Archaeology

Ancestors of modern humans "recycled" broken flint tools 400,000 years ago in order to create small, sharp utensils with specific functions in the processing of animal products and plant materials. The results were found in digs at Qesem Cave, located just outside Tel Aviv, which was discovered in 2000 during a road construction project and has since provided insights into life in the region hundreds of thousands of years ago. In recent years, archaeologists working in caves in Spain and North Africa and digs in Italy and Israel have unearthed evidence that prehistoric people recycled…

By Charles Choi, Inside Science – New research suggests that megaliths -- monuments such as Stonehenge created from large rocks during the Stone and Copper Ages in Europe -- owe their origins to a mysterious culture from northwest France with advanced seafaring technology. Roughly 35,000 megaliths are known throughout Europe, including standing stones, stone circles and megalithic tombs. Most megaliths date from 4500 to 2500 B.C., are concentrated in coastal areas along the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and share similar or even identical architectural features, said archaeologist Bettina…

A new sewage treatment project in London discovered something in the mud of the Thames; the remains of a human, leg bones still covered by thigh-high leather boots. When you say thigh-high leather boots it sounds much sexier than fishing waders, which are not made of leather any more because, let's face it, leather is useless in water and science improved fishing a lot. Archaeologists analyzing the remains say the grooves in his teeth were likely caused by rope, and that, plus his build, suggests his trade was fisherman. He was in his mid-30s, they estimate, so his death was not natural.…

What began as an expedition to record the inscriptions of ancient Egyptian quarry workers produced a remarkable discovery about the Great Pyramid at Giza. My colleagues and I in the Anglo-French joint archaeological mission to the ancient quarry site of Hatnub recently revealed the existence of a well-preserved haulage ramp dating to the time of the Great Pyramid, roughly 4,500 years ago. We think this could significantly change the theories about how the workers who built the monument were able to transport such large blocks of stone to great heights. It could even provide evidence that…

The Great Pyramids have long been held up as the pinnacle of ancient engineering. Over 100 structures, some as high as were constructed of huge alabaster blocks, many quarried from Hatnub - the site of an new interesting discovery. Given the challenges in building such huge structures, it is no surprised the Great Pyramid of Khufu is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It and others were built thanks to quarries connected to the Nile by Bronze Age roads. The blocks were transported by sleds. But what about construction? Huge ramps? Were they poured? Some even speculated about…

Where do the Jewish people come from? This is a question that anthropologists, historians and theologists have studied for millennia. According to mythology, the Judaeans descended from three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who are buried in the Cave of the Patriarchs (Cave of Machpelah) in Hebron – a city in the Palestine region and a world heritage site located in the southern West Bank, 19 miles south of Jerusalem. Buried alongside them are said to be Adam and Eve and the four Matriarchs – Sara, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel. The cave has never been excavated, but on top of it is a…

A mummy dating from 3700-3500 B.C. housed in the Egyptian Museum in Turin since 1901 has never undergone any conservation treatments - and that provided a unique opportunity for some science. And the results were a surprise. It was assumed the Turin mummy had been naturally mummified by the desiccating action of the hot, dry desert sand but chemical analysis showed that the mummy had undergone an embalming process, with a plant oil, heated conifer resin, an aromatic plant extract and a plant gum/sugar mixed together and used to impregnate the funerary textiles in which the body was…

Some 4,000 years before domesticated agriculture, hunter-gatherers baked their own bread, according to a discovery at an archaeological site in northeastern Jordan. Researchers have discovered the charred remains of a flatbread baked around 14,400 years ago, the oldest direct evidence of bread found to date, predating the advent of agriculture by at least 4,000 years. The findings suggest that bread production based on wild cereals may have encouraged hunter-gatherers to cultivate cereals, and thus contributed to the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period. The 24 charred food…

The oldest colors in the geological record have been discovered. At 1.1 billion-years-old, the bright pink pigments extracted from marine black shales of the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania, West Africa, are actually molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were produced by ancient photosynthetic organisms - cyanobacteria. The fossils range from blood red to deep purple in their concentrated form, and bright pink when diluted and are more than half a billion years older than previous pigment discoveries. The rocks deep beneath the Sahara desert in Africa, remnants of an ancient ocean that…

The 'Two Brothers' mummies, discovered by the modern world in 1907, reside in the Manchester Museum  and are the mummies of, unsurprisingly, two elite men (they didn't mummify peasants), Khnum-nakht and Nakht-ank. The remains date to around 1800 B.C. but there has always been argument about whether or not the two are actually related even though they share a joint burial site at Deir Rifeh, a village 250 miles south of Cairo. Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the coffins indicated that both men were the sons of an unnamed local governor and had mothers with the same name, Khnum-aa. It was…