient cave paintings hidden among previously described cave art. In a paper, "Animals hidden in plain sight: stereoscopic recording of Paleolithic rock art at La Pasiega cave, Cantabria," published in Antiquity, the team fills in details missing from previous photographic images.

The researchers revisited La Pasiega cave's rock art using new digital stereoscopic recording methods and identified previously unnoticed animal figures within the cave art. Specifically, they discovered new depictions of horses, deer, and a large bovid (possibly an aurochs) that had not been recognized before.

Some figures were previously considered incomplete as if the artist simply gave up on the rendering midway through. Through stereoscopic photography and a better understanding of how natural rock formations were incorporated into the artwork, these incomplete figures were reinterpreted as complete animal depictions.

Comment: There's sufficient evidence to conclude that our paleolithic ancestors were much more capable, creative, and inspired, than we are led to believe: Also check out SOTT radio's:


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Red Flag

How the Soviets used common criminals to destroy the regime's enemies

Ryan McMaken
Mises Institute
Thu, 24 Aug 2023 00:00 UTC
gulag
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

As violent crime rates rise and unsolved homicides become more common, Many ordinary voters have noticed that the regime doesn't seem especially interested in investigating and prosecuting actual dangerous criminals. At the same time, the regime appears increasingly paranoid about "antidemocratic" activities and other alleged threats to the state. Gangs of thieves cleaning out the inventory of small businesses? The ruling elite isn't concerned. Meanwhile, if a small business owner fails to report a $700 transaction on Venmo, heavily armed IRS agents may soon show up on his doorstep.

This apparent trend toward ignoring violent criminals while prosecuting hapless middle-class taxpayers has caused many conservative activists — such as Tucker Carlson and Mike Cernovich — to resurrect the thirty-year-old phrase "anarcho-tyranny." Conservative columnist Sam Francis defined the term in the early 1990s as "the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety."
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Info

Buffalo slaughter left lasting impact on Indigenous peoples

Carol Clark
Emory University
Wed, 23 Aug 2023 20:33 UTC
American Bison
© Emory University
“Bison were not just key to the economies of some Indigenous nations,” says Emory economist Maggie Jones, co-author of the study. “The bison were also important cultural and spiritual symbols.”
The mass slaughter of North American bison by settlers of European descent is a well-known ecological disaster. An estimated eight million bison roamed the United States in 1870, but just 20 years later fewer than 500 of the iconic animals remained.

The mass slaughter provided a brief economic boon to some newly arriving settlers, hunters and traders of the Great Plains who sold the hides and bones for industrial uses.

In contrast, Indigenous peoples whose lives depended on the bison suffered a devastating economic shock — one that still reverberates in these communities today, an economic study finds.

The Review of Economic Studies published the findings by economists at Emory University, the University of Toronto and the University of Victoria. The researchers quantified both the immediate and long-term economic impacts of the loss of the bison on Indigenous peoples whose lives depended on the animals.

Changes in the average height of bison-related people is one striking example of the fallout. Adult height across a population is one proxy of wealth and health given that it can be impacted by nutrition and disease, particularly early in development.

Bison-reliant Indigenous men stood around six feet tall on average, or about an inch taller than Indigenous men who were not bison-reliant.

"They were among the tallest people in the world in the mid-19th century," says Maggie Jones, assistant professor of economics at Emory University and a co-author of the paper. "But after the rapid near-extinction of the bison, the height of the people born after the slaughter also rapidly declined."

Within one generation, the average height of Indigenous peoples most impacted by the slaughter dropped by more than an inch.

"That's a major drop, but given the magnitude of the economic shock it's not necessarily surprising," Jones says.
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Dig

New ancient ape from Türkiye challenges the story of human origins

University of Toronto
Phys.org
Wed, 23 Aug 2023 20:47 UTC
skull
© Sevim-Erol, A., Begun, D.R., Sözer, Ç.S. et al.
A new face and partial brain case of Anadoluvius turkae, a fossil hominine—the group that includes African apes and humans—from the Çorakyerler fossil site located in Central Anatolia, Türkiye.
A new fossil ape from an 8.7-million-year-old site in Türkiye is challenging long-accepted ideas of human origins and adding weight to the theory that the ancestors of African apes and humans evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa between nine and seven million years ago.

Analysis of a newly identified ape named Anadoluvius turkae recovered from the Çorakyerler fossil locality near Çankırı with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Türkiye, shows Mediterranean fossil apes are diverse and are part of the first known radiation of early hominines — the group that includes African apes (chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas), humans and their fossil ancestors.

The findings are described in a study published today in Communications Biology co-authored by an international team of researchers led by Professor David Begun at the University of Toronto (U of T) and Professor Ayla Sevim Erol at Ankara University.

"Our findings further suggest that hominines not only evolved in western and central Europe but spent over five million years evolving there and spreading to the eastern Mediterranean before eventually dispersing into Africa, probably as a consequence of changing environments and diminishing forests," said Begun, professor in the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T. "The members of this radiation to which Anadoluvius belongs are currently only identified in Europe and Anatolia."

The conclusion is based on analysis of a significantly well-preserved partial cranium uncovered at the site in 2015, which includes most of the facial structure and the front part of the brain case.
      Read More...
Info

Cave excavations in Turkey uncovers 86,000-year-old traces of human life

Leman Altuntaş
Arkeonews Net
Tue, 22 Aug 2023 16:34 UTC
Cave archaeology
© Ankara University
In the excavations carried out in the İnkaya Cave in Çanakkale, located in the northwestern part of Türkiye, in addition to the traces of 86 thousand years of human life in the layers of the cave, many tools made of flint for various purposes were also found.

İnkaya Cave, located within the borders of Bahadırlı village in the Çan district, was found during the Muğla and Çanakkale Provinces Survey conducted in 2016 under the direction of İsmail Özer, a lecturer at Ankara University, Department of Paleoanthropology.

Excavations in the cave, which will shed light on Paleolithic period migrations between Anatolia and the Balkans, were carried out by an international team between 2017 and 2020 under the presidency of the Troy Museum Directorate.

During the excavations carried out last year, the Middle Paleolithic period workshop part of the cave was unearthed.

The İnkaya Cave excavations, which have been ongoing, were granted supported status by the Turkish Historical Society this year. Carried out by a team of 20 people, this year's excavation revealed that humans from the Middle Paleolithic Period resided in the region for extended periods due to the availability of flint raw material and water resources.

"Evidence of the Paleolithic era in Çanakkale was previously limited. Through our research, it became evident that Çanakkale is actually one of the very rich provinces in Türkiye in terms of the Paleolithic period," said excavation director Professor Ismail Ozer.
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