Research Shows More Women Cave Artists

Painting from Pech-Merle in France showing several hand prints.

Much more Stone Age cave art seems to be the creation of women artists than previously thought, according to new research.

An American archaeologist has measured outlined handprints found on cave walls in France and Spain ~ some dating back 28,000 years ~ and has shown that the relative lengths of fingers fit the proportions of female hands better than those of males.

“I had access to lots of people of European descent who were willing to let me scan their hands as reference data,” says Dean Snow, of Pennsylvania State University.

According to the London Times:

By matching their hand profiles against photographs of paint-outlined hands from the caves of El Castillo and Gargas, in northern Spain, and Pech-Merle in the Dordogne region of France, “even a superficial examination of published photos suggested to me that there were lots of female hands there."

The handprints were created by placing the palm, or possibly the back, of the hand against the cave wall, taking a mouthful of powdered pigment ~ usually red ochre ~ and blowing it, as Michel Lorblanchet showed many years ago. Sometimes a finger appears to be missing. Such absences have been attributed to mutilation, but bending the finger back while spraying the hand with the pigment powder would give the same effect.

Snow believes that many of these hand prints are those of women. In two examples from Castillo, about 28,000 years old, “The very long ring finger on one example is a dead giveaway for male hands,” he said. “The other has a long index finger and a short little finger — thus very feminine.”

Click here for the London Times article.

Stone Mug Bears Mysterious Script

The stone mug with its inexplicable carvings.

Ten lines of script carved into a 2,000-year-old stone mug found on Mount Zion are mystifying archaeologists, who believe the inscription may provide details about ancient Jewish life.

"These were common stone mugs that appear in all Jewish households" of the time, lead excavator Shimon Gibson of the University of North Carolina told National Geographic. "But this is the first time an inscription has been found on a stone vessel."

According to National Geographic:

Working on historic Mount Zion ~ site of King David's tomb and the Last Supper ~ the archaeologists found the cup near a ritual pool this summer. The dig site is in what had been an elite residential area near the palace of King Herod the Great, who ruled Israel shortly before the birth of Jesus.

From the objects that surrounded it, Gibson determined that the cup dated from some time between 37 B.C. and A.D. 70, when the Romans nearly destroyed Jerusalem after a Jewish revolt.

Such stone mugs were popular among Jews at the time because of the culture's purity rules. According to tradition, a pottery cup that had been contaminated by contact with a forbidden food had to be broken and discarded, according to National Geographic.

Click here for the National Geographic article.

Ancient Origins Found for Red Riding Hood

Little Red Riding Hood by Fleury Francois Richard (1777-1852)

It has long been known that popular fairy tales frequently had ancient origins, but new research shows Little Red Riding Hood having roots going back at least 2,600 years.

Using research techniques more commonly associated with biologists ~ called a taxonomic tree of life ~ anthropologists are able to explore these stories' origins in various cultures through various time periods. For example, Dr. Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, has studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world. According to the London Telegraph:

Whilst the European version tells the story of a little girl who is tricked by a wolf masquerading as her grandmother, in the Chinese version a tiger replaces the wolf. In Iran, where it would be considered odd for a young girl to roam alone, the story features a little boy.

. . . He said: “Over time these folk tales have been subtly changed and have evolved just like a biological organism. Because many of them were not written down until much later, they have been misremembered or reinvented through hundreds of generations. By looking at how these folk tales have spread and changed it tells us something about human psychology and what sort of things we find memorable.

“The oldest tale we found was an Aesopic fable that dated from about the sixth century BC, so the last common ancestor of all these tales certainly predated this. We are looking at a very ancient tale that evolved over time.”

Tehrani has identified 70 variables in plot and characters between different versions of Little Red Riding Hood. The original ancestor is thought to be similar to another tale, The Wolf and the Kids, in which a wolf pretends to be a nanny goat to gain entry to a house full of young goats.

Click here for the Telegraph.com article.

Temples Display Precise Astronomical Alignment

Karnak temple hieroglyphs.

Temples in ancient Egypt were aligned so precisely with astronomical events that people could set their political, economic and religious calendars by them, according to a study of 650 temples dating back to 3000 BC.

For example, New Year coincided with the moment that the winter-solstice sun hit the central sanctuary of the Karnak temple in present-day Luxor, archaeological astronomer Juan Belmonte of the Canaries Astrophysical Institute in Tenerife, Spain, explains in an article in New Scientist magazine.

Hieroglyphs on temple walls have hinted at the use of astronomy in temple architecture, including depictions of the "stretching of the cord" ceremony in which the pharaoh marked out the alignment for the temple with string. But there had been little evidence to support the drawings.

"Somebody would have had to go to the prospective site during a solar, stellar or lunar event ~ as we did ~ to mark out the position that the temple axis should take," Belmonte says. "For the most important temples, this may well have been the pharaoh, as the temple drawings show."

Belmonte and Mosalam Shaltout of the Helwan Observatory in Cairo found that the temples are all aligned according to an astronomically significant event, such as a solstice or equinox, or the rising of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.

Lone Male Buried Amidst Moche Priestesses

Gilded mask found beside the tomb of the elite male.

Archaeologists were surprised recently to unearth the remains of a male buried among a bevy of powerful priestesses in a Peruvian pre-Inca Moche tomb. The Moche people were a fragmented society of farmers who occupied the arid coasts of Peru from about 100 to 1000 AD.

According to National Geographic:

Surrounded by early "smoke machines" as well as human and llama bones, the body was among several buried inside a unique double-chambered tomb that dates back to A.D. 850, said archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, of the Catholic University of Peru in Lima.

The tomb contained a wooden coffin decorated with a copper lattice and a gilded mask, sitting on a raised platform. Inside the coffin "is where we find the main object of the burial, and that fellow is a male," Castillo said.

"After 18 years of excavation in San José de Moro, we were expecting another female," he added. "But this tends to happen [in archaeology]—expect the unexpected."

The site has so far yielded seven royal priestess burials, an indication of the powerful role of women in Moche society, Castillo said.

Click here for the National Geographic article and more photos.

Early Stone Figures May Have Been Toys

Three of the 2,000 figures unearthed so far in Catalhoyuk.

Stone Age statues carved from stone and clay 9,000 years ago could have been the world's first educational toys. About 2,000 of them have been unearthed at Catalhoyuk in Turkey ~ the world's oldest known town ~ some as recently as last week.

Made by Neolithic farmers, they depict tiny cattle, sheep and people. According to the London Daily Mail:

In the 1960s, some researchers claimed the more rotund figures were of a mysterious large breasted and big bellied "mother goddess,” prompting a feminist tourism industry that thrives today.

But modern day experts disagree.

They say the "mother goddess" figures ~ which were buried among the rubbish of the Stone Age town ~ are unlikely to be have been religious icons. Many of the figures thought to have been women in the 1960s, are just as likely to be men.

Archaeologist Lynn Meskell of Stanford University said: "The majority are cattle or sheep and goats. They could be representatives of animals they were dealing with ~ and they could have been teaching aides.
"All were found in the trash - and they were not in niches or platforms or placed in burials."

Of the 2,000 figurines dug up at the site, less than five per cent are female, she told the British science Festival in Surrey University, Guildford. "These are things that were made and used on a daily basis. People carried them around and discarded them."

Catalhoyuk is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. Established around 7,000 BC, it was home to 5,000 people living in mud brick and plaster houses.

Click here for the Daily Mail article.

Oldest Manmade Fibers Found in Cave

A team of archaeologists and paleobiologists has discovered flax fibers that are more than 34,000 years old, making them the oldest fibers known to have been used by humans. They were found during excavation of a cave in the Republic of Georgia.

The flax could have been used to make linen and thread, researchers say. The cloth and thread would then have been used to fashion garments for warmth, sew leather pieces, make cloths, or tie together packs that might have aided the mobility of our ancient ancestors from one camp to another.

"This was a critical invention for early humans. They might have used this fiber to create parts of clothing, ropes, or baskets ~ for items that were mainly used for domestic activities," says Ofer Bar-Yosef, one of the team leaders. "We know that this is wild flax that grew in the vicinity of the cave and was exploited intensively or extensively by modern humans."

Some of the fibers were twisted, indicating they were used to make ropes or strings. Others had been dyed.

Today, these fibers are not visible to the eye, because the garments and items sewed together with the flax have long ago disintegrated. They were discovered by microscopic examination of samples of clay retrieved from different layers of the cave.

Click here for the Harvard University press release.

Early Depiction of Menorah is Discovered

The seven-branched menorah is carved at the base of this stone.

Israeli archaeologists have uncovered one of the earliest depictions of a menorah ~ the seven-branched candelabra that has come to symbolize Judaism ~ in a 2,000-year-old synagogue recently discovered by the Sea of Galilee.

The synagogue dates to the period of the second Jewish temple in Jerusalem, where the actual menorah was kept. A small number of depictions of the menorah have surfaced from the same period, according to the Associated Press, but this one was unique because it was inside a synagogue and far from Jerusalem, illustrating the link between Jews around Jerusalem and in the Galilee to the north.

The temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by Roman legions in 70 A.D. Most other depictions of the menorah were made only after the temple's destruction, and if this finding is indeed earlier it could be closer to the original, said Aren Maeir, an archaeology professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

"If you have a depiction of the menorah from the time of the temple, chances are it is more accurate and portrays the actual object than portrayals from after the destruction of the temple, when it was not existent," he said.

The menorah, depicted atop a pedestal with a triangular base, is carved on a stone which was placed in the synagogue's central hall.

Click here for the Associated Press article.

Easter Island Hats are Volcanic Rock

The mysterious volcanic hats atop the statues.

Researchers believe they’ve figured out how the remote Easter Islanders were able to place huge rock “hats” on their distinctive statues, but they still don’t know why.

The hats were carved from volcanic rock. "We know the hats were rolled along the road made from a cement of compressed red scoria dust," archaeologist Colin Richards tells the BBC. Each hat weighs several tons, but the reason for the hats remains unknown.

"These hats run all the way down the side of the volcano into the valley,” he says. "We can see they were carefully placed. The closer you get to the volcano, the greater the number.”

Easter Island lies 2,500 miles off the coast of Chile and is one of the world’s most remote places inhabited by people. "The Polynesians saw the landscape as a living thing, and after they carved the rock the spirits entered the statues," Richards adds.

The research team is from the University of Manchester and University College London, the first English archaeologists to work on Easter Island since 1914.

Click here for the BBC article.

Monks Trained Eyes for Super-Fine Drawing

The Chi-Rho page from the Book of Kells, circa 800 AD.

A Cornell paleontologist claims to have solved the mystery of how monks in the 7th and 8th centuries could illustrate manuscripts with details comparable to the finest engravings on a modern dollar bill ~ centuries before magnifying lenses were invented.

Some of the geometric designs are so precise that in some places they contain lines less than half a millimeter apart and nearly perfectly reproduced in repeating patterns ~ leading a later scholar to call them "works not of men, but of angels."

According to Physorg.com:

The answer, says Cornell paleontologist John Cisne, may be in the eyes of the creators. The Celtic monks evidently trained their eyes to cross above the plane of the manuscript so they could visually superimpose side-by-side elements of a replicated pattern, and thereby, create 3-D images that magnified differences between the patterns up to 30 times.

The monks could then refine any disparities by minimizing the apparent vertical depth of the images ~ ultimately replicating the design element to submillimeter precision. Cisne proposed the idea in the July 17 issue of the journal Perception.

The paper suggests that the technique, called free-fusion stereocomparison, which takes advantage of the brain's ability to perceive depth by integrating the slightly different views from each eye, was known nearly a thousand years before it was articulated by stereoscope inventor Sir George Wheatstone in the 19th century.

Cisne analyzed the most detailed illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, created between 670 and 800 AD ~ including the circa 800 Book of Kells ~ where some have as many as 30 lines per centimeter.

Click here for the complete Physorg.com article.

Click on the photo to see much more detail.

Earliest 'Zero' Was Only a Placeholder

Wall of ancient Egyptian numerals at Karnak.

The mathematical concept of zero ~ or at least a “placeholder” zero in the form of two brackets ~ may date back 5,000 years to ancient Sumaria, when its purpose was to enable people to tell 1 from 10 or 100.

But zero actually began functioning as a numerical value in fifth century India, according to Robert Kaplan in his 2000 book The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. "It isn't until then, and not even fully then, that zero gets full citizenship in the republic of numbers," Kaplan tells Scientific American, adding that some cultures were slow to accept the idea of zero, which for many carried darkly magical connotations.

According to Scientific American, the second appearance of zero occurred independently in the New World, in Mayan culture, likely in the first few centuries A.D. "That, I suppose, is the most striking example of the zero being devised wholly from scratch," Kaplan says.

The number zero as we know it arrived in the West circa 1200, most famously delivered by Italian mathematician Fibonacci (aka Leonardo of Pisa), who brought it, along with the rest of the Arabic numerals, back from his travels to north Africa. But the history of zero, both as a concept and a number, stretches far deeper into history—so deep, in fact, that its provenance is difficult to nail down.

Click here for the complete Scientific American article.

Inset photo shows ancient Babylonian zero as two small wedges.

DNA May Help Confirm Mayan Battle

Photo taken last week of ruins of a Mayan temple at the El Mirador archaeological site in Guatemala, near the Mexican border. Reuters reports that researchers are performing DNA tests of hundreds of spear tips, arrowheads and bone fragments found here to learn more about a dramatic battle believed to have occurred between a Mayan royal family and invaders from hundreds of miles away. El Mirador until recently has been buried under thick jungle vegetation.