A trail of footprints probably left by Australopithecus afarensis individuals some 3.5 million years ago, at Laetoli, northern Tanzania [1110x1600]

Ax from Viking era, before and after conservation 10th–11th century [566x674]

Neolithic tools discovered in Shanxi

A number of stone tools dating back to the Neolithic Age have been discovered in a village in north China’s Shanxi Province, local archaeological authorities said Tuesday.

Zhang Hongbo, a villager of Linghui Village in Yuanqu County, said some villagers found a heap of stoneware with strange shapes when constructing a road several days ago.

Since the village has a long history, villagers searched on the Internet and found the stoneware was quite similar to ancient stone implements. They later sent the stoneware to the county museum.

“Among the dozens of stoneware, there are stone axes, hammers, chisels and knives,” said Yao Haihe, with the natural museum of Yuanqu County. Read more.

Archaeologists Discover New Mass Grave From Notorious Shipwreck

On an island off the coast of Western Australia, archaeologists have found a mass grave associated with a shipwreck so nightmarishly gruesome, it makes Lord of the Flies look tame.

The grave contains remains of five passengers on the Batavia, a flagship of the Dutch East India Company that sank in 1629 on its maiden voyage from the Netherlands to Java. The bodies, interred neatly in a row and showing no signs of violence, likely died soon after the wreck of dehydration—before madness set in among some of the survivors.

Notoriously, many of the Batavia’s other passengers were murdered by mutineers after the ship ran aground on Morning Reef near Beacon Island. Signs of this brutality abound in other gravesites excavated by archaeologists. One such skeleton belongs to a man missing the top of his skull from a sword blow. His body was unceremoniously dragged into its final resting place. Read more.

These 12,000-Year-Old Fish Hooks Are the Oldest to Ever Be Discovered in a Grave

Prehistoric people who lived on Indonesia’s rugged and remote Alor Island held fishing in such high importance that even the dead were supplied with equipment for snagging a fresh catch. While digging at an archaeological site on the island’s south coast in 2014, scientists found a group of ancient fish hooks, which were buried with an adult human around 12,000 years ago. They’re the oldest fishhooks to ever be discovered in a grave, according to a new report published in the journal Antiquity.

Archaeologists from Australian National University found the partial skeleton while excavating an early rock shelter on Alor’s west coast. The bones—which appeared to belong to a female—were interred with five circular one-piece fish hooks made from sea snail shell. Also found was a perforated bivalve shell, buried beneath the skeleton’s chin. Read more.

Venezuelan rock art mapped in unprecedented detail

Rock engravings located in Western Venezuela - including some of the largest recorded anywhere in the world - have been mapped in unprecedented detail by UCL researchers.

The engravings (petroglyphs), some of which are thought to be up to 2,000 years old, include depictions of animals, humans and cultural rituals. One panel is 304m² containing at least 93 individual engravings, the largest of which measure several metres across. Another engraving of a horned snake measures more than 30 metres in length.

All the rock art surveyed is located in the Atures Rapids (Raudales de Atures) area of Amazonas state in Venezuela, historically reported as the home of the native Adoles by Jesuit priests. Eight groups of engraved rock art were recorded on five islands within the Rapids. Read more.

5,500-Year-Old Wooden Clubs Were Deadly Weapons

How do you solve a Stone Age murder mystery? First, identify the weapon.

Archaeologists in the United Kingdom are turning to forensic methods to understand violence in the Neolithic period.

In experiments described in the journal Antiquity yesterday (Dec. 7), researchers used a replica of a 5,500-year-old wooden club to see what kind of damage they could inflict on a model of a human head. They found that such clubs were indeed lethal weapons.

Archaeologists have found ample evidence of violence in Western and Central Europe during the Neolithic period, through burials of people who had skull fractures—some healed, some were fatal —from an intentional blow to the head. But it was often unclear where these injuries came from. 

“No one was trying to identify why there was blunt-force trauma in the period,” said study leader Meaghan Dyer, a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh. Read more.

On an uninhabited Caribbean island, archaeologists were amazed to discover a series of cave drawings pre-dating European contact. This was a surprise because the drawings are so well-preserved. Over 70 winding caves on the island of Mona, between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, contain art. Some are scratches on the rock. Others are more sophisticated, with paint made from sophisticated organic materials such as bat droppings, plant gums, minerals like iron, and materials from native trees like turpentine trees. The islanders were putting a lot of work into their art, deep where the light of day could not illuminate their creations.

The researchers noted that the indigenous people of Mona Island believed that the sun and moon emerged from beneath the ground. So exploring deep into the expansive network of subterranean caves, and making art there, is interpreted by today’s archaeologists as a highly spiritual act. 

Underwater search planned for clues to early Islamic city of Ayla

AMMAN — For the first time ever, archaeologists will carry out an underwater excavation in July in the Gulf of Aqaba, hoping to discover the sunken ruins of the early Islamic city of Ayla, a marine conservationist said on Thursday.

The early Islamic city of Ayla is the Red Sea’s oldest port and a major archaeological site in Islamic history, according to Ihab Eid, the executive director of the Royal Marine Conservation Society of Jordan (JREDS).

“Based on old images and studies, we believe that part of the the Islamic city of Ayla is now under water… images show that there might be a wall below the water in the Gulf of Aqaba,” Eid told The Jordan Times. Read more.

Experts meet in Egypt over moving King Tut artifacts

Archaeologists and conservation experts met in Cairo on Sunday to discuss the safe transportation of King Tutankhamun’s throne, chests and bed from the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo to a new one being built on the other side of the Egyptian capital.

The meeting, organized by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, brought together experts from Egypt, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and Japan.

Tareq Tawfiq, a senior ministry official in charge of the new museum, told The Associated Press that the meeting’s primary objective was to reach a “global consensus” on how to safely transport and display King Tut’s items in the new museum being built close to the famed Giza Pyramids. Read more.

Okay, sure.

Archaeogeneticist pinpoints Indian population origins using today's populace

IN addition to its vast patchwork of languages, cultures and religions, the Indian Subcontinent also harbours huge genetic diversity. Where did its peoples originate? This is an area of huge controversy among scholars and scientists. A University of Huddersfield PhD student is lead author of an article that tries to answer the question using genetic evidence.

A problem confronting archaeogenetic research into the origins of Indian populations is that there is a dearth of sources, such as preserved skeletal remains that can provide ancient DNA samples. Marina Silva and her co-authors have instead focused on people alive in the Subcontinent today.

They show that some genetic lineages in South Asia are very ancient. The earliest populations were hunter-gatherers who arrived from Africa, where modern humans arose, more than 50,000 years ago. But further waves of settlement came from the direction of Iran, after the last Ice Age ended 10-20,000 years ago, and with the spread of early farming. Read more.

Homo naledi's surprisingly young age opens up more questions on where we come from

Scientists today announced that the Rising Star Cave system has revealed yet more important discoveries, only a year and a half after it was announced that the richest fossil hominin site in Africa had been discovered, and that it contained a new hominin species named Homo naledi by the scientists who described it.

The age of the original Homo naledi remains from the Dinaledi Chamber has been revealed to be startlingly young in age. Homo naledi, which was first announced in September 2015, was alive sometime between 335 and 236 thousand years ago. This places this population of primitive small-brained hominins at a time and place that it is likely they lived alongside Homo sapiens. This is the first time that it has been demonstrated that another species of hominin survived alongside the first humans in Africa. Read more.

Ancient Egyptian limestone relief recovered from Paris

Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities officially received today an ancient Egyptian limestone relief, which has been recovered from France, during a ceremony held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs headquarters in Cairo.

Shaaban Abdel-Gawad, the general supervisor of the ministry’s Antiquities Repatriation Department, says that the relief was on display at a Paris auction house. The ministry took all the necessary procedures to stop the sale of the relief and have it withdrawn from the auction.

Abdel-Gawad said that the relief was stolen from a temple at Saqqara necropolis during the 1900s and smuggled out of the country.

The relief, which is dated to the 30th Dynasty during the reign of King Nakhtenbo II, is about 44X50 cm in size and weighs about 80kg. Read more.

Pre-Inca pieces found in Cajamarca

The Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva, who also discovered the Royal Tombs of Sipan, confirmed that pre-inca gold pieces were found in Cajamarca. The valuable pieces were in Cutervo and they are going to be taken to Lima to be analyzed and recognized by the Ministry of Culture.

Alva says to RPP that the pieces found are original, very unique and most importantly they are very well preserved. Additionally, he points out that most of the collection is formed by miniature pieces. This fact, makes the archaeologist believe that the area was likely to be the burial of a noble child.

The discovery in Cajamarca was carried out by a group of tourists who traveled to the Ilucan hill during Easter break. They handed 100 metal objects to the Municipality of Cutervo. Read more.

Buried Secrets: 7,000 Bodies Lie Beneath Former 'Insane Hospital'

An estimated 7,000 bodies are thought to be buried under The University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC), according to radar scans of the campus grounds.

Construction workers first discovered some of the unidentified human remains under the university in November 2012 while preparing to build a new road on the campus. University officials described the discovery of the 66 corpses in a statement published online in April 2013, noting that the workers had uncovered wooden coffins containing human remains dating to the 19th and 20th centuries. The remains were thought to be those of former patients at the Mississippi State Insane Hospital, an asylum for people with mental illnesses, which operated on that site from 1855 to 1935, according to the statement.

Then, in 2014, radar scans of land to the west of the UMMC School of Dentistry yielded another grim surprise: 2,000 more bodies, The Clarion-Ledger reported in March of that year. And more recent scans now place the current estimate of human bodies under UMMC at around 7,000 people, distributed across 20 acres of grounds, UMMC officials announced yesterday (May 9) in a statement. Read more.

Burial chamber of recently unearthed 13th Dynasty Pyramid in Dahshur uncovered

The Egyptian archaeological mission from the Ministry of Antiquities uncovered the burial chamber of a 13th Dynasty Pyramid discovered last month at Dahshur archaeological site.

Adel Okasha, head of the mission and the general director of the Dahshur site, explained that after removing the stones that covered the burial chamber, the mission discovered a wooden box engraved with three lines of hieroglyphics.

These lines are rituals to protect the deceased and the name of its owner.

Sherif Abdel Moneim, assistant to the minister of antiquities, revealed that the box housed the four canopic jars of the deceased with their name engraved, that of the daughter of the 13th Dynasty King Emnikamaw, whose pyramid is located 600 metres away. Read more.