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Morocco: University of Pennsylvania Team Uncovers Skeleton of "World's Oldest Child"

Faye Flam
philly.com
Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Paleoartist Viktor works on the model of Bouchra, which means "good news" in Arabic. Some say it's possible this child's people were part of our ancestry.
Last year, while a Penn team of archaeologists was working in Morocco, members uncovered a treasure beyond anything they'd imagined - a skeleton of a child from 108,000 years ago.

They don't know what killed him at about age 8, but his remains are believed to be one of the most complete ever found of this period.

The skeleton promises to open a window into a pivotal time in human evolution when Neanderthals still ruled Europe, and Africans were inventing art and symbolic thought.

One of the earliest sites where people left evidence of artwork and symbolism is in Morocco, where a team led by Penn Museum's Harold Dibble found the child.

One of Dibble's students was the first to notice a piece of bone the size of a quarter, said Dibble, who is a curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. To everyone's surprise, the bone was part of a remarkably complete skull and upper body of a child that died 108,000 years ago, as shown by various dating techniques.
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Archaeologists discover evidence of prehistoric settlement on remote Scottish island


STV
Sat, 18 Jun 2011 03:50 UTC
Scottish Ancient Settlement
© Doc Searls
Isolated: The tiny island of Boreray is remote but beautiful.

'Incredibly significant find' on tiny island of Boreray is 'is further evidence of the international importance of the St Kilda archipelago'.

Evidence of a permanent Iron Age settlement on one of Europe's most inhospitable islands has been uncovered by archaeologists.

It had been thought that the St Kildan island of Boreray, 40 miles west of the Outer Hebrides in the Atlantic Ocean, had never been populated.

Inhabitants of nearby Hirta island only visit Boreray in the summer to hunt birds and gather wool.

But the new discovery suggests that people may have lived on the steep slopes of the island back in prehistoric times.

The last 36 inhabitants of the St Kilda archipelago left the islands in 1930.

Archaeologists from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and the National Trust for Scotland made the discovery on an eight-day research trip to Boreray.
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'Biggest Porcelain Haul' Found in Indonesia


Agence France-Presse
Fri, 17 Jun 2011 11:33 UTC
Image
© Agence France-Presse
This undated recent handout picture released by Portugal-based salvage company Arqueonautas Worldwide (AWW) shows a diver inspecting stacked porcelain at a shipwreck in the Java sea. A $70-million haul of Ming Dynasty porcelain has been found in a 16th-century shipwreck off the Indonesian island of Java, a Portugal-based salvage company said
A $70-million haul of Ming Dynasty porcelain has been found in a 16th-century shipwreck off the Indonesian island of Java, a Portugal-based salvage company said Friday.

Arqueonautas Worldwide (AWW) and its Indonesia-based partner RM Discovery Inc. said an "archaeological reconnaissance operation" had confirmed the discovery of the "biggest shipwreck cargo of Ming porcelain ever found".

"The Chinese merchant ship from the time of the Wanli Emperor sank around 1580 in over 50 metres (600 feet) depth approximately 150 kilometres (93 miles) off the Indonesian coast," the company said in a statement.

Fishermen found the wreck in mid-2009 and the Indonesian government contracted AWW and RM Discovery to carry out the delicate task of recovering its historically significant cargo, the company said.
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Hourglass

UK: Prehistoric stone circle discovered in Yorkshire

Sean McLachlan
Gadling
Sun, 12 Jun 2011 15:51 UTC
Mölndal cairn in Sweden
© Wikimedia Commons
Photo of Mölndal cairn in Sweden. No image of the Ilkley Moor cairn is available. It's not as well preserved as the Mölndal cairn.
A stone circle that was once part of a prehistoric cairn has been discovered by a group of amateur archaeologists on Ilkley Moor, Yorkshire, England.

A cairn is a large pile of stones that marked the grave of an important individual in prehistoric times. These stones were often taken away by later farmers for building walls or cottages, and sometimes all that's left is a circle of stones from the base, as is the case here. The team says the cairn measures 27 by 24 feet. It would have been pretty high back in its glory days.

One stone had a man-made circular impression archaeologists call a cup mark. These are found all over prehistoric Europe singly or in groups, but nobody knows what they mean.
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The Devastating Effects of Agriculture: We're Getting Shorter NOT Taller and Our Brains are Shrinking, So is Farming to Blame?

Damien Gayle
The Daily Mail
Sun, 12 Jun 2011 13:39 UTC
People have got shorter and our brains have shrunk - and scientists believe farming could be to blame.

Modern humans are about 10 percent smaller and shorter than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, scientists have found, and our brains have fallen in size by the same proportion.

Most of that decline in physical size has occurred since the advent of farming about 10,000 years ago.

Image
© Alamy
Easy life: Human beings have have shrunk 10 percent in the 10,000 years since the advent of farming
The findings run contrary to the popular notion that humans are growing progressively larger and taller.

Research shows that declines in height occurred in 19 of 21 societies that switched from hunter-gathering to farming - perhaps the greatest change in lifestyle in human history.

The findings pose a puzzle since societies that switch to farming usually experience a population boom as food becomes more plentiful.

Comment: Intelligent like this individual, for example?

Another thing to consider, in light of this recent article about human beings being *behold the hubris!* "extinction proof" due to the "benefits" of agriculture, is that the advent of agriculture led to humans eating a predominantly carbohydrate-based diet, which in modern times has resulted in the consumption of copious quantities of chemical-laden pseudo-foods based on grains. The result is a population that is so full of toxins that they have literally, physically lost the ability to think.

This fundamental inability to think has, in more recent decades, led to a total 'coup-de-monde' by utterly corrupt individuals and groups who found it rather easy to get the world to believe in lies and illusions.

A global population immersed in illusion and ruled by corrupt leaders, more than anything else, makes the human race eligible for an extinction level event.

In short, if you act like a bunch of dumbed-down idiots, 'creation' tends to do the merciful thing and wipe the slate clean.

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Sherlock

Archaeologists search for ancient Chinese ship off African coast


archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com
Tue, 14 Jun 2011 22:20 UTC
Chinese Ship Kenyan Coast
© Global Post
Workers clean a model of a Chinese ship sailed by Chinese explorer Zheng He. He led seven seven voyages in which he sailed from China to more than 30 countries and regions throughout the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf from 1405 to 1433

Did the Chinese come to East Africa before the Europeans? China says yes, as do a growing number of Western historians. To prove the theory, Chinese and Kenyan archaeologists are now searching the African coast for the fabled wreck of a Ming dynasty junk - an ancient Chinese sailing vessel - from the fleet of legendary 15th-century explorer Zheng He.

A new report, obtained by GlobalPost, reveals that the researchers have identified several shipwrecks of interest off the Kenyan coast near the World Heritage site of Lamu.

Despite years of excitable hype by China's state media, the underwater archaeologists involved in the search are warning that the newly discovered wrecks could be from any era or country - and even if a sunken Chinese ship is found, it may no longer be intact or even identifiable.

Some reports in the Chinese and Kenyan media have implied that the wreck of a ship from Zheng He's fleet has already been found - and by extension, irrefutable historical proof that Chinese explorers visited Kenya before the Europeans. Evidence that China had friendly trading relations with Africa before the colonialists arrived would add luster to the Asian giant's rapidly expanding presence on the continent.
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Sherlock

'Incredibly exciting' rare pre-Ice Age handaxe discovered on Orkney


news.stv.tv
Tue, 07 Jun 2011 22:06 UTC
Rare handaxe

Discovered: The tool could potentially 'set back our known history'.

A Palaeolithic handaxe has been found by a local walker on an Orkney beach.

An "incredibly rare" pre-Ice Age handaxe which may have been used to kill woolly mammoths, has been found on an Orkney beach.

The Palaeolithic - or Old Stone Age - tool, which could be anything between 100,000 and 450,000 years old, is one of only ten ever to be found in Scotland. The axe, which was found on a stretch of shore in St Ola by a local man walking along the beach, is the oldest man-made artefact ever found in Orkney.

The stone tool, which is around five-and-a-half inches long, has been broken, and originally would have tapered to a point opposite the cutting edge, but at some point in time, the point broke off and someone reworked the flint to its present straight edge.

Orkney-based archaeologist Caroline Wickham-Jones, who has studied the axe, described its discovery as "incredibly exciting".

Ms Wickham-Jones, who a lecturer in archaeology at Aberdeen University, said: "This axe is definitely older than 100,000 years - so old it's become geology.
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Document

Huge Ancient Language Dictionary Finished After 90 Years


Scienced Daily
Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:57 UTC
Ancient Dictionary
© University of Chicago
Martha Roth, Editor in Charge of the Assyrian Dictionary at the University of Chicago, puts the final volume in the set of books.

An ambitious project to identify, explain and provide citations for the words written in cuneiform on clay tablets and carved in stone by Babylonians, Assyrians and others in Mesopotamia between 2500 B.C. and A.D. 100 has been completed after 90 years of labor, the University of Chicago announced June 5.

To mark the completion of the 21-volume Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the Oriental Institute at the University, where the project was housed, held a conference on June 6, during which scholars from around the world discussed the significance of the achievement.

"I feel proud and privileged to have brought this project home," said Martha Roth, editor-in-charge of the dictionary and dean of Humanities Division at the University of Chicago, who has been working on the project since 1979. "I feel this will be a foundation for how to do more dictionary projects in the future."

"The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is one of the most important and unique contributions of the Oriental Institute to understanding the civilizations of the ancient Near East," said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute. "The CAD is the single most impressive effort I know of to systematically record, codify and make accessible the Akkadian language that forms the heart of the textual record of civilization in the place of its birth: Mesopotamia.
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Pharoah

Mysterious Spots on King Tut's Tomb Suggest Hasty Burial

Remy Melina
LiveScience
Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:49 UTC
Wall in Tutankhamen's Tomb
© Robert Jensen / J. Paul Getty Trust
Photo of a wall in Tutankhamen's tomb, taken in February 2009.

Mysterious brown spots covering the surfaces of King Tut's tomb have long puzzled scientists trying to identify them. Now a new study reveals ancient Egyptian microbes left these blemishes.

The spots offer insight not only into the boy king's death, but also into the haste of his burial, according to researcher Ralph Mitchell, an expert in cultural heritage microbiology at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

When the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities asked the Getty Conservation Institute to investigate whether the spots signaled the tomb's deterioration, they turned to Mitchell. Combining classical microbiology with DNA analysis, he studied the mysterious dark spots that have seeped into the tomb's paint and plaster.
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Archaeologists discover Skeleton in Doctor's Garden


University of Bristol
Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:50 UTC
Image
© Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol
A University of Bristol archaeologist uncovering the skeleton in Dr Jenner's garden
A skeleton, possibly dating from Roman times, has been unearthed by archaeologists from the University of Bristol during a dig in the garden of vaccination pioneer Dr Edward Jenner in Berkeley, Gloucestershire.

The archaeologists, led by Professor Mark Horton and Dr Stuart Prior, have been excavating part of the garden of The Chantry, the former country home of vaccination pioneer, Dr Edward Jenner (1749-1823), during a series of annual digs since 2007. They have already established that Berkeley is an important Anglo-Saxon site with a mynster of the same scale and status as Gloucester.
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