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Hamish Mowatt of South Ronaldsay, one of the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland, unearthed a Neolithic tomb in his backyard garden. Now archaeologists are scrambling to document and preserve the 5,000 year old grave site.
Mr Mowatt said he had always wondered what lay under an 8ft stone in the garden and eventually curiosity got the better of him.
He dug a small hole close to the stone to see how thick it was. He then managed to get a thin wire pushed under the stone and confirmed there was definitely a space underneath. While doing this, a finger-hole size appeared in the earth to his right. This allowed him to push the wire in — to a depth of three feet.
By carefully removing a small area of earth and two stones, Mr Mowatt could see a rock face. Shining a torch inside, he saw a chamber with about nine inches of water lying in the bottom.
Mr Mowatt added: “I have an underwater camera, so I got it in through the hole and the monitor rigged up. On the screen, I could see the rock face clearly, but when I went further I could clearly see what I thought was a white skull, with two eye sockets, looking back at me.”
So far, three skulls are visible in the stone chamber, which is filling up with water. Experts think there might be multiple connected chambers on the site. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: Sigurd Towrie)
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At a site south of Paris, France, archaeologists Cécile Buquet-Marcon and Anaick Samzun discovered what they believe to be evidence of a successful and intentional arm amputation:
The man, who lived in the Linearbandkeramik period, when European hunter-gatherers began subsistence farming, was found to be missing his forearm and hand bones.[...]
Pain-killing plants such as the hallucinogenic Datura are likely to have been used in the operation, and the wound was probably cleaned using antiseptic herbs like sage, the scientists said.
“I don’t think you could say that those who carried out the operation were doctors in the modern sense that they did only that, but they obviously had medical knowledge,” Mrs Buquet-Marcon said.
Link | Photo: Stephanie Watson
A glue formula used by people in South Africa 70,000 years ago required more intelligence than archaeologists normally attribute to Stone Age men. It was made by mixing red ochre with the gum of acacia trees. It turns out that the red ochre serves more than a decorative purpose, as researchers found out when they made some of the glue themselves.
“We discovered that when we used ochre, the glue is much more robust, and the stone tool doesn’t come off the shaft,” said study team member Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
But making the glue wasn’t easy for the ancient Africans.
It was mentally taxing work that would have required humans to account for differences in the chemistry of gum harvested from different trees and in the iron content of ochre from different sites.
“They couldn’t possibly have known about chemical pH or iron content … but they knew that certain combinations of things worked very well,” Wadley said.
Archaeologists examining an undersea site in Britain have discovered something wonderful: an 8,000-year-old piece of string!
Our ancestors made it by twisting together what seem to be fibres of honeysuckle, nettles, or wild clematis, and used it in their struggle for survival as the last ice age ended.
This early piece of technology, measuring about 41/2in must have been a revolutionary advance at the time, useful for binding together weapons or tools.
But in case you don’t believe me that it’s a wonderful find, here’s what British Archaeology mangazine editor Mike Pitts said about the discovery:
‘It is a fantastic find. I don’t think the average person realises what an important piece of technology string has been over the ages.’
Indeed. Link – via Scribal Terror
Archaeologists digging at Zaraysk, Russia, unearthed a trove of Stone Age figurines and carvings, including something puzzling: a cone-shaped object whose function remains a mystery:
Also among the finds was an object carved from mammoth ivory, shaped like a cone with its top removed. The cone is densely ornamented and has a hole running through its centre.
The authors note that the object is unique among Palaeolithic artefacts. "The function of this decorated object remains a puzzle," they say.
Since you guys are experts at guessing in our weekly What is it? game, let’s try this one for size: what do you think the mystery object is for?
(Photo: Amirkhanov/Lev/Antiquity)
