Archaeology Discovery of Lismullin Henge Wednesday, Nov 12 2008

Early last year, archaeologists working on the route of a controversial highway near the village of Lismullin, Ireland, stumbled across a vast Iron Age ceremonial enclosure, or henge, surrounded by two concentric walls. The 2,000-year-old site is just over a mile from the Hill of Tara, traditional seat of the ancient Irish kings and site of St. Patrick’s conversion of the Irish to Christianity in the fifth century A.D. The discovery of the massive henge, measuring more than 260 feet in diameter, confirms the long-held belief that the area around the hill contains a rich complex of monuments.

The extraordinary amount of archaeological remains on the Hill of Tara–burial mounds, religious enclosures, stone structures, and rock art dating from the third millennium b.c. to the twelfth century A.D.–makes it Ireland’s most spiritually and archaeologically significant site. Construction of the new M3 highway, meant to ease traffic congestion around Dublin, threatens not only the Hill of Tara’s timeless quality, but also newly discovered archaeological sites in the surrounding valley.

Lismullin, seen at right in an aerial shot taken during excavations, and other sites that stand in the way of the new road are now approved for destruction. Although archaeologists and concerned Irish politicians are rallying support worldwide for the protection of the Hill of Tara, the iconic site remains in great peril. At press time, the European Commission had initiated legal action against the Irish government over the M3, charging Ireland with failing to protect its own heritage.

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History of Tools Used by Ancient Chimpanzee Wednesday, Oct 29 2008

Ancient Chimpanzee Nutcrackers • Taï forest, Ivory Coast

Archaeologists led by Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary have uncovered the first known ancient chimpanzee archaeological site, a grouping of stone hammers that were used by apes 4,300 years ago to smash open nuts. By analyzing pollen grains embedded in the stones, the team was able to identify five species of nuts the tools were used to open, four of which are not eaten by humans. The discovery shows that stone tool use is not a behavior that chimpanzees learned recently by watching the farmers who live in the area, as some skeptics believe. Mercader thinks that humans and chimpanzees may have inherited stone tool use from an ancestral species of ape that lived as long as 14 million years ago.

Although using a big rock to smash open a nut may seem like a simple task, Mercader sees the stones as clues to much more complex behavior. “There is clear evidence that chimpanzees understand what raw materials they need,” he says, pointing out that the apes prefer specific, durable types of stone, such as quartzite or granite. Knowing where to find the stones also requires planning and a good memory in a thick jungle where visibility is only about 40 feet.

The number of behaviors that are uniquely human has been steadily dwindling as scientists learn more about our primate cousins, but producing cutting tools still seems to be beyond the abilities of chimpanzees living in the wild.

“If you go to a nut-cracking site today, you would find there are flakes that come off of the hammers,” Mercader says. “What we haven’t seen is a chimp picking up any of those by-products and using them.”

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Discovery of the Early Squash Seeds from Peru Tuesday, Oct 21 2008

New research favors the idea that agriculture began in the New World shortly after it first appeared in the Old World. Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University has the squash seeds to prove it.

Found in buried house floors in the northern Andean Ñanchoc Valley, the seeds were discovered near other floral remains, including peanut shells, quinoa grains, and cotton bolls, as well as stone hoes, grinding stones, plots for planting, and small-scale canals for irrigation. With accelerated mass spectrometry, Dillehay’s team dated the remains to between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, with the 10,000-year-old cultivated squash seeds being the oldest. Similarly old evidence of other species of squash has also been found in Mexico and Ecuador.

Across the world, in the Fertile Crescent, the domestication of rye, wheat, and barley between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago helped mark the transition from nomadic lifestyles to sedentary agricultural communities that would lead to more complex societies. Plant cultivation appears to have played a similarly central role in the tropical dry forest of the Ñanchoc Valley. Over several thousand years, the people settled down, planted more, managed their water supply, and built ritual mounds–steps toward the more advanced Andean cultures to come. According to Dillehay, “Not only do people domesticate plants, but the plants in some ways domesticate people.”

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Facts Behind the Discovery of New Dates for Clovis Sites Thursday, Oct 16 2008

New radiocarbon dates kept the controversy over the peopling of the Americas simmering in 2007. An analysis of dates for the best-documented Clovis sites suggests the culture arose later and was shorter-lived than once thought, a finding that some say deals a blow to the “Clovis first” theories that maintain the big-game-hunting people were the first immigrants to the New World. Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, and Thomas Stafford of Stafford Research Laboratories in Colorado, used modern radiocarbon methods to re-date more than 20 previously known Clovis sites which had been dated with older, less precise techniques. All of the sites now seem to fall between 13,050 to 12,800 years ago. Most archaeologists still believe the Clovis people inhabited North America for at least 500 years, starting about 13,300 years ago.

Waters and Stafford contend this new 250-year window for Clovis in America is too brief for any founding population of hunter-gatherers to have dispersed across the Americas. Instead, they argue, such tightly spaced dates reflect the spread of Clovis technology and its signature fluted points through a preexisting population. But in a letter to Science, more than a dozen prominent archaeologists, including some who are open to the notion of a pre-Clovis culture in the Americas, insist there is no basis for Waters and Stafford’s theory that technology may have spread more swiftly across the continent than humans themselves. What’s really needed, they say, is more rigorous dating of all Paleolithic sites in the Americas.

“We’ll be happy to date any Clovis site anyone wants,” says Waters. “But the idea that Clovis was first just doesn’t make any sense. Unless they had a time machine, there isn’t any way for them to have spread across two continents that fast.”

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Facts And Theories of Nebo-Sarsekim Cuneiform Tablet Tuesday, Oct 14 2008

Last June, Austrian Assyriologist Michael Jursa was doing what he has done since 1991, poring over the more than 100,000 undeciphered cuneiform tablets in the British Museum. But while analyzing records from the Babylonian city of Sippar, he made a startling discovery with Biblical implications. It came in the unlikely form of a tablet noting a one-and-a-half pound gold donation to a temple made by an official, or “chief eunuch,” Nebo-Sarsekim.

“At first I was just pleased to have found a reference to the title ‘chief eunuch,’ as these officials are mentioned very rarely in the sources,” says Jursa. “Then it suddenly came to me that this text was very close chronologically to an episode narrated in Jeremiah 39 in which Nebo-Sarsekim is mentioned, and that I might actually have found the very man. So then I got quite excited and instantly went and checked (and double-checked) the exact spelling of the name in the Hebrew Bible and saw that it matched what I had found in the Babylonian text!”

The tablet is dated 595 B.C., the ninth year of Nebuchadnezzar II’s reign. The Book of Jeremiah relates that after Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem in 587 B.C., he committed the prophet Jeremiah to Nebo-Sarsekim’s care.

“It is so incredibly rare to find people appearing in the Bible, who are not kings, mentioned elsewhere,” says Jursa. “Something like this tablet, where we see a person mentioned in the Bible making an everyday payment to the temple in Babylon and quoting the exact date, is quite extraordinary.”

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Discovery of the Underwater City of Egypt Tuesday, Oct 7 2008

The scientists have found the proofs that on the place of the city Alexandria founded by Alexander Macedonian, even 700 years before that existed a large city. Before this moment it was considered that on the place of Alexandria was located a small fishermen village Rakotis. But the archaeological dig, held on the bottom of the Alexandria port, have shown that the size of the city was way bigger than the scientists have assumed.

At the moment the scientists are trying to find out the size of the discovered city. The dating by the radioactive carbon has helped to ascertain the approximate age of the ancient city: 1000 years BC.

“Such a thing often happens in science. The most interesting thing is that we weren’t searching for an ancient city”,- said Jean-Daniel Stanley from the Washington museum of natural history. Making the archaeological digs, the scientists were trying to find the answer to the question why have the Greek and Roman buildings sunk and in the end they have found the objects which refer to the earlier period.

J-D Stanley hopes that the research of Rakotis will be as much exciting as the discovery of the ruins of such ancient cities like Heraclion, Kanopus and Menotice near Alexandria in 1996.

Muhammed Abdel-Maksud, the expert on Alexandria from the Council on the antiquity of Egypt has reported that the discovery of Rakotis is only the beginning. “There are proofs that already in times of Pharaohs at this place was located a flourishing city, but for the moment it is early to talk about this. We are working on it”, – added M. Abdel-Maksud.

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New Solar System Birth Discovery Saturday, Oct 4 2008

First there was the theoretical Big Bang that got the universe going. Several billion years passed. Then a Little Bang birthed our solar system.

At least scientists have long thought that’s how it went, and now they have a computer model to back up the idea that our sun is the product of an explosive event. The new modeling finds that a supernova, or exploding star, could indeed have triggered birth of our sun in a dense cloud of gas and dust, the researchers say.

Stars are born when a cloud of material collapses. Exactly what triggers the collapse is not entirely known. One idea is that most stars, including perhaps our sun, were created in dense starbirth regions when another very massive star explodes, putting intense pressure on surrounding clouds.

“We’ve had chemical evidence from meteorites that points to a supernova triggering our solar system’s formation since the 1970s,” said theorist Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution. “But the devil has been in the details. Until this study, scientists have not been able to work out a self-consistent scenario, where collapse is triggered at the same time that newly created isotopes from the supernova are injected into the collapsing cloud.”

Short-lived radioactive isotopes — versions of elements with the same number of protons, but a different number of neutrons — found in very old meteorites decay on time scales of millions of years and turn into different (so-called daughter) elements. Finding the daughter elements in primitive meteorites implies that the parent short-lived radioisotopes must have been created only a million or so years before the meteorites themselves were formed.

“One of these parent isotopes, iron-60, can be made in significant amounts only in the potent nuclear furnaces of massive or evolved stars,” Boss today. “Iron-60 decays into nickel-60, and nickel-60 has been found in primitive meteorites. So we’ve known where and when the parent isotope was made, but not how it got here.”

Previous models by Boss and former DTM Fellow Prudence Foster showed that the isotopes could be deposited into a pre-solar cloud if a shock wave from a supernova explosion slowed to 6 to 25 miles per second and the wave and cloud had a constant temperature of -440 degrees Fahrenheit (10 K).

“Those models didn’t work if the material was heated by compression and cooled by radiation, and this conundrum has left serious doubts in the community about whether a supernova shock started these events over four billion years ago or not,” said Harri Vanhala, who found the negative result in his Ph.D. thesis work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in 1997.

In several runs on the computer, the shock front was made to strike a pre-solar cloud of material with the mass of our sun, consisting of dust, water, carbon monoxide, and molecular hydrogen, reaching temperatures as high as 1,340°F (1000 K). In the absence of cooling, the cloud could not collapse.

However, with a newly crafted theoretically plausible cooling law, the researchers found that after 100,000 years the pre-solar cloud was 1,000 times denser than before, and that heat from the shock front was rapidly lost, resulting in only a thin layer with temperatures close to 1,340 degrees F (1000 K). After 160,000 years, the cloud center had collapsed to become a million times denser, forming the protosun. The researchers found that isotopes from the shock front were mixed into the protosun in a manner consistent with their origin in a supernova.

Other studies have suggested that our sun may have been born in a very crowded environment, near massive stars, but has since drifted to its relatively lonely position in space.

“This is the first time a detailed model for a supernova triggering the formation of our solar system has been shown to work,” said Boss. “We started with a Little Bang 9 billion years after the Big Bang.”

The results are detailed in the Oct. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Boss has previously shown that all this violent activity might have contributed to the makeup of our planetary system, too.

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