Tag: archaeology

Ancient suburbs

Beneath the surface of Nebelivka’s surrounding landscape and at nearby archaeological sites, 6 ka remnants of what were possibly some of the world’s first cities are emerging from obscurity. These low-density, spread-out archaeological sites are known as megasites, a term that underscores both their immense size and mysterious origins. Now, some scientists are arguing the settlements represent a distinct form of ancient urban life that has gone largely unrecognized. Megasites were cities like no others that have ever existed.

are suburbs the cradle of civilization?

Ancient Games

Long before Settlers of Catan, Scrabble and Risk won legions of fans, actual Roman legions passed the time by playing Ludus Latrunculorum, a strategic showdown whose Latin name translates loosely to “Game of Mercenaries.” In northwest Europe, meanwhile, the Viking game Hnefatafl popped up in such far-flung locales as Scotland, Norway and Iceland. Farther south, the ancient Egyptian games of Senet and Mehen dominated. To the east in India, Chaturanga emerged as a precursor to modern chess. And 5 ka ago, in what is now southeast Turkey, a group of Bronze Age humans created an elaborate set of sculpted stones hailed as the world’s oldest gaming pieces upon their discovery in 2013.

44 ka Figurative Art

We describe an elaborate rock art panel from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong that portrays several figures that appear to represent therianthropes hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids; this painting has been dated to at least 44 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. This hunting scene is currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.

2021-11-13: The New Yorker has a nice background article, and it turns out newer research pushed the age 1 ka back:

The painting of the warty pig was at least 45 ka old. This makes it the oldest known example of figurative cave art in the world. The implications of these dates are profound. The famous animal paintings in the Chauvet cave, of France, are dated at 35 ka BP; the Sulawesi warty pig outdoes them by 10 ka. Many archeologists and anthropologists talk about a “great leap forward” in human culture, suggesting that it occurred 30-60 ka BP. During this “leap,” Homo sapiens initiated behaviors characteristic of modern humans. Such discoveries indicate that the leap may have occurred toward the more ancient end of that range. The warty pig also upends any lingering belief that figurative cave art was a European thing. “The early cave art in Europe is so spectacular that it was hard for archeologists to tear their eyes away from it”. This sometimes resulted in a “not fully conscious Eurocentrism.”

2023-01-06: Insights into the why of cave paintings

the number of marks on the cave paintings was a record, by lunar month, of the animals’ mating seasons. Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systemic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar

Skeleton Lake

A new study, dated and analyzed the DNA from the bones of 37 individuals found at Roopkund. The majority of the deceased indeed died 1000 or so years ago, but not simultaneously. And a few died much more recently, likely in the early 1800s. Stranger still, the skeletons’ genetic makeup is more typical of Mediterranean heritage than South Asian.

“It may be even more of a mystery than before. It was unbelievable, because the type of ancestry we find in 33% of the individuals is so unusual for this part of the world.”