Category: Arch/ Anthro
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Analysis of ancient Scythian leather samples shows two were made from human skin
A selection of the leather object fragments analyzed in this study: 1. Ilyinka kurgan 4 burial 2; 2. Ilyinka kurgan 4 burial 3; 3. Vodoslavka kurgan 8 burial 4; 4. Orikhove kurgan 3 burial 2; 5. Zelene I kurgan 2 burial 3; 6. Kairy V kurgan 1 burial 1; 7. Ol’hyne kurgan 2 burial 1;…
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Cuneiform-Inscribed Bricks Unveil Strength of Ancient Geomagnetic Field in Mesopotamia
Reconstructing the behavior of Earth’s magnetic field during archaeological periods is crucial for both achieving a better understanding of the field and related natural phenomena and for providing a basis for absolute dating archaeological materials. In new research, University College London’s Professor Mark Altaweel and his colleagues analyzed 32 inscribed baked bricks from Mesopotamia from…
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Maya mortuary deposits found in cave at Tulum
Archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) have discovered a mortuary deposit in a cave at the Maya city of Tulum. Tulum is a Maya walled city which served as a major port for Coba, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. The city was one of the last cities built and…
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America’s native population arises from a single wave of Asian migration, suggest dental anthropologists
Migration map. Credit: R. Scott et al For more than 50 years, dental anthropologists have studied variation in the shape of human teeth to study the patterns of migration that people took as they populated the world. The last major continental migration event took place about 16,000 years ago, when humans first moved into North…
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First discovery of carbon-based cave art in France’s Dordogne region could pave way for precise radiocarbon dating
(a) Visible (VIS) light photography of the selected panel at the “Carrefour” ranging from the facing Reindeers 11 and 12 at Font-de-Gaume cave (credit: Anne Maigret, C2RMF) and (b) corresponding false color infrared photography (FCIR) image of the facing reindeer evidencing the underlying black horse figure with the indicated analytical pXRF and micro-Raman point analyses.…
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Study unravels history and demise of long-haired canine
The 160-year-old pelt of the woolly dog Mutton in the Smithsonian Institution’s collection. A little-known dog lineage with fur so thick it was spun into blankets was selectively bred for millennia by Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest until its rapid demise following European colonization, a study in Science showed Thursday. The new research was…
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Archaeologists uncover a bronze belt fitting from an unknown pagan cult
A team of archaeologists from Masaryk University have uncovered a bronze belt fitting from an unknown pagan cult in the village of Lány, located in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. The belt fitting dates from the 8th century AD and depicts a snake devouring a frog-like creature that appears in Germanic, Avar,…
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North America’s first people may have arrived by sea ice highway as early as 24,000 years ago
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain One of the hottest debates in archaeology is how and when humans first arrived in North America. Archaeologists have traditionally argued that people walked through an ice-free corridor that briefly opened between ice sheets an estimated 13,000 years ago. But a growing number of archaeological and genetic finds—including human footprints in…
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1,600-Year-Old Wooden Saddle Unearthed in Mongolia
New archaeological discoveries from Mongolia show that, despite a fragmentary archaeological record, horse cultures of the eastern Eurasian steppe were early adopters of frame saddles and stirrups, by at least the turn of the 5th century CE. The 1,600-year-old saddle discovered at Urd Ulaan Uneet is one of the earliest known examples of a wooden…
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Divers explore 5,000-year-old stone piles submerged in alpine lake
Members of the Bavarian Society for Underwater Archaeology are conducting a study of 5,000-year-old man-made stone piles submerged in Lake Constance, an alpine lake that borders Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Most of the piles (cairns) are located at a depth of four to six metres between the municipalities of Romanshorn and Altnau, which upon the…