ASIA, EUROPE, RUSSIA, WORLD

Siberian Princess reveals her 2,500-year-old tattoos

Siberian Princess reveals her 2,500-year-old tattoos

Siberian Princess reveals her 2,500-year-old tattoos
The mummy of a woman called the “Altai Princess” is in the museum of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, Russia.

Tattoos aren’t just a trendy way for people to express themselves – they’re also apparently a time-honored tradition dating back almost three thousand years.

A Siberian mummy, who researchers believe was buried 2500 years ago, will show off her intricate ink when she finally goes on display this month, and her shockingly well-preserved body art makes her look surprisingly modern.

The mummified body of the young woman, believed to be between 25 and 28 years old, was found in 1993, researchers told The Siberian Times.

Since then she has been kept frozen in a scientific institute, but she will soon be available to the public to be viewed from a glass case at the Republican National Museum in Siberia’s capital of Gorno-Altaisk.

The woman, dubbed in the media as the Ukok “princes,” was found wearing expensive clothing – a long silk shirt and beautifully decorated boots – as well as a horse hair wig.

A sculptor’s impression of how Princess Ukok looked 2,500 years ago.

Archeologists told the paper that because she was not buried with any weapons she was not a warrior, and that she was likely a healer or storyteller.

Though her face and neck weren’t preserved, she was inked across both arms and on her fingers, in what researchers say was an indication of status.

Princess Ukok’s hand, as the scientists saw her first, with marked tattoos on her fingers. She was buried with two men and six horses. Because she was not buried with weapons, researchers think that she might have been a healer or storyteller.

“The more tattoos were on the body, the longer it meant the person lived, and the higher was his position,” lead researcher Natalia Polosmak told the Times.

The woman was buried beside two men whose bodies also bore tattoos, as well as six horses.

A drawing of a tattoo on a warrior’s shoulder.

Researchers think the group belonged to the nomadic Pazyryk people, and that their body art is something special even in comparison to other mummies who have been found wih tattoos in the past.

“Those on the mummies of the Pazyryk people are the most complicated and the most beautiful,” Polosmak told the Times.

This diagram shows the placement and greater detail of the princess’ tattoos.

“It is a phenomenal level of tattoo art,” she said. “Incredible.”

Not everyone was pleased that the mummy was uncovered.

This diagram shows placement of the princess’ tattoos on her shoulder.

Controversy erupted after she was discovered, as many believed she should not have been removed from her burial site. Some locals even believed her grave’s disruption caused a “curse of the mummy” which they blamed for the crash of the helicopter carrying her remains.

The “Altai Princess” mummy was found at the Gorny Mountain Altai by Natalya Polos’mak, a scientist of the Novosibirsk Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

“The Altai people never disturb the repose of the interned,” Rimma Erkinova, deputy director of the Gorno-Altaisk Republican National Museum told the Times. “We shouldn’t have any more excavations until we’ve worked out a proper moral and ethical approach.”

Tattoos that appear on the Princess’ hand. Because she was relatively young, researchers theorize, she had fewer tattoos.

Local authorities in the region have declared the area a ‘zone of peace,’ so no more excavations can be done in an effort to prevent plundering, though scientists believe there are many more mummies that can be found.

EUROPE, WORLD

Rabbits Dig Up Two 9,000-Year-Old Artifacts from Bronze Age; Guess Where They Found It

Rabbits Dig Up Two 9,000-Year-Old Artifacts from Bronze Age; Guess Where They Found It

European rabbits dug up Stone and Bronze Age artifacts on Skokholm Island.

A fluffle of wild rabbits has dug up priceless archaeological treasures on an island off the coast of Wales, in the United Kingdom.

The burrowing bunnies unearthed two artifacts — a 9,000-year-old Stone Age tool and a 3,750-year-old pottery piece, likely from a broken Bronze Age urn, according to the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales, which manages Skokholm Island, where the objects were found. 

Archaeologists have discovered similar artifacts on the U.K.’s mainland, but these new findings are the first of their kind on Skokholm Island, and indicate that humans visited or lived there thousands of years ago, the Wildlife Trust found. 

The island, which sits about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) off the coast of Pembrokeshire, a county in southwest Wales, is known for the tens of thousands of seabirds that nest there in the spring and summer months. Its natural beauty and wildlife have earned it the nickname “Dream Island.”

An aerial view of Skokholm Island, which lies off the coast of Wales.

Archaeological findings over the years showed evidence of prehistoric people on this island, but little is known about them. Starting in 1324, Skokholm Island became a rabbit farm for the next 200 years — a common island practice at that time, according to the Wildlife Trust. It seems that some of these rabbits’ descendants did the digging for the latest finds.

The wardens found the artifacts by these rabbit holes on Skokholm Island.

Wardens Richard Brown and Giselle Eagle, who are monitoring the island while it’s on lockdown due to the pandemic, found the smooth, oval-shaped Stone Age artifact first, while they were near a rabbit warren. They described it as “an interesting looking pebble,” in a March 16 blog post.

The bevelled pebble that rabbits dug up on Skokholm Island.

The duo emailed photos of the pebble to Toby Driver, an archaeologist with the Royal Commission, Wales, who in turn contacted prehistoric stone tool expert Andrew David. As soon as he saw the images, David knew the stone was a significant find.

“The photos were clearly of a late Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) ‘bevelled pebble,’ a tool thought to have been used in tasks like the preparation of seal hides for making skin-clad watercraft, or for processing foods such as shellfish, among hunter-gatherer communities some 6,000-9,000 years ago,” David wrote in an email to the wardens.

“Although these types of tools are well known on coastal sites on mainland Pembrokeshire and Cornwall, as well as into Scotland and northern France, this is the first example from Skokholm, and the first firm evidence for late Mesolithic occupation on the island,” David added. 

Just a few days later, Brown and Eagle found another artifact — a coarse piece of pottery — that rabbits had dug out by the same holes as the previous find. As the wardens wrote in a March 19 blog post, this piece of pottery “to our (very) untrained eyes, looked old.”

This fragment of pottery may have been part of a Bronze Age burial urn.

The pottery fragment came from a thick-walled pot that had been decorated with incised lines around its top, Jody Deacon, the curator of prehistoric archaeology at Amgueddfa Cymru — National Museum Wales, told the wardens. This pot was likely an early Bronze Age vase urn, a container associated with cremation burials, Deacon noted.

The pottery fragment dated to between 2100 and 1750 B.C., or about 3,750 years ago, Deacon said.

The dead were often cremated and buried in urns in western Wales at that time, but this is the first evidence of such an urn in Skokholm Island, or any of the western Pembrokeshire islands, Deacon said.

“This is an incredibly exciting discovery,” the wardens wrote in the March 19 blog post. “It is rather mind blowing that for thousands of years, people have returned to this same area, some of them perhaps working at seal skins, perhaps building skin boats, others burying their dead.”

Thanks to these rabbit-assisted finds, the Royal Commission, Wales now plans to undertake archaeological work on Skokholm Island this summer.

“It seems we may have an early Bronze burial mound built over a middle Stone Age hunter-gatherer site, disturbed by rabbits,” Driver said. “It’s a sheltered spot, where the island’s cottage now stands, and has clearly been settled for millennia.”

ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

World-First Fossil Shows Dinosaur Sitting On Clutch Of Eggs Like A Bird

World-First Fossil Shows Dinosaur Sitting On Clutch Of Eggs Like A Bird

The ~70-million-year-old fossil in question: an adult oviraptorid theropod dinosaur sitting atop a nest of its fossilized eggs. Multiple eggs (including at least three that contain embryos) are clearly visible, as are the forearms, pelvis, hind limbs, and partial tail of the adult.

It’s hard to imagine a mighty T. rex kneeling delicately above a clutch of eggs, but new research surrounding a fossilized oviraptor suggests that this behavior may have indeed been practiced by some dinosaurs.

The first non-avialan dinosaur (species outside of the clade of dinosaurs related to living birds) fossil to feature an adult dinosaur sat on top of a clutch of eggs that contain embryonic remains has been detailed in Science Bulletin.

What’s more, the embryos were at different stages, suggesting the eggs would hatch at different times, something that is usually determined by when the parent starts incubating.

An attentive oviraptorid theropod dinosaur broods its nest of blue-green eggs while its mate looks on in what is now Jiangxi Province of southern China some 70 million years ago.
The partial skeleton of the oviraptorosaur was found on a nest of at least 24 fossilized eggs.

“This isn’t the first time an oviraptorid has been found in such a way, nor are these the first-ever oviraptorid embryos,” study author Shundong Bi, a professor at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, told IFLScience.

“But it is the first time that an adult has been found atop embryo-bearing eggs. It’s also the first nesting oviraptorid to be discovered outside the Gobi Desert.”

Brooding, seen in chickens that sit on their eggs to incubate them during development, was thought to be an unlikely behavior in non-avialan dinosaurs whose heavy bodies would surely squish their progeny.

However, this new fossil found near Ganzhou, China, is the first discovered having preserved a non-avialan dinosaur atop an egg clutch that still contains embryonic remains.

The researchers believe the presence of an adult on eggs containing embryos at advanced growth stages provides strong support for the brooding hypothesis in some non-avialan dinosaurs.

Interestingly, the embryos inside the eggs are at different developmental stages, which points to the possibility that had they survived the eggs would’ve hatched at different times.

“The asynchronous hatching was not widespread among dinosaurs,” said Bi.

“This phenomenon, known as asynchronous hatching, is pretty peculiar and uncommon even in modern birds, the living descendants of dinosaurs.”

The researchers say their findings demonstrate that the evolution of reproductive biology along bird-line archosaurs (a large group of vertebrates that includes dinosaurs and pterosaurs and is represented today by birds) was complex and not the linear, incremental process it’s previously assumed to have been.

They theorize that some aspects of non-avialan theropod reproduction may have been unique to these dinosaurs and not passed to the avialan ancestors that eventually gave rise to modern birds.

Recent research detailed how the avialan feature of flight likely evolved twice in dinosaurs before the clade containing modern birds’ ancestors came into the picture.

This new insight presents a further trait of avialan dinosaurs and animals that may have been shared by some of their distant cousins.

EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

500-year-old gold coins discovered in a German monastery were ‘hastily hidden’ during a ‘dangerous situation’

500-year-old gold coins discovered in a German monastery were ‘hastily hidden’ during a ‘dangerous situation’

Archaeologists in Germany have uncovered a handful of 500-year-old gold coins buried among the ruins of a medieval monastery.

500-year-old gold coins discovered in a German monastery were 'hastily hidden' during a 'dangerous situation'
One of the four gold coins was discovered at a monastery in Germany.

Known as Himmelpforten, the Augustinian Hermit monastery housed monks from its founding in 1253 into the 16th century.

The archaeologists think the four coins were “hastily hidden” by one of the monks in 1525 during an uprising in which farmers stormed the monastery in Wernigerode, a town in central Germany, according to a translated article in Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, a German newspaper. 

“The gold coins were of great value, and the small fortune was probably hidden by a monk in an acutely dangerous situation,” Felix Biermann, a project manager and archaeologist from the Saxony-Anhalt State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology told Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. “It didn’t end well because the coins couldn’t be recovered.”

Classified as guilders (guldens), a type of currency used during the Holy Roman Empire, the coins include one that was minted in Frankfurt before 1493, during the reign of the Holy Roman emperor Frederick III; another coin minted in Schwabach, outside Nuremberg, sometime between 1486 and 1495; and two coins produced in Bonn by the Archdiocese of Cologne around 1480, according to Newsweek.

In addition to the coins, researchers discovered an array of artifacts, including brass book clasps from the monastery’s library, ceramics, animal bones, a cavalry spur, and lead seals that were used to stamp cloth for commerce, all of which provide insight into the large-scale trade and prosperity of the monastery, according to Mitteldeutsche Zeitung.

All that remains of the monastery itself is the foundations of some buildings, including the main chapel and refectory where the monks would have dined.

CANADA, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

The 14,000-year-old ice age village discovered is 10,000 years older than the pyramids

The 14,000-year-old ice age village discovered is 10,000 years older than the pyramids

The 14,000-year-old ice age village discovered is 10,000 years older than the pyramids

In their oral history, the Heiltsuk people describe how the area around Triquet Island, on the western coast of their territory in British Columbia, remained open land during the ice age.

“People flocked there for survival because everywhere else was being covered by ice, and all the ocean was freezing and all of the food resources were dwindling,” says Heiltsuk Nation member William Housty.

And late last year, archaeologists excavating an ancient Heiltsuk village on Triquet Island uncovered the physical evidence: a few flakes of charcoal from a long-ago hearth.

Analysis of the carbon fragments indicates that the village site — deserted since a smallpox epidemic in the 1800s — was inhabited as many as 14,000 years ago, making it three times as old as the pyramids at Giza, and one of the oldest settlements in North America.

“There are several sites that date to around the same time as the very early date that we obtained for Triquet Island, so what this is suggesting is that people have been here for tens of thousands of years,” says Alisha Gauvreau, a scholar at the Hakai Institute and a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, who has been working at the Triquet Island site.

But how was it that Triquet Island remained uncovered, even during the ice age? According to Gauvreau, sea levels in the area remained stable over time, due to a phenomenon called sea level hinge.

“So all the rest of the landmass was covered in ice,” she explains. “As those ice sheets started to recede — and we had some major shifts in sea levels coastwide, so further to the north and to the south in the magnitude of 150 to 200 meters of difference, whereas here it remained exactly the same.”

The result, Gauvreau says, is that people were able to return to Triquet Island repeatedly over time. And while nearby sites also show evidence of ancient inhabitants, people “were definitely sticking around Triquet Island longer than anywhere else,” she says. In addition to finding bits of charcoal at the site, she says archaeologists have uncovered tools like obsidian blades, atlatls and spear throwers, fishhook fragments and hand drills for starting fires.

“And I could go on, but basically, all of these things, coupled with the fallen assemblage, tell us that the earliest people were making relatively simple stone tools at first, perhaps expediently, due to the parent material that was available at the time,” Gauvreau says.

The site also indicates that these early people were also using boats to hunt sea mammals, and gather shellfish, she adds. And later on, they traded or travelled great distances to obtain nonlocal materials like obsidian, greenstone, and graphite for tools.

For archaeologists and anthropologists, the find bolsters an idea, called the “Kelp Highway Hypothesis” hypothesis, proposing that the first people who arrived in North America followed the coastline in boats to avoid the glacial landscape.

“It certainly adds evidence to the fact that people were able to travel by boat in that coastal area by watercraft,” Gauvreau says.

And for the Heiltsuk Nation, which has worked with the archaeologists for years to share knowledge and identify sites like Triquet Island, the updated archaeological record provides new evidence, as well.

The nation routinely negotiates with the Canadian government on matters of territory governance and natural resource management — negotiations that depend in part on the community’s record of inhabiting the area over long periods.

Archaeologists at the site are unearthing tools for lighting fires, fish hooks and spears dating back to the Ice Age

“So when we’re at the table with our oral history, it’s like me telling you a story,” Housty says. “And you have to believe me without seeing any evidence.”

But now, he explains, with the oral history and archaeological evidence “dovetailing together, telling a really powerful tale,” the Heiltsuk have new advantages at the negotiating table.

“That’s really going to be very significant … and I think will definitely give us a leg up in negotiations, for sure,” he says.

RUSSIA, WORLD

3,000-Year-Old “Charioteer” Skeleton With Special Belt Discovered In Siberia

3,000-Year-Old “Charioteer” Skeleton With Special Belt Discovered In Siberia

3,000-Year-Old "Charioteer" Skeleton With Special Belt Discovered In Siberia
The burial includes a distinctive hooked piece of bronze, probably once fixed to a belt around the waist, which is for drivers of horse-drawn chariots to tie the reins and free their hands.

Archaeologists in Siberia have discovered the untouched 3,000-year-old grave of a person thought to be a charioteer — indicating for the first time that horse-drawn chariots were used in the region.

The skeletal remains were interred with a distinctive hooked metal attachment for a belt, which allowed drivers of horse-drawn chariots to tie their reins to their waists and free their hands. This type of artifact has also been found in Chinese and Mongolian graves.

Aleksey Timoshchenko, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Live Science in an email that the object was found in its original placement at the waist of the person in the undisturbed grave. 

The burial was found by Russian archaeologists during their latest excavations in the Askizsky region of Khakassia in Siberia, where a railway is being expanded.

“This fact, along with direct analogies in burial mounds of China, allows us to determine their purpose a little more confidently,” he said.

Timoshchenko led the latest expedition to the Askizsky region of Khakassia in Siberia, where Russian archaeologists have already spent several years excavating areas ahead of the expansion of a railway.

The team discovered the charioteer burial and other graves this month near the village of Kamyshta.

Unknown object

Archaeologists think the “charioteer” burial is from the Lugav culture, which occupied the region about 3,000 years ago. But no remains of chariots have ever been found.

Oleg Mitko, an archaeologist at Novosibirsk State University in Russia who’s a consultant for the finds but not an expedition member, said objects like the “charioteer’s belt” had been found before but not understood.

“For a long time in Russian archaeology this was called a PNN — an ‘item of unknown purpose,'” he told Live Science in an email. But recent discoveries of Bronze Age charioteer burials in China, along with the remains of chariots and horses, indicated that “this object is an accessory for a chariot.”

No chariots had been found in Siberian burials, he said, and the hooked bronze belt plate may have been placed in the Late Bronze Age grave as a symbolic substitute.

As well as the distinctive bronze belt piece, archaeologists also found a bronze dagger and jewelry in the tomb.

Burial mound

The tomb of the “charioteer” was found among graves dated to about 3,000 years ago during the time of the Lugav culture, according to a translated statement.

The burial consisted of an earthen mound heaped over a roughly square stone tomb; a bronze knife, bronze jewelry, and the distinctive belt part was among the grave goods. 

Timoshchenko said the Bronze Age people of the Lugav culture were mainly engaged in cattle breeding and were replaced in the region in about the eighth century B.C., during the Early Iron Age, by Scythian people of the Tagar culture.

According to the statement, the latest excavations unearthed burials from three Bronze Age phases in the region: the earliest from about the 11th century B.C., as the Karasuk culture transitioned into the Lugav culture; a second, with the charioteer, from the Lugav culture itself; and a third after the eighth century B.C., from the early Bainov stage of the Tagar culture.

EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

300,000-year-old double-pointed stick among oldest record of human-made wooden tools

300,000-year-old double-pointed stick among oldest record of human-made wooden tools

Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest large collection of wooden tools made by humans at a site in Schöningen, Germany. The artefacts date back to about 300,000 years ago.

300,000-year-old double-pointed stick among oldest record of human-made wooden tools
Perspective photograph of the double-pointed throwing stick from Schöningen, Germany.

Included in what ancient people left behind are wooden spears and shorter throwing sticks that have been sharpened at both ends.

It is unclear exactly which hominin is responsible for producing the tools, but their age suggests either Homo heidelbergensis or Homo neanderthalensis.  

The collection has been analysed before, but further analysis has been required to gain deeper insight into how the tools were used.

The 300,000-year-old tools found at Schöningen were analysed using micro-CT scanning, 3D microscopy and infrared spectroscopy to better understand how they were made and their potential uses. The results are published in the PLOS ONE journal.

The double-pointed stick in particular reveals new human behaviours for the time period. Made from spruce, the branch was debarked and shaped for aerodynamics and ergonomics.

It is believed the wood was seasoned to prevent it from cracking and warping.

New insights from the detailed multi-analytic techniques suggest that the main purpose of the tool was as a throwing stick for hunting. This indicates “potential hunting strategies and social contexts including for communal hunts involving children,” the researchers write.

“The Schöningen throwing sticks may have been used to strategically disadvantage larger ungulates [hooved animals such as deer and antelope], potentially from distances of up to 30 metres.”

“In illustrating the biography of one of Schöningen’s double-pointed sticks, we demonstrate new human behaviours for this time period, including sophisticated woodworking techniques,” the authors write.

These are also not the only ancient tools that have been found at the site. In 2012, researchers found that 171,000-year-old tools found at Schöningen were probably made using fire.

Though it is the oldest collection of wooden tools anywhere in the world, the Schöningen spears are not the oldest known tools made from wood.

In 1911, an artefact now known as the “Clacton spear” was discovered near the English seaside town of Essex. It is believed to be the 400,000-year-old tip of a spear, making it the oldest known wooden tool.

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

‘Thunder floor’ found at ancient Andean site in Peru

‘Thunder floor’ found at ancient Andean site in Peru

An ancient “sounding” dance floor, perhaps designed to create a drum-like sound for a thunder god when stomped on, has been identified by archaeologists in Peru. Found at the site of Viejo Sangayaico, 200km southeast of Lima, the floor was built into an open-air platform sometime between AD1000 and AD1400.

‘Thunder floor’ found at ancient Andean site in Peru
A different drum: an open-air platform at Viejo Sangayaico that makes a deep percussive sound when stomped on may have been a “sounding” dance-floor used to venerate a nearby mountain deity of thunder and lightning

It then continued in use under Inca rule, from 1400 to 1532, and perhaps during the early years of the Spanish conquest.

“We know that in pre-Hispanic Andean rituals dance was a big part of the proceedings.

I believe that this specially constructed platform was built to enhance the natural sounds associated with dance,” says Kevin Lane, an archaeologist with the Instituto de las Culturas (IDECU) of the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina, who led the research.

Funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the project’s findings have recently been published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

The dance floor was built on one of two open-air platforms close to a possible Inca temple dedicated to a lightning deity.

The platforms face the nearby mountain of Huinchocruz, where a pre-Hispanic ceremonial platform known as an ushnu stood.

“I believe that these open platforms would have been used during the pre-Hispanic period as a stage on which to venerate the nearby mountain gods, in this case those of Huinchocruz,” Lane says.

Because lightning deities were associated with rain and thunder in Andean belief, it is possible that the people of Viejo Sangayaico used the dance floor to imitate the sound of thunder, Lane explains. “This would likely have been accompanied by drums and possibly Andean wind instruments.”

The archaeologists first identified the sounding dance floor when they heard a hollow noise as they walked on it. “We realized that the platform was built to enhance sound when we started excavating it,” Lane says.

“We discovered that the platform had been dug and then infilled with specially prepared fills and surfaces to create a percussion effect. This involved four layers of camelid guano interspersed with four layers of clean silty clay.”

Lane says the dung layers contained small gaps which caused a deep, bass-like sound to be produced whenever people danced or stomped on the floor’s surface, which was around 10 meters in diameter.

“We reckon the platform could have held up to 26 people dancing in unison, making for a loud thumping sound,” Lane says, adding that the dust raised by the dancing may have been a visual feature.

The discovery raises the possibility that parts of other Andean sites may have been built to enhance sound. “We already knew this from sites like Chavin, but even during the late pre-Hispanic period it is possible that many sites had sectors specially prepared for this,” Lane says.

Another Andean site in Peru where the use of sound has recently been studied is Huánuco Pampa.

“The sounding dance platform is a fantastic find and it shows that, aside from instruments, the human body and the landscape could be employed musically,” Lane says. “It also brings past sounds to life, especially given that the past is mostly silent and lost to us.”

All In One Magazine