Archaeology - The Parnassian (Page 8)

Archaeology · Science · Education · Nature

Here is another recent study claiming to change our ideas about the origin of humankind

An international team led by Eslem Ben Arous and Eleanor Scerri describes stone tools of Homo sapiens, 150,000 years old, found at the Bété I site in Côte d'Ivoire. The layer has been dated by two independent methods, and the pollen, phytoliths and plant waxes in the

Archaeology · Heritage · Science · Palaeontology · Nature

The 17th-century "Whalers' Cemetery" on Spitsbergen, by the Likneset station, has begun to thaw after 400 years

The 17th-century "Whalers' Cemetery" on Spitsbergen, by the Likneset station, has begun to thaw after 400 years. And now Norwegian archaeologists are examining knitted woollen stockings, finely woven woollen trousers, blue silk neckerchiefs, fragments of blue-striped linen shirts, caps and blankets found in remarkably well-

Archaeology · The East · Art · Museums

The Greeks called the battle of the Olympian gods against the giants a Gigantomachy: creatures born of the earth who rose against the new divine order

The photograph shows a fragment of a relief of the 2nd century BC from Aphrodisias. It is now kept in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. The relief depicts giants with serpent bodies in place of legs. This iconography appears in the Hellenistic period and stresses the giants' link with the

Archaeology · Observations · Science · Ethnography

Thirteen vessels 4,500 years old found in north-eastern Poland

Thirteen vessels 4,500 years old have been found in north-eastern Poland. Nine of them bear chemical traces of fermentation: lactic, acetic and levulinic acids, the by-products of yeasts and bacteria, and biomarkers of wheat and barley, fruit and resins. The researchers from the University of Warsaw call

Archaeology · Science · Nature

Nine People in Ten Are Right-Handed

Nine people in ten are right-handed. Other primates show no such picture: chimpanzees and gorillas may also prefer one hand, but far less often and far less markedly. Scientists have long been trying to work out why humans, specifically, have gone so far. There is no shortage of hypotheses:

Archaeology · Science · Humour

Dental calculus is the last kind of stone an archaeologist expects to find, yet Elena Fiorin and her colleagues have published measurements of mercury concentrations not in bones but in the dental plaque of those buried at two leprosaria: St Leonard in…

76 samples of dental plaque and 45 of soil showed that the inmates of the leprosaria carried between 0.11 and 9.7 mg/kg of mercury, that is, several times more than the control groups from ordinary cemeteries. This confirms that lepers were indeed treated with mercury. It was

Archaeology · Science

The earliest dental intervention in human history was performed by Neanderthals

In Chagyrskaya Cave in the Altai, researchers have found a lower left second molar with a large artificial cavity on its chewing surface. Its age is about 59,000 years. Until now the earliest evidence of deliberate treatment of caries was thought to be the tooth of an Epigravettian Homo

Archaeology · Observations · Science · Humour

Prehistoric Danes kept hunting and fishing as their main sources of sustenance even centuries after the arrival of agriculture!

Now there's a discovery! People went on procuring food outside agricultural practices, despite their appearance. When I hear scientific conclusions of this kind, I am never quite sure: is this the result of some extraterrestrial ethnographic expedition? For whom, other than extraterrestrials, could it possibly come as a

Archaeology · Science · Palaeontology

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen have analysed marks on the teeth of the narrow-nosed rhinoceros Stephanorhinus hemitoechus from two Middle Palaeolithic sites in Spain and France, dating to some 100,000 years ago

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen have analysed marks on the teeth of the narrow-nosed rhinoceros Stephanorhinus hemitoechus from two Middle Palaeolithic sites in Spain and France, dating to some 100,000 years ago. The grooves, notches, sliding marks and scratches proved to be precisely what repeated percussion leaves

Archaeology · Museums

In south-western Norway a tourist accidentally picked up a gold mount from a sword scabbard of the first half of the sixth century

Not a treasure hunter, not an illicit digger, not an amateur archaeologist, but simply a walker found a badly worn little piece of gold lying on the surface of the ground. It is reported that the method of manufacture is standard for an elite Scandinavian workshop of the Migration Period:

Archaeology · Geography · Science

At Nauwalabila I, in Kakadu National Park in the north of Australia, what may be the world's oldest evidence of the heat treatment of flint has been found

Patrick Schmidt and Peter Hiscock have re-examined flakes from the deep layers of this rock shelter and found on them traces of deliberate heating dating from 45 to 60 thousand years ago. The technique is as follows: a piece of flint is buried in hot sand beneath a fire,

Archaeology · Archive · The East · Museums · Science

The National Museum of Denmark has held a collection of some five-thousand-year-old clay tablets from Mesopotamia and Syria in storage for about a hundred years

The National Museum of Denmark has held a collection of some five-thousand-year-old clay tablets from Mesopotamia and Syria in storage for about a hundred years. Since the material is cuneiform, nobody took the tablets seriously. Until the Hidden Treasures project of the University of Copenhagen and the