Archaeology

A group of archaeologists and paleobiologists say they have discovered flax fibers in a cave in the Republic of Georgia that are more than 34,000 years old, making them the oldest fibers known to have been used by humans. The flax, which would have been collected from the wild and not farmed, could have been used to make linen and thread, they say. The cloth and thread could then have been used to fashion garments for warmth, sew leather pieces, make cloths, or tie together packs that might have aided the mobility of our ancient ancestors from one camp to another. The excavation was jointly…

The Bar-Kokhba revolt of the Jews against the Romans was the third and last, establishing a new Jewish state for two years before the Romans crushed it.   Along with a massacre in approximately 136 AD, the Romans renamed the region Syria Palaestina out of spite, which has caused no end to problems since (and demonstrates 'colonialism' is only bad when it's not being used in your favor) and they banned religious practices. During that period, they even made their own currency.  The largest cache of rare coins ever found in a scientific excavation from the period of the Bar-…

This link http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/christopherhowse/100002162/stone-ag... shows an interesting piece of stone age ware from Northern Spain that has been investigated by the University of Zaragoza.  Even to my beady Hedgehog eyes, the pattern labelled "relief design" looks remarkably like a fish. But look at the article and comments.  Please tell me, O Human Hank, why are the columnists and readers of such a conservative newspaper so "snotty" about science?   To save youall the bother of registering, the Hedgehog would be glad to receive your comments and feed them…

Unless the writing is completely legible and usually modern, even advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems give rise to transcription problems and provide results with many errors that need to be edited afterwards, a time-consuming process. The Computational Perception and Learning Research Group in the Computer Languages and Systems Department at the Universitat Jaume I, in collaboration with the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, have developed a new assisted system for the transcription of written text called 'State',  a transcription system that integrates a series of…

Archaeologists have used stone tools to answer many questions about human ancestors in both the distant and near past and now they are analyzing the origin of obsidian flakes to better understand how people settled and interacted in the inhospitable Kuril Islands. Using X-ray fluorescence spectrometers, archaeologists from the University of Washington and the Smithsonian Institution have found the origin of 131 flakes of obsidian, a volcanic glass. These small flakes were discarded after stone tools were made from obsidian and were found at 18 sites on eight islands in the Kurils. The flakes…

Today the Hecate Strait is a tempestuous 40-mile wide channel that separates the mist-shrouded archipelago of Haida Gwaii from the BC mainland. But Haida oral tradition tells of a time when the strait was mostly dry, dotted here and there with lakes. And indeed, during the last ice age, glaciers locked up so much water that the sea level was hundreds of feet lower than it is today. Soil samples from the sea floor of Hecate Strait contain wood, pollen, and other terrestrial plant materials that tell of a tundra-like environment. Whether or not the strait was ever completely dry during these…

The largest artificial underground cav in Israel has been exposed in the Jordan Valley in the course of a survey carried out by the University of Haifa's Department of Archaeology. Prof. Adam Zertal, who headed the excavating team, reckons that this cave was originally a large quarry during the Roman and Byzantine era and was one of its kind. Various engravings were uncovered in the cave, including cross markings, and it is assumed that this could have been an early monastery. "It is probably the site of "Galgala" from the historical Madaba Map," Prof. Zertal says. The enormous and striking…

More than 100 feet deep in Lake Huron, on a wide stoney ridge that 9,000 years ago was a land bridge, University of Michigan researchers have found the first archeological evidence of human activity preserved beneath the Great Lakes. The researchers located what they believe to be caribou-hunting structures and camps used by the early hunters of the period.  "This is the first time we've identified structures like these on the lake bottom," said John O'Shea, curator of Great Lakes Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology and professor in the Department of Anthropology. "Scientifically,…

Dating human migration has always been something of a guess, especially without corroborating archaeological evidence. Researchers at the University of Leeds say they have devised a more accurate method .  That's good news, because the most widely used genetic method works back to find the last common ancestor of any particular set of lineages using samples of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), but this method has recently been shown to be unreliable, throwing 20 years of research into doubt.  The new method refines the mtDNA calculation by taking into account the process of…

A University of Leicester student will be presenting his discovery of 425 million year-old fossils found in rocks from the Silurian period of geological time in Herefordshire.  The fossils represent a great range of animal groups and their study has tremendously increased knowledge of the evolution of life. David Riley’s research represents the first major attempt by scientists to understand the preservation pathway giving us a rare ‘window’ into a Silurian sea floor environment. The Leicester University PhD student will be presenting his research at the Festival of Postgraduate Research…