Smashed Skulls Indicate Stone Age Fears

Several of the smashed skulls, all of young men.

Evidence that some Stone Age cultures may have considered dead young men to be threatening to living people could be the reason groups of newly discovered skulls were buried with smashed-in faces.

The 10,000-year-old skulls were found in Syria. They appear to have been dug up several years after being buried with their bodies, separated, then reburied. No one knows why Neolithic societies buried clusters of skulls - often near or underneath settlements.

Like those found in other caches, they have been cleanly separated from their spines, suggesting they were collected from dead bodies that had already begun to decompose. Patterns on the bone indicate that some had been decomposing for longer than others, making it likely that they were all gathered together for a specific purpose.

Most of the skulls belonged to adult males between 18 and 30 years old.

Click here for the article.

Artifacts Point to Earlier African Stone Age

Archaeologists at Border Cave where the artifacts were found.

 New findings indicate that the late Stone Age in Africa began about 20,000 years earlier than previously thought. Artifacts found in a cave reveal residents were carving bone tools, using pigments, making beads and even using poison 44,000 years ago.

Such artifacts had previously been linked to the San culture, which was thought to have emerged around 20,000 years ago. The Later Stone Age in Africa occurred at the same time as Europe's Upper Paleolithic Period, when modern humans moved into Europe from Africa and met the Neanderthals about 45,000 years ago.

 According to LiveScience.com:

"Our research proves that the Later Stone Age emerged in South Africa far earlier than has been believed and occurred at about the same time as the arrival of modern humans in Europe,” says researcher Paola Villa of the Colorado Museum of Natural History. "The differences in technology and culture between the two areas are very strong, showing the people of the two regions chose very different paths to the evolution of technology and society."

Traces of civilization have been found going back nearly 80,000 years in Africa, but these fragments — bone tools, carved beads — vanish from the archaeological record by about 60,000 years ago.

Click here for the article.

Why Did Stone Age Brits Convert to Farming?

Archaeologists are investigating islands around Britain in an attempt to settle debate about why the isles’ hunter-gatherers converted to farming about 6,000 years ago. The issue is whether the change was due to colonists moving into Britain or if the indigenous population adopted an agricultural lifestyle themselves.

According to the Independent:

The experts will be excavating three island groups in the western seaways ~ the Channel Islands, the Isles of Scilly and the Outer Hebrides ~ to understand what sailing across this area would have been like in 4,000 BC.

Fraser Sturt, from the Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Southampton, said: "How people changed from hunter-gatherers to agricultural lifestyles is one of the big questions in archaeology. We know that the first signs of domestication occurred in the Middle East around 10,000 BC and reached France by 5,000 BC. However, it appears to be another 1,000 years before Neolithic farming activities reached Britain."

"We are investigating why this happened by looking at changing social practices, possible environmental impacts and the nature of maritime technology and communication."

Recent discovery of French pottery in Scotland suggests that colonization from the continent is a possible explanation for the shift. Studies show that the first colonists are likely to have travelled across the western seaways, but there has been very little excavation of the islands to prove this theory.

Click here for the complete article.

More Evidence of Pre-Clovis American Settlement

Examples of Clovis-era tools.

Thousands of 15,500-year-old stone tools unearthed over the past several years prove that the Clovis culture was not the first human population in the Americas, according to archaeologists writing in a recent issue of Science magazine.

According to the BBC:

A number of digs across the Americas in recent decades had already hinted that the "Clovis first" model was in serious trouble. But the huge collection of well-dated tools excavated from a creek bed 60km (40 miles) northwest of Austin (Texas) mean the theory is now dead, argue the Science authors. 

"This is almost like a baseball bat to the side of the head of the archaeological community to wake up and say, 'Hey, there are pre-Clovis people here, that we have to stop quibbling and we need to develop a new model for peopling of the Americas'," Michael Waters, a Texas A&M University anthropologist, told reporters.

Hunter-gatherers were thought to have crossed from Siberia into Alaska via a land bridge that became exposed when sea levels dropped. Evidence indicates this occurred as far back as about 13,500 years. But an increasing number of archaeologists have argued there was likely to have been an earlier occupation based on the stone tools that began turning up at dig sites with claimed dates of more than 15,000 years.

Click here for the complete article.

More Evidence Points to Stone Age Beer

Research for a half-century has indicated Stone Age farmers domesticated cereals not so much to fill their stomachs but to lighten their heads. Signs that people went to great lengths to obtain grains despite the hard work needed to make them edible ~ plus the knowledge that feasts were important community-building gatherings ~ support the idea that cereal grains were being turned into beer, says archaeologist Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

Agriculture began in the Neolithic Period of the Stone Age about 11,500 years ago. Evidence suggests that until the Neolithic, cereals such as barley and rice constituted only a minor element of diets, most likely because they require so much labor to get anything edible from them.

"In traditional Mayan villages where I've worked, maize is used for tortillas and for chicha, the beer made there,” Hayden says. “Women spend five hours a day just grinding up the kernels.” However, sites in Syria suggest that people nevertheless went to unusual lengths at times just to procure cereal grains ~ up to 40 to 60 miles.

One might speculate, Hayden said, that the labor associated with grains could have made them attractive in feasts in which guests would be offered foods difficult or expensive to prepare, and beer could have been a key reason to procure the grains used to make them.

"It's not that drinking and brewing by itself helped start cultivation, it's this context of feasts that links beer and the emergence of complex societies," Hayden added.

Click here for the complete article.

Europe's Stone Age Tombs Built in Brief Period

The Ring of Brodgar, a Neolithic tomb in Orkney, Scotland.

New research indicates western Europe’s huge prehistoric tombs were built in an isolated burst of activity around 4000 BC instead of throughout the Stone Age. “It trivializes the tombs to call it a fad, but building such structures seems to have become a fashion where great numbers were built and then there was a cessation for centuries,” says archaeologist Chris Scarre of Durham University.

According to USA Today:

Rather than a single “megalithic” culture stretching across Europe, the outburst of mound tombs likely represents an idea reaching local cultures, he suggests, which then “stopped and started” across the centuries. 

“One big implication is the realization that the people buried in this fashion represent only a small fraction of the people who were alive then,” Scarre says. “Until the Roman era, thoughtful burial of the dead may have been a rare thing in this part of Europe.”

Improved dating of materials such as birch bark, bone and stone left in the tombs now reveals the clustered construction times of the mounds, according to Scarre.

Click here for the article.

Melting Ice Reveals More Ancient Tools

Global warming continues to reveal ancient artifacts buried under ice patches for thousands of years. Some of the latest finds are in the Mackenzie Mountains in the arctic regions of North America.

Ice patch archeology is a recent phenomenon that began in Yukon. In 1997, sheep hunters discovered a 4,300-year-old dart shaft in caribou dung that had become exposed as the ice receded. Scientists who investigated the site found layers of caribou dung buried between annual deposits of ice.

Archaeologist Tom Andrews of the International Polar Year Ice Patch Study first became aware of the importance of ice patches when word about the Yukon find started leaking out. In 2000, he cobbled together funds to buy satellite imagery of specific areas in the Mackenzie Mountains and began to examine ice patches in the region.

Results have been extraordinary. Andrews and his team have found 2,400-year-old spear throwing tools, a 1,000-year-old ground squirrel snare, and bows and arrows dating back 850 years.

"The implements are truly amazing,” Andrews says. “There are wooden arrows and dart shafts so fine you can't believe someone sat down with a stone and made them."

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Human Population Surge Preceded Agriculture

New genetic evidence shows that human populations in sub-Sahara Africa began to expand in size 40,000 years ago, well before the development of agriculture. This supports the hypothesis that population growth played a significant role in the evolution of human cultures in the Late Pleistocene.

There has been long-standing disagreement in archaeological circles whether humans increased in number as a result of innovative technologies formulated by hunter-gatherer groups in the Late Pleistocene, or with the advent of agriculture in the Neolithic.

Researchers recently surveyed the genetic material of about 200 individuals from seven human populations and used a computational approach to simulate the evolution of genetic lineages. They found that both hunter-gathers and food-producing groups best fit models with approximately ten-fold population growth beginning well before the origin of agriculture.

Click here for the complete ScienceDaily article.

Scottish Settlement Dates Back 14,000 Years

Amateur archaeologists have uncovered Scotland's oldest human settlement, dating back 14,000 years. It’s the first proof that humans lived in Scotland during the upper paleolithic period, when nomadic humans hunted with bows and arrows and when mammoth and rhinoceros roamed the land.

Flint arrowheads were discovered in a field by the Biggar Archeology Group. The tools had been made in a way that identified them as belonging to about 12,000 BC. At that time, the North Sea was an expanse of land, over which nomadic humans roamed. Similar tools had been found in Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany, but never in Scotland.

Dr Alan Saville, a senior curator at the National Museum of Scotland, who helped identify the objects, said he was "very excited" when he saw them. "This is the breakthrough," he said. "Now we are able to say for absolute certain that we had human settlement at that time in Scotland."

Click here for the complete article.

Archaeologists Ponder Stone-Age Cannibalism

One of the 7,000-year-old skeletons unearthed at the Herxheim village.

Archaeologists are speculating on what could have led to an extensive occurrence of Stone Age cannibalism among villagers near Herxheim, Germany.

"It is impossible to establish direct proof of cannibalism,” says Bruno Boulestin, an anthropologist at Bordeaux University. “But here we have systematic, repetitive gestures, which suggest that the bodies were eaten."

According to a report in The Guardian, thousands of human bones have been unearthed at Herxheim, near Speyer. About 7,000 years ago farmers ~ who grew wheat and barley and raised livestock ~ built a village of four to 12 houses, the post holes of which have survived.

During the first series of excavations at the end of the 1990s, numerous injuries visible on the skeletons were taken as evidence that the victims had been massacred. But in 2008 Boulestin examined the fragments recovered from one of the trenches, pointing out that nearly 2,000 samples belonged to fewer than 10 individuals.



The marks of breaking, cutting, scraping and crushing indicate that the bodies were dismembered, the tendons and ligaments severed, the flesh torn off and the bones smashed. The vertebra were cut up to remove the ribs, just as butchers do today with loin chops.

What can this bloodbath mean? The potsherds found among the human remains suggest it must have occurred over a period of no longer than 50 years. There is nothing to imply the victims were killed for food. Only under extreme conditions would 100 or so farmers have been able to overcome about 10 times their number. The archaeologists have therefore concluded that this was some form of ritual killing.

Click here for the complete article in The Guardian.

Peking Man Now Believed 750,000 Years Old

Homo erectus skull from the Zhoukoudian caves.

A new and more accurate dating method shows Peking Man may be 200,000 years older than previously thought. Bones of Sinanthropus pekinensis ~ a Homo erectus commonly known as Peking Man ~ were discovered in the 1920s during cave excavations near Beijing and now believed to be 750,000 years old.

Scientists have used various techniques to try and date the fossils, but a lack of suitable methods for cave deposits has limited their accuracy. Shen and his colleagues used a relatively new method that examines the radioactive decay of aluminum and beryllium in quartz grains, which enabled them to get a more precise age for the fossils.

"The analysis dated the finds to around 750,000 years old, some 200,000 years older than previous estimates and indicates a hominin presence in the area through glacial and interglacial cycles. The results should help to build a more reliable chronology of human evolution in East Asia," the researchers wrote.

Click here for the Reuters article.
Click here for a more extensive LiveScience article.

Stone Age 'Venus' Figures Found Near Moscow

Four sides of the finished "Venus" figurine, resembling other Stone Age female carvings found from Sibera to western Europe.


Russian archaeologists digging southeast of Moscow have unearthed a cache from the Stone Age, including two human figurines, an inscribed rib from a mammoth and another small carved bone.

"The finds enrich the inventory of Upper Palaeolithic art and broaden the known distribution of specific types of art objects in the East European Upper Palaeolithic," Dr. Sergey Lev of the Russian Academy of Sciences told BBC News. "In terms of the splendour and variety of its art pieces, Zaraysk is on a par with such famous sites as Kostenki and Avdeevo."

The 22,000-year-old figurines are a type of "Venus" statuette, examples of which have been found in locations ranging from the mountains of Spain as far east as Siberia. However, their cultural significance remains a point of debate among anthropologists.

A "Spectacular" Find

At Zaraysk, the two figurines were found carefully buried in storage pits. Underneath each was a round deposit of fine sand toward the south; toward the north, there was a deposit of red ochre, an iron-based pigment. Each of the figurines had been covered with the shoulder-blade of a mammoth.

One is presumed to be finished and stands at a height of nearly 7 inches the other is clearly unfinished and about half as big. Both resemble examples of such statuettes found at the Avdeevo site to the southwest, suggesting cultural links between the two.

"This collection of artefacts is spectacular in a number of ways, not only for the range of representations of both humanistic and animal but also for the range of materials that is used," says Jeffrey Brantingham, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). "These finds are really incredibly rare, and they offer a unique picture into human Upper Palaeolithic life."

Click here for the complete BBC News article.
Click here for a CNN article on the discovery.

Two Tribes Found in Sahara Stone Age Cemetery

The 200 graves unearthed earlier this year in the largest Stone Age cemetery yet discovered in the Sahara Desert have revealed bodies of two successive populations. These people occupied a southern Sahara region called Gobero in what is now the country of Niger. At the time of their Stone Age occupation, the desert was a green and fertile savannah. 

First were the Kiffians, tall hunters of wild game who also fished with harpoons carved from animal bone. The later group were the Ténérians, a smaller people who lived there, hunting, fishing and herding cattle.

Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago scientist who discovered the ancient graveyard about eight years ago while searching for dinosaur bones, says the Gobero settlements started about 10,000 years ago and lasted about 5,000 years.

In describing the 200 graves, he said some burials were accompanied by pottery and ivory ornaments. A girl was buried wearing a bracelet carved from a hippo tusk. A man was seated on the carapace of a turtle. A scene of particular poignancy was the triple burial of a woman lying on her side, facing two young children, whose arms reached out to the woman in an embrace.

Here are some photos of the archaeological work being done by Dr. Sereno and his team at the Gobero site, taken by Mike Hettwer of National Geographic.


Paul Sereno and Elena Garcea excavate adjacent burials at Gobero, the largest graveyard discovered to date in the Sahara.

Two distinct cultures lived at Gobero. The Kiffians, like the male at left, were tall. This skull was dated at 9,500 years ago. A dry interlude chased the Kiffians away. When the rains returned, the Tenerians, who were shorter and leaner, populated the area. The Tenerian male, right, died when he was about 18. The skull was dated at 5,800 years old.

In this grave, a Tenerian woman and two children, about 5 and 8 years old, were posed in an embrace. Pollen under the skeletons indicate that they were laid on top of flowers. The bones show no sign of the cause of death.

A close-up of the burial of the woman and two children. The 5-year-old is at left.

This Tenerian girl, about 11 years old, died 4,800 years ago. She was buried wearing a bracelet carved from a hippopotamus tusk on her upper arm. The Tenerians buried their dead on top of dunes near a lake.

Paul Sereno works to stabilize the skull of a woman of a nomadic culture knowns as the Tenerians, who lived in the area in Niger from 6,500 to 4,500 years ago, when rains fell and lakes dotted the Sahara.

Click here for a New York Times article about the Gobero excavation.

Click here for a New York Times article about the Sahara’s shift from savannah to desert.