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Early humans lived in China 1.7 million years ago

Charles Choi
LiveScience
Thu, 15 Aug 2013 08:06 UTC
Homo-Erectus
© Thomas Roche | Wikimedia CommonsHomo erectus, an ancestor to modern humans, arose at least 1.8 million years ago. Around that time in the fossil record, archaeologists see big shifts in brain size and body size in ancient hominins.
An extinct species of tool-making humans apparently occupied a vast area in China as early as 1.7 million years ago, researchers say.

The human lineage evolved in Africa, with now-extinct species of humans dispersing away from their origin continent more than a million years before modern humans did. Scientists would like to learn more about when and where humans went to better understand what drove human evolution.

Researchers investigated the Nihewan Basin, which lies in a mountainous region about 90 miles (150 kilometers) west of Beijing. It holds more than 60 sites from the Stone Age, with thousands of stone tools found there since 1972 - relatively simple types, such as stone flakes altogether known as the Oldowan.

Researchers suspect these artifacts belonged to Homo erectus, "thought to be ancestral to Homo sapiens," Hong Ao, a paleomagnetist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Xi'an, told LiveScience.

The exact age of these sites was long uncertain. To find out, Ao and his colleagues analyzed the earth above, below and in which stone tools at the Shangshazui site in the Nihewan Basin were found. The tools in question were stone blades potentially used for cutting or scraping.
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Oldest rock art in North America revealed

Megan Gannon
LiveScience
Wed, 14 Aug 2013 07:04 UTC
Rock Art
© University of ColoradoResearchers found that petroglyphs discovered in western Nevada are at least 10,500 years old, making them the oldest rock art ever dated in North America.
On the west side of Nevada's dried-up Winnemucca Lake, there are several limestone boulders with deep, ancient carvings; some resemble trees and leaves, whereas others are more abstract designs that look like ovals or diamonds in a chain.

The true age of this rock art had not been known, but a new analysis suggests these petroglyphs are the oldest North America, dating back to between 10,500 and 14,800 years ago.

Though Winnemucca Lake is now barren, at other times in the past it was so full of water the lake would have submerged the rocks where the petroglyphs were found and spilled its excess contents over Emerson Pass to the north.
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Ancient Pennsylvania dwelling still divides archaeologists

Kevin Begos
Missourian
Tue, 13 Aug 2013 20:13 UTC
Meadowcroft National Historic Site
© Keith Srakocic/The Associated Press The shelter covering the archaeological dig at the Meadowcroft National Historic Site is seen next to part of the natural rock overhand where Native Americans stayed as they traveled through the area thousands of years ago in Avella, Pa., on Aug. 5. A fluke rainstorm has brought Mercyhurst University professor Jim Adovasio back to do new work at the site that launched a furious debate in 1973 over when the first humans came to the Americas.
Avella, Pa. - A fluke rainstorm at an ancient rock shelter in western Pennsylvania has brought a renowned archaeologist back to the site of where a furious debate was launched in 1973 over when the first humans came to the Americas.

As a young archaeologist, Jim Adovasio found radiocarbon evidence that humans had visited the Meadowcroft site 16,000 years ago. To archaeologists it was a stunning discovery that contradicted the so-called Clovis first theory, which dated the first settlement in the Americas to New Mexico about 13,000 years ago.

The question is important because it ties into bigger questions on how and why so many different cultures developed in the Americas, and whether they all descended from one group that came across from Asia or arrived in multiple waves.

On that question, Adovasio's theory of multiple visits has mostly won out since other pre-Clovis sites have been discovered in North and South America.
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Neandertals were no copycats

Michael Balter
ScienceNow
Mon, 12 Aug 2013 14:00 UTC
Neanderthal Tools
© Abri Peyrony & Pech-de-l’Azé I ProjectsWell-rounded. Neandertals made bone tools, probably used to work animal hides (drawing lower right), without any help from modern humans.
Sometimes it seems Neandertals just can't catch a break. Every time an archaeologist comes up with new evidence for something cool and clever they did, another researcher claims they learned it from their modern human cousins. But new discoveries of polished bone tools at two prehistoric sites in France suggest that Neandertals independently invented these finely made implements, without a helping hand from Homo sapiens. The finds may represent the best sign yet that Neandertals were no boneheads when it came to technological innovation.

Neandertals lived in Europe and Asia between about 135,000 and 35,000 years ago, after which they went extinct. For a long while they had the territory to themselves; but then, sometime between about 45,000 and 40,000 years ago, modern humans moved into Europe from Africa. At roughly the same time, Neandertal behavior seemed to change and become more "modern": Their stone tools became more sophisticated, they began to wear jewelry, and they started using bone tools. For many archaeologists, the timing strongly suggested that Neandertals had copied modern human behavior.

But other researchers insisted that Neandertals had developed the behaviors before modern humans came to town. The debate often revolved around esoteric discussions of how to interpret radiocarbon dates from sites that both Neandertals and moderns had occupied, contamination of Neandertal sites by modern human artifacts, and other technical details.
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Head of a goddess statue discovered


HurriyetDailyNews
Sun, 11 Aug 2013 16:45 UTC
Goddess Statue
© Anadolu AgencyThe head of a mother goddess statue is the first of its kind in Turkey.
The head of an 8,000-year-old statue of a goddess has been found during excavations in İzmir's Yeşilova tumulus.

Associate Professor Zafer Derin said they had found very important pieces during this year's excavations, adding that the four-centimeter head of the statue had a special meaning as it was the first of its kind discovered in Turkey.

Women and fertility were sacred in western Anatolian culture, Derin said, adding that the area was the center of the mother goddess culture. "We have the head of a mother goddess figure. We know that worship of mother goddesses was common in this region in the past, but we have found the four-centimeter head of a goddess statue for the first time in Turkey. People used to put this statue in their home to have healthier children. This small piece is a very beautiful one from 6000 B.C."

Derin said the name of Anatolia came from the holiness of the mother goddess, according to the view of some, adding that they had seen the same portrayal in pots found in the region.

He said another significant find unearthed during the Yeşilova excavations was a seal in the shape of a shoe. "People used to carry this seal with them and use it when a signature was necessary."

Derin said the Yeşilova excavations, were currently hosting scientists from Europe and the U.S.
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Black Magic

What's Buried Next Door to Vancouver Island University?

admin
KevinAnnett.com
Sun, 11 Aug 2013 00:03 UTC
Crimes against Humanity in our own Backyard are Finally Surfacing
I was held in the Nanaimo Indian Hospital when I was a child, for seven years. I was used like a guinea pig in experiments. Lots of Indian kids died in there.
- Joan Morris, Songhees Nation, at a lecture at Malaspina College (VIU) in the spring of 2004

Nanaimo Indian Hospital c 1948
© Unknown
Just south of the VIU campus stands an overgrown piece of land behind stern barbed wire fencing: the site of the former Nanaimo Indian Hospital, run by the United Church of Canada and the federal government for over a half century.

According to Joan Morris and other Indians, this ground holds the remains of children who were killed after grisly medical experiments were conducted there for decades by military doctors.
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Prehistoric well could solve questions about local indigenous groups

Nicholas Fouriezos
The St. Augustine Record
Fri, 09 Aug 2013 00:00 UTC
Ancient Well
© Peter WillottCity archaeologist Carl Halbirt looks at an area of one of his digs off May Street on Thursday, where he believes he has uncovered a Timucuan Indian well than is more that 500 years old.
An archaeological discovery made earlier this summer could show that indigenous people in the St. Augustine area once built and used wells before ever being exposed to European influence.

Local archaeologists previously assumed that the Timucuan indians, who settled in the area before the Spanish arrived, received fresh water from "seeps" in nearby embankments.

"We've never found an example like that, that predates the European settlement here," city archaeologist Carl Halbirt said. "It gives us an idea of where the indigenous population possibly obtained their water."

What appears to be a coquina well was discovered on a property near the Francis and Mary Usina Bridge in June, as part of a county ordinance which requires certain properties to be investigated for archaeological deposits before construction.

The excavation site is littered with historical value. Halbirt said the city has extracted more than a ton of shell, mostly oyster shell, and "tens of thousands" of animal bones, primarily from small fish.

"From that evidence, this is going to give us a really good idea of what their subsistence was like during that time period," Halbirt said. "Most of the shell is fish, but we also have deer, turtle, water birds, and I think we have alligator."
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Gold Coins

Byzantine coins and gold found in Israel garbage pit

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Wed, 07 Aug 2013 16:02 UTC
Image
© Pavel Shargo / Institute of Archaeology / Tel Aviv UniversityByzantine gold coin found at the archaeological site of the ancient city of Apollonia-Arsuf
Archaeologists digging at a site north of Tel Aviv have uncovered ancient coins and jewelry in a mysterious garbage dump, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement.

Located near the ancient city of Apollonia-Arsuf, the Byzantine refuse pit is one of many unearthed in the area. But unlike the other garbage dumps, the pit measures more than 100 feet in diameter.

As they dug into it, the archaeologists found a hoard of 400 Byzantine coins, 200 intact Samaritan lamps and gold jewelry amid animal bones, pottery and glass fragments.

Most objects date to the 5th-7th centuries A.D.
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Gold Coins

Back to Bedlam: Crossrail digging unearths ancient London burial ground

Maev Kennedy
The Guardian
Wed, 07 Aug 2013 00:00 UTC
Image
Tunnelling project's chief archaeologist says up to 4,000 bodies of plague victims and inmates of Bedlam may be discovered

Every day hordes of London commuters have passed unknowingly over the bodies of thousands of their predecessors, buried a few metres under the roaring traffic and rumbling trains at Liverpool Street, and which are now being exposed for the first time by the huge Crossrail construction project.

The bodies include those of mentally ill patients from Bethlem, the ancient and notorious asylum from which the word Bedlam entered the English language. Bodies that were never claimed by their families - often those of beaten, starved and exploited inmates - would have ended up in the burial ground alongside rich and poor, old and young, victims of plague and war, from across London.

Jay Carver, lead archaeologist on the Crossrail sites - the largest archaeology project in the UK on the largest infrastructure project in Europe - described the site as exceptionally interesting. "Because of its history, we know that this is one of the most diverse burial grounds in London, a real cross section of its people across two centuries. Bone preservation is excellent in the finds we have already made, and we are expecting many important discoveries when we get into the main phase of the excavation."

The trial trenches have already yielded the first treasure from the 40 archaeology sites along the route of Crossrail's tunnelling: a thumbnail-sized golden coin from Venice, pierced so it could be stitched on as expensive decoration on some costly garment - and likely a bad loss when the thread broke and it fell into the gutter some 400 years ago.
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Crusader

SOTT Focus: Behind the Headlines: Who was Jesus? Examining the evidence that Christ may in fact have been Caesar!

Sott Editors
Sott.net
Sun, 14 Jul 2013 18:00 UTC
jesus pilate
'Jesus' before Pontius Pilate: Never happened!
On this show, the SOTT Talk Radio hosts went biblical, but with a strong revisionist bent.

The idea that a man named Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, performer of miracles, betrayed and crucified and declared to be the 'son of god', actually existed during the Roman Empire in the area of modern-day Palestine is the subject of long and often heated debate.

Historians and archeologists are adamant that there is no historical evidence for the existence of such a person, Christians on the other hand, just know in their hearts that Jesus lived and died to take away our sins (or debts). So what's the deal?

The skinny is that, while it isn't exactly widely known (to say the least), there is evidence to suggest that the details of the life of Jesus Christ were in fact pinched from another famous J.C. of the same era. So, seriously, who was on first here?

Have a listen as author and historian Laura Knight-Jadczyk takes us through the evidence that suggests 'Christ' may in fact have been Caesar...

Running Time: 02:27:00

Download: MP3


Comment: Check out part 2 of our discussion about 'Jesus' as Caesar here.

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