All posts by Archaeology World Team

Some of the first humans in the Americas came from China, study finds

Some of the first humans in the Americas came from China, study finds

Some of the first humans in the Americas came from China, study finds
During the second migration, the same lineage of people settled in Japan, which could help explain similarities in prehistoric arrowheads and spears found in the Americas (pictured), China and Japan.

Some of the first humans to arrive in the Americas included people from what is now China, who arrived in two distinct migrations during and after the last ice age, a new genetics study has found.

“Our findings indicate that besides the previously indicated ancestral sources of Native Americans in Siberia, northern coastal China also served as a genetic reservoir contributing to the gene pool,” said Yu-Chun Li, one of the report authors.

Li added that during the second migration, the same lineage of people settled in Japan, which could help explain similarities in prehistoric arrowheads and spears found in the Americas, China, and Japan.

It was once believed that ancient Siberians, who crossed over a land bridge that existed in the Bering Strait linking modern Russia and Alaska, were the sole ancestors of Native Americans.

More recent research, from the late 2000s onwards, has signaled that more diverse sources from Asia could be connected to an ancient lineage responsible for founding populations across the Americas, including in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and California.

Known as D4h, this lineage is found in mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from mothers and is used to trace maternal ancestry.

The team from the Kunming Institute of Zoology embarked on a 10-year hunt for D4h, combing through 100,000 modern and 15,000 ancient DNA samples across Eurasia, eventually landing on 216 contemporary and 39 ancient individuals who came from the ancient lineage.

By analyzing the mutations that had accrued over time, looking at the samples’ geographic locations, and using carbon dating, they were able to reconstruct the D4h’s origins and expansion history.

The results revealed two migration events. The first was between 19,500 and 26,000 years ago during the Last Glacial Maximum, when ice sheet coverage was at its greatest and climate conditions in northern China were probably inhospitable.

The second occurred during the melting period, between 19,000 and 11,500 years ago. Increasing human populations during this period might have triggered migrations.

It was during this second migration that the scientists found a surprising genetic link between Native Americans and Japanese people, particularly the indigenous Ainu.

In the melting period, a subgroup branched out from northern coastal China to Japan, contributing to the Japanese people, the study said, a finding that chimes with archeological similarities between ancient people in the Americas, China, and Japan.

Li said a strength of the study was the number of samples they discovered, and complementary evidence from Y chromosomal DNA showing that male ancestors of Native Americans lived in northern China at the same time as female ancestors made researchers confident of their findings.

“However, we don’t know in which specific place in northern coastal China this expansion occurred and what specific events promoted these migrations,” he said.

“More evidence, especially ancient genomes, is needed to answer these questions.”

Excavations Continue in Middle Egypt’s Meir Necropolis

Excavations Continue in Middle Egypt’s Meir Necropolis

An Egyptian archaeological mission has uncovered a collection of structure relics from the Byzantine and Late Period in Meir Necropolis in the Assiut governorate.

The mission discovered the large remains of structures on two levels, with the upper level consisting of monks’ cells with a court and a number of chambers and the lower level consisting of a collection of burials.

​“The discovery highlights the significance of Meir during the Old and Middle Kingdoms as well as the Late Period,” said Mostafa Waziry, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, referring to a Coptic text engraved on one of the walls of the structural remains.

The text, written in black ink, consists of eight lines of prayers to God. Above it, three clay shelves that may have been used to hold the monks’ equipment at the time or manuscripts.

The burials include a collection of coffins and human skeletons in poor condition, among them the funerary objects of an unidentified lady.

These objects consist of remains of a decorated coffin in poor condition, a funerary mask and collar, clay pots of different shapes and sizes, along with a group of blue and black faience beads and two copper mirrors, said Adel Okasha, head of the Central Archaeological Department for Antiquities in Middle Egypt.

The Meir site is located about 50 kilometres northwest of the Upper Egyptian city of Assiut. Provincial rulers, or nomarchs, were buried in tombs in the hillside.

Several of the tombs have been cleared and opened to visitors.

The necropolis has many important rock-cut tombs dating to the sixth and seventh dynasties, painted with coloured scenes depicting daily life including industries and sports with a distinct local style.

What’s the oldest known case of cancer in humans?

What’s the oldest known case of cancer in humans?

What's the oldest known case of cancer in humans?
The first cancer case on record occurred 1.7 million years ago and was found in an early human relative’s toe bone.

Cancer may seem like a modern disease, but it has affected humans for eons. Scientists have discovered numerous prehistoric human remains indicating the presence of cancer. So, what’s the earliest case of cancer on record? And what’s the first time that humans wrote about it in medical texts?

The earliest evidence of human cancer comes from an early human relative who lived around 1.7 million years ago. This individual, likely of the species Paranthropus robustus or Homo ergaster, lived with a malignant tumor in their left toe bone.

Archaeologists discovered the skeletal remains inside Swartkrans cave, a limestone deposit in South Africa that’s often called the Cradle of Humankind for being home to the largest concentration of human relative remains in the world. 

When researchers compared computed tomography (CT) scans of the toe bone fossil with images of modern-day cases of osteosarcoma, an aggressive form of cancer that begins in the cells that form bones, they immediately recognized the distinctive cauliflower-like appearance of an osteosarcoma, according to a 2016 study about the case published in the South African Journal of Science.

Nowadays, osteosarcoma is one of the most common bone cancers in humans and can occur at any age, although it is most frequently seen in children, teenagers and young adults who are still growing, according to the American Cancer Society. However, while this prehistoric individual’s age is unknown, it appears that they were an adult, the researchers said. 

An even older benign tumor was found in a 1.9 million-year-old human relative known as Australopithecus sediba found in South Africa, according to a separate 2016 study in the South African Journal of Science.

It’s not surprising that the oldest known cancer case was in a bone, since organs, skin and other soft tissues are more prone to decay than bones are. 

“Bone is one of the few tissues that can survive in the fossil record,” Bruce Rothschild, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

However, even if cancer is present in a fossil, it often isn’t visible to the naked eye and takes further examination to find — which was the case for the toe bone.

“About one-third of cancers will show themselves,” Rothschild said. “But you would need to perform an X-ray to determine if something was hidden inside the bone. Most pathologists [today] look at an X-ray before coming up with a diagnosis of a tumor when it involves the bone.”

First written record of cancer

The Edwin Smith Papyrus from ancient Egypt is the first known text that mentions cancer.

Although the 1.7-million-year-old toe bone is the earliest known case of cancer in a hominin, a group that includes modern humans, the first written record of cancer doesn’t show up until much, much later.

In 3000 B.C. Imhotep — an ancient Egyptian mathematician, physician and architect — wrote what came to be known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus, a textbook about bodily trauma and surgical procedures. In the text, he detailed 48 medical cases, including several case studies on breast cancer.

The text was written in hieratic, an ancient Egyptian writing system, and was later translated into a two-volume English text by American archaeologist James Henry Breasted. In it, Imhotep described characteristics of different types of tumors, including “oily tumors” and “solid tumors.” He also included descriptions of a breast tumor  — describing it as “bulging mass in the breast” that is cool, hard and as dense as an “unripe hemat fruit” that spreads under the skin, according to the book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of  Cancer” (Scribner, 2010). 

While Imhotep gives a number of treatments for the other medical conditions in the text, under “therapy” for the breast tumor he wrote, “There is none.” However, he did note the best practices for binding other types of  tumors, which involved creating an ointment made of grease, honey and lint, according to The Cancer Letter, which published an excerpt of the historical text. 

The papyrus not only offers a glimpse of how surgical medicine was practiced thousands of years ago by ancient Egyptians, arguably some of the world’s first surgeons, but also provides some of the earliest evidence of cancer ever recorded, according to a 2016 study published in the journal Cancer. 

It’s unclear how these cases of prehistoric cancer developed. Just like the humans who came before us, we’re still trying to figure out what causes many cancers and the best ways to treat them.

Archaeologists 3D map Red Lily Lagoon, the hidden Northern Territory landscape where first Australians lived more than 60,000 years ago

Archaeologists 3D map Red Lily Lagoon, the hidden Northern Territory landscape where first Australians lived more than 60,000 years ago

Archaeologists 3D map Red Lily Lagoon, the hidden Northern Territory landscape where first Australians lived more than 60,000 years ago

Archaeologists map Red Lily Lagoon, a hidden landscape in the Northern Territory where the first Australians lived more than 60,000 years ago.

Red Lily Lagoon in West Arnhem Land sits more than 40 kilometers inland, near a culturally significant rock art site, Madjedbebe. It is an important archaeological landscape with significant implications for understanding the First Australians.

Scientists at Flinders University have used sub-surface imaging and aerial surveys to see through floodplains in the Red Lily Lagoon area of West Arnhem Land in Northern Australia.

These ground-breaking methods showed how this important landscape in the Northern Territory was altered as sea levels rose about 8,000 years ago.

The researchers used a 3D model to visualize that landscape, with the findings, published in the scientific journal Plos One.

“These results show huge hidden sandstone escarpments — similar to the dramatic sandstone escarpments we see in Arnhem Land and Kakadu today — that for the majority of human occupation were actually exposed and probably habited by people,” lead researcher Jarrad Kowlessar said.

He said the underground mapping and visualization technique could be used by archaeologists to identify underground sites where First Australians may have lived thousands of years ago, and potentially left behind rock art or tools.

The findings also provide a new perspective on the region’s rock art, which is internationally recognized for its significance and distinct style.

The researchers can see how the transformation of Red Lily Lagoon had led to the growth of mangroves that have supported animal and marine life in a region where ancient Indigenous rock art is located by examining how sediments now buried beneath the flood plains changed as sea levels rose.

This transformation has, in turn, fostered an environment that has inspired the subjects and animals in ancient rock art.

In their findings published, the researchers say environmental changes at the lagoon are reflected in the rock art because fish, crocodiles, and birds were featured in the art when the floodplain transformed to support freshwater habitats for new species.

The study’s co-author, Associate Professor Ian Moffat, said the technique was a “game changer” for archaeological research.

“Instead of focusing on the archaeological sites — which is the way we normally think about archaeology — we’ve really stepped out and tried to understand the landscape in a much more holistic way,” he said.

Professor Paul Tacon, an archaeologist at Griffith University who was not involved in the research, said the technique was a “promising” use of the 3D modeling technology, but more research was needed.

Professor Paul Tacon also warned that if rock art had been painted on the sandstone cliffs, it would likely have been eroded by now.

Dr. Kowlessar, however, thinks that even if rock art had been lost to time, the method could still be used to locate locations where people may have left behind tools, furthering researchers’ understanding of Australia’s First Peoples.

A 7,000-year-old tomb in Oman holds dozens of prehistoric skeletons

A 7,000-year-old tomb in Oman holds dozens of prehistoric skeletons

A 7,000-year-old tomb in Oman holds dozens of prehistoric skeletons
The ancient tomb near Nafūn in Oman’s central Al Wusta province has been dated by archaeologists to between 6,600 and 7,000 years old. Nothing like it has been found in the region.

Archaeologists have found the remains of dozens of people who were buried up to 7,000 years ago in a stone tomb in Oman, on the Arabian Peninsula. 

The tomb, near Nafūn in the country’s central Al Wusta province, is among the oldest human-made structures ever found in Oman. The burial area is next to the coast, but it is otherwise a stony desert.

“No Bronze Age or older graves are known in this region,” Alžběta Danielisová, an archaeologist at the Czech Republic’s Institute of Archaeology in Prague, told Live Science. “This one is completely unique.”

The latest excavations are part of a third year of archaeological investigations in Oman led by the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Danielisová is leading the excavations at the tomb for the institute, which is part of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS). The tomb itself was discovered about 10 years ago in satellite photographs, and archaeologists think it dates to between 5000 B.C. and 4600 B.C. 

Ancient tomb

The tomb is beneath an earthen mound and built with walls of thin stone slabs, or ashlars. It was covered by a roof, also made of ashlars, that has now partially collapsed.
Skulls and bones from more than twenty bodies have been found in the tomb; archaeologists think they were deposited there at different times, after the bodies were left elsewhere to decompose.
Czech-led scientists are also investigating ancient sites in the Rub’ al Khali desert in Dhofar province, in the South of Oman.

A report on the project said the tomb’s walls were made with rows of thin stone slabs, called ashlars, with two circular burial chambers inside divided into individual compartments. The entire tomb was covered with an ashlar roof, but it has partially collapsed, probably because of the annual monsoon rains. 

Several “bone clusters” were found in the burial chambers, indicating that the dead had been left to decompose before being deposited in the tomb; their skulls were placed near the outside wall, with their long bones pointed toward the center of the chamber. 

Similar remains were found in a smaller tomb next to the main tomb; archaeologists think it was built slightly later. Danielisová said there is evidence that the dead there were buried at different times, and three graves of people from the Samad culture, who lived thousands of years later, were found nearby. 

The next stage will be to carry out anthropological and biochemical assessments of the human remains — such as isotope analysis, a look at the differing neutrons in the nuclei of various key elements — to learn more about the diets, mobility and demographics of the people who were buried in the tomb, she said. 

The team also hopes to find a nearby ancient settlement where the people may have lived.

Prehistoric Oman

The archaeologists are also investigating inscriptions found on rock faces near the tomb, but which were made many thousands of years later.
The investigations in southern Oman include landscape features like dry riverbeds and fossilized dunes that can tell them more about how the region’s climate has changed over millennia.
The archaeologists in southern Oman have also unearthed this stone hand-ax which may date from the first migrations of early humans out of Africa between 300,000 and 1.3 million years ago.

The work on the tomb is one of several archaeological projects in Oman being led by scientists from the Czech Republic. 

According to a statement from the CAS, these projects include an expedition in southern Oman’s Dhofar province that has found a stone hand ax that may date back to the first early human migrations out of Africa, between 300,000 and 1.3 million years ago.

The scientists are using dating techniques provided by the Nuclear Physics Institute of the CAS, the southern expedition leader Roman Garba, an archaeologist and physicist with the CAS, said in the statement. The same dating techniques will also be used to learn more about the roughly 2,000-year-old rows of stone “triliths” that have been found throughout Oman since the 19th century. 

Although the triliths are only a few feet (less than 1 meter) tall and were built during the Iron Age, some recent news reports compared them to England’s Stonehenge.

The archaeologists are also investigating rock inscriptions near the tomb, although they were made thousands of years later, Danielisová said. Some of the symbols seem to be pictures, but others appear to be words and names. “We are still fuzzy about that,” she said.

“It’s really interesting stuff,” Melissa Kennedy, an archaeologist at The University of Western Australia, told Live Science. “It all goes to building up a better picture of what was happening in the Neolithic across the Arabian Peninsula.” 

Kennedy was not involved in the latest expeditions in Oman, but she has researched “mustatils” — vast stone desert monuments of about the same age — in neighboring Saudi Arabia. Her team has also found similar tombs where several people were buried at this time, and both finds suggest that people were marking their territory from very early on. 

“These kinds of tombs give us a great insight into family relationships and how they viewed death and perhaps life after death,” she said.

An 8-year-old girl unearths Stone Age dagger at her school in Norway

An 8-year-old girl unearths Stone Age dagger at her school in Norway

An 8-year-old girl unearths Stone Age dagger at her school in Norway
Elise, an 8-year-old student, found the Neolithic dagger while playing near her school in Norway.

While playing outside her school in Norway, an 8-year-old girl found an unexpected treasure — not a lost ball or a discarded jump rope, but a flint dagger crafted by Stone Age people 3,700 years ago.

The student, identified only as Elise in a statement translated from Norwegian, discovered the gray-brown dagger when she was playing in a rocky area by her school in Vestland County. “I was going to pick up a piece of glass, and then the stone was there,” she said in the statement. 

Elise showed the stone to her teacher, Karen Drange, who saw that the stone looked ancient. Drange contacted Vestland county council, and archaeologists from the county examined the artifact.

The nearly 5-inch-long (12 centimeters) tool is a rare find, Louise Bjerre Petersen, an archaeologist with Vestland county municipality, said in the translated statement. Flint, a hard sedimentary rock, does not naturally occur in Norway, so the dagger may have come from across the North Sea in Denmark, according to the statement.

The nearly 5-inch-long (12 centimeters) flint dagger was likely crafted during the Neolithic period about 3,700 years ago.

This type of dagger is often found with sacrificial finds, the archaeologists added. To further investigate the area, the Vestland County Council and Vestland County’s University Museum in Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, teamed up to explore the school’s grounds. But they didn’t find any other evidence dating back to the Stone Age, they said in the statement. 

Based on its style, the dagger likely dates to the New Stone Age, or the Neolithic, a time when prehistoric humans shaped stone tools and began to rely on domesticated plants and animals, build permanent villages and develop crafts, such as pottery.

In Norway, the Stone Age, which includes the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic, lasted from 10000 B.C. to 1800 B.C., with a number of hunter-gatherers permanently settling down to farm around 2400 B.C., according to Talk Norway, an educational website on Norway’s history and cultural heritage.

The dagger will be cataloged and used in research at the University Museum. The artifact isn’t the only Stone Age discovery to recently get attention in Norway.

This past winter, the full-body reconstruction of a Stone Age teenager who lived 8,300 years ago went on display at the Hå Gamle Prestegard museum in southern Norway.

The teen boy was likely part of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer group, but the details surrounding his death are a mystery; it appears he died alone leaning against a cave wall, as his remains had no indications of a burial.

Modern humans migrated into Europe in 3 waves, ‘ambitious and provocative’ new study suggests

Modern humans migrated into Europe in 3 waves, ‘ambitious and provocative’ new study suggests

Modern humans migrated into Europe in 3 waves, 'ambitious and provocative' new study suggests
Evidence of the earliest migration of sapiens in all Europe is found at Grotte Mandrin (the rock at the center of the picture) in Mediterranean France.

It was long thought that modern humans first ventured into Europe about 42,000 years ago, but newly analyzed tools from the Stone Age have upended this idea. Now, evidence suggests that modern humans trekked into Europe in three waves between 54,000 and 42,000 years ago, a new study finds.

Our species, Homo sapiens, arose in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and anatomically modern humans emerged at least 195,000 years ago.

Evidence for the first waves of modern humans outside Africa dates back at least 194,000 years to Israel, and possibly 210,000 years to Greece.

For years, the oldest confirmed signs of modern humans in Europe were teeth about 42,000 years old that archaeologists had unearthed in Italy and Bulgaria. These ancient groups were likely Protoaurignacians — the earliest members of the Aurignacians, the first known hunter-gatherer culture in Europe.

However, a 2022 study revealed that a tooth found in the site of Grotte Mandrin in southern France’s Rhône Valley suggested that modern humans lived there about 54,000 years ago, a 2022 study found. This suggested Europe was home to modern humans about 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. 

In the 2022 study, scientists linked this fossil tooth with stone artifacts that scientists previously dubbed Neronian, after the nearby Grotte de Néron site. Neronian tools include tiny flint arrowheads or spearpoints and are unlike anything else found in Europe from that time.

Now, in a new study, an archaeologist argues that another wave of modern humans may have entered Europe between the 42,000-year-old Protoaurignacians and the 54,000-year-old Neronians. “It’s an in-depth rewriting of the historical structure of [the] arrival of sapiens in the continent,” study lead researcher Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse in France, told Live Science in an email. He detailed his ideas in a study published on Wednesday (May 3) in the journal PLOS One.

These maps show evidence for three distinct waves of early migration of Homo sapiens in Europe from the East Mediterranean coast. In phase 1, the Neronians created tools about 54,000 years ago.

Stone Age evidence

Slimak focused on a group or “industry” of stone artifacts previously unearthed in the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean region that today includes Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Scientists have long thought that the Levant was a key gateway for modern humans migrating out of Africa.

When Slimak compared Neronian tools from Grotte Mandrin with the industry from about the same time from a site known as Ksar Akil in Lebanon, he found notable similarities. This suggested both groups were one and the same, with the Levantine group expanding into Europe over time. The much younger Protoaurignacian artifacts also have very similar counterparts in the Levant from a culture known as the Ahmarian, Slimak noted. 

“I buil[t] a bridge between Europe and the East Mediterranean populations during the early migrations of sapiens in the continent,” Slimak said.

In addition, Slimak found thousands of modern human flint artifacts from the Levant that existed in the period known as the Early Upper Paleolithic, between the Ksar Akil and the Ahmarian ones. This led him to look for possible modern human counterparts of these artifacts in Europe.

Stone artifacts from a European industry known as the Châtelperronian highly resemble modern human artifacts seen in the Early Upper Paleolithic of the Levant. In addition, Châtelperronian items date to about 45,000 years ago, or between those of the Neronians and the Protoaurignacians. However, scientists had often thought Châtelperronians were Neanderthals.

Slimak now argues the Châtelperronians were actually a second wave of modern humans into Europe. “We have here, and for the first time, a serious candidate for a non-Neanderthalian origin of these industries,” Slimak said. 

This new model of modern human settlement of Europe is “ambitious and provocative,” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who did not take part in the new study, told Live Science in an email. “Evidence has been building for a while that there were several early dispersals of Homo sapiens into Europe before the well-attested Aurignacian-associated one about 42,000 years ago.”

Future research can help confirm or disprove this new idea. “I see this paper generating a number of research projects to support or refute it,” Christian Tryon, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Connecticut who helped translate the new study, told Live Science in an email. “People now need to look at some of the archaeological sites here with a critical eye to see if they see the same kinds of technical details reported by Slimak. This is the start of a long process, I suspect.”

2,000-year-old bamboo slips discovered in Yunnan

2,000-year-old bamboo slips discovered in Yunnan

2,000-year-old bamboo slips discovered in Yunnan

Thousands of bamboo slips (rectangles tied together to form books) have been discovered at the Hebosuo archaeological site in southwestern China’s Yunnan province.

The Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology announced that more than 10,000 ancient bamboo and wooden slips, known as ­jiandu, have been found at the more than 2,000-year-old Hebosuo Site in Kunming, Southwest China’s Yunnan Province.

Bamboo or wooden slips were bound together to create “books” that could be written on and rolled up like scrolls before the paper was invented and used extensively.

About 2,000 of them, or 1,300, are from the Han Dynasty (202 B.C.–220 A.D.), and 837 are seal impressions. In Western Han tombs, bamboo slips are frequently literary works and books about agriculture and medicine, but in this discovery, the majority of the writings are administrative.

The seal impressions are particularly noteworthy because they include official seals from 20 of the 24 counties ruled by the ancient Dian kingdom, a non-Han culture of agriculture-based settlements, and exceptionally sophisticated metal workers centered in modern-day Yunnan. Emperor Wu of Han annexed the kingdom in 109 B.C.

This combo photo shows bamboo and wooden slips unearthed from Hebosuo relics site dating back to the Bronze Age, in Kunming, southwest China’s Yunnan Province.

Some of the slips list the names of 12 counties, including “Dian Chi county” and “Jian Ling county,” that once belonged to the Yizhou Prefecture, which was established by Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty (206BC-AD220). Wu did this after defeating the Dian Kingdom, which was established by an ancient ethnic group that lived along what is now the southwest border of Yunnan Province.

Other characters such as “county magistrate,” and “Dian Cheng” (prime minister of Dian management) were also discovered on the slips, Tao Zhongjun, a Chinese historian, told the Global Times on Tuesday, noting that such information shows a “well designed” social administrative system was used to govern the southwest border area.

Titles such as “Dian Cheng” reveal special political roles were set up by the Han government in the southwest area, said Jiang Zhilong, lead archaeologist on the Hebosuo project.

“Such discoveries are evidence that shows China was a unified country made up of multi-ethnic cultures,” Jiang noted.

Parts of the Analects of Confucius, the fundamental philosophical guide to Confucianism, were also found on the slips.

They also the content of the slips covers a wide variety of topics, including judicial documents and texts related to the administrative system, transportation, and ethnic relations.

The archeologists also found house ruins and road ruins suggesting roads as wide as 12 meters at the Hebosuo site, Jinning District of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, a core residential area of the ancient Yunnan region.