Tag: archaeology

1021

New research pinpoints an exact date Vikings from Europe were in North America: 1021 (1000 years ago this year), 430 years before Christopher Columbus was even born. How was this determination possible? Because the Sun erupted in an immense series of storms that altered Earth’s atmosphere, leaving measurable changes in tree rings at the time. A team of scientists looked at wood found at the L’Anse aux Meadows Viking site. In 3 cases the trees had been physically cut down, and moreover, they were clearly cut with metal tools — Vikings had metal implements at the time, but indigenous people did not. The wood was all from different trees (one was fir, and another juniper, for example). The key parts here are that the wood was all from trees that had been alive for many decades, and all had their waney edge intact as well.

Sodom Air Burst

people may have passed down accounts of the spectacular disaster as oral history over generations, providing the basis for the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah—which, like Tall el-Hammam, were supposedly located near the Dead Sea.

The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. A city-wide ~ 1.5-m-thick carbon-and-ash-rich destruction layer contains peak concentrations of shocked quartz (~ 5–10 GPa); melted pottery and mudbricks; diamond-like carbon; soot; Fe- and Si-rich spherules; CaCO3 spherules from melted plaster; and melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 °C. Amid city-side devastation, the airburst demolished 12+ m of the 4-to-5-story palace complex and the massive 4-m-thick mudbrick rampart, while causing extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans. An airburst-related influx of salt (~ 4 wt.%) produced hypersalinity, inhibited agriculture, and caused a ~ 300–600-year-long abandonment of ~ 120 regional settlements within a > 25-km radius. Tall el-Hammam may be the second oldest city/town destroyed by a cosmic airburst/impact, after Abu Hureyra, Syria, and possibly the earliest site with an oral tradition that was written down (Genesis). Tunguska-scale airbursts can devastate entire cities/regions and thus, pose a severe modern-day hazard.

2022-02-01: while the Sodom Air burst has been debunked, there’s other interesting meteorites in history:

First Applied Geometry

Researchers have made a discovery that may shake up the history of mathematics, revealing evidence of applied geometry being used for the purposes of land surveying 3.7 ka BP. Found on a Babylonian clay table, the etchings are believed to represent the oldest known example of applied geometry, and feature mathematical techniques linked to the Greek philosopher Pythagoras that were well ahead of their time.

Doggerland

500m wide, the beach is made of material dredged from the sea bottom 13 kilometers offshore and dumped on the existing beach. It’s an experimental coastal protection measure, its sands designed to spread over time to shield the Dutch coast from sea-level rise. The endeavor has made 21m cubic meters of Stone Age soil accessible to archaeologists. “The surprising thing is just how much DNA is still down there.”

2022-03-06: A map of Doggerland 11 ka BP:

Doggerland was, by any estimation, the most attractive landscape in northwestern Europe for Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and perhaps the continent’s most densely populated region at the time. Because of the seemingly inexhaustible resources present there, normally mobile Mesolithic societies may have been encouraged to create permanent or semipermanent settlements. While relatively few Mesolithic sites have been located on land, if Doggerland was indeed the heartland for these early Holocene communities, it stands to reason that many archaeological sites may lie beneath the North Sea. Seismic data has now given archaeologists a much better sense of Doggerland’s topography. They know where its rivers, lakes, and coastlines were located, and where its forests were found. They can use this information to speculate about where people may have lived.
This new type of research into Doggerland has the potential to once again dramatically alter the field of European prehistory. “We have a completely intact landscape with a state of preservation that we can often only dream of on land. I think we will have a lot of exciting discoveries to come. We are barely scratching the surface.”

400 ka Knowledge Exchange

Different groups of hominins probably learned from one another much earlier than was previously thought, and that knowledge was also distributed much further. A study on the use of fire shows that 400 ka ago knowledge and skills must already have been exchanged via social networks. The most important question is: what was it that made widespread cultural diffusion possible 400 ka ago? ‘I hope we can change the discussion surrounding fire use by hominins. That we look more at what the use of fire meant for human development and how that related to social change.’

Jurassic Pompeii

The misfortune that struck this place 167 ma BP has delivered to him an extraordinary collection of fossil animals in what is unquestionably one of the most important Jurassic dig sites ever discovered in the UK. The quantities involved are astonishing. 10Ks of these animals that scientists collectively call “the echinoderms”. It’s a great name, derived from the Greek for “hedgehog”, or “spiny”, “skin”. What is a sea urchin, if not an “underwater hedgehog”? But it’s also the quality of the preservation that’s jaw-dropping. Lean in close to a slab of rock that’s just been cleaned up and you’ll observe what, at first sight, reminds you of a plate of noodles. It is in fact a great mass of fossil arms from who knows how many sea lilies. You can clearly discern the individual calcite plates, or ossicles, that made up the skeletal frames of these animals when they were alive. What’s more, the specimens are fully articulated. Everything is captured in 3 dimensions.

2023-05-13: And a similar site also in the UK

Fossils from 462 ma BP recently discovered in a quarry, called Castle Bank in central Wales reveal some Cambrian life forms held on for millions of years longer than paleontologists had thought before going extinct, and certain classes of modern animals got their starts earlier than expected. The quarry also holds strange creatures thought to have arisen and vanished during the Cambrian period, such as opabiniids, which had five eyes and a long proboscis, and scaly slugs called wiwaxiids. Newcomers spotted in the deposits include modern families of glass sponges and a group of crustaceans called horseshoe shrimp, which were thought to have arisen much later. The researchers have found 170 species. “There is every reason to expect that the diversity of the fauna will continue to climb as the authors continue their research”. But even the currently documented diversity emphasizes the underappreciated importance of this time, called the Ordovician, which set the stage for the world’s current biodiversity. The Welsh quarry could definitely be as famous as the Burgess Shale.

Mapping Angkor

Most people don’t realize that Angkor Wat is just 1 of more than 1000 temples in the greater Angkor region. This settlement may have been home to 900k people at its height in the 13th century. Angkor was comparable to the 1m people who lived in ancient Rome at its height. Researchers were able to map 10Ks of archaeological features at Angkor. Because Angkorian people built their houses out of organic materials and on wooden posts, these structures are long gone and not visible on the landscape. But lidar revealed a complex urban landscape complete with city blocks consisting of the mounds where people built their houses and small ponds located next to them. This work has created one of the most comprehensive maps of a sprawling medieval city in the world, leading us to ask: How did the city develop over time, and how many people lived here?

20 ka Civilization?

Recent digs in the forest steppes of Russia have found a large circular structure built over 25 ka ago, using material from up to 60 mammoths. The labor invested here is much less than needed for the construction of Göbekli Tepe and, as a result, isn’t in and of itself sufficient evidence of a complex society—but this is no temporary structure.

The old paradigm of agriculture and civilization beginning after the last ice age, and proceeding on a materially overdetermined set course of progress, seems to rest on increasingly shaky theoretical grounds. As a consequence, the hypotheses of what we expect to find and what kind of digs we want to fund have to be revised as well. Not just because our timelines of monumental architecture and complex society have been thrown into question by Göbekli Tepe, but because of evidence of early cultivation, such as small-scale farming 23 ka ago at the Ohalo II site near the Sea of Galilee. Over 10 ka prior to when we had first thought agriculture began, at least some of our ancient ancestors had gathered over 140 plant species in 1 place, evidently sowing and harvesting early edible cereals and using rudimentary tools to turn them into flour.

With both agriculture and monumental construction much older than what was thought before, we should likely rethink the origins of urban life as well. How old might settlements of 100s or 1000s of people be? How frequently did such civilizations arise, only to fall and be forgotten? I strongly suspect they might be 8 ka older than we believed previously. I’m happy to take a Long Bet with a qualified challenger skeptical of such a claim, that in 20 years, we will know of at least 1 such permanent settlement older than 20 ka. Perhaps such a bet can, in its small way, help stimulate some interest in hunting for such sites.

Makapansgat pebble

a 260-gram, 8.3 cm long, reddish-brown jasperite cobble, ca 3M years before present with natural chipping and wear patterns that make it look like a crude rendition of a human face. it has been suggested that some australopithecine might have recognized it as a symbolic face, in possibly the earliest example of symbolic thinking or aesthetic sense in the human heritage, and brought the pebble back to the cave. This would make it a candidate for the oldest known manuport