A large hall from the time of Viking Harald Bluetooth discovered
A large hall from the reign of King Harald Bluetooth of Norway was unearthed during housing construction work near Hune, a village in the Jammerbugt Municipality of North Jutland, Denmark.
The hall was up to 40 meters long and 8-10 meters wide, with 10-12 oak posts supporting the roof. They are rectangular in cross-section and measure up to 90×50 cm.
The hall probably served as a crucial location for political gatherings, for hosting visitors, and as the hub of social activity in the community’s social life.
Preliminary dating places the hall in the last half of the ninth century or the very first part of the eleventh century, but it was probably in use during the reign of Harald Bluetooth.
A rune stone near the excavation site has a date that fits this time frame. The stone, which dates from between 970 and 1020, is located in Hune Kirke and is inscribed with the words “Hove, Thorkild, and Thorbjrn set their father Runulv den Rdnilde’s stone.”
A rune stone near the excavation site.
The hall’s design is reminiscent of structures found at Harald Bluetooth’s ring castles, including Fyrkat at Hobro and Aggersborg at Aggersund.
The researchers have only excavated a portion of the hall, but they believe that additional buildings and features lie beneath the surface to the east of the hall, as buildings of this type rarely stand alone.
Thomas Rune Knudsen, from North Jutland Museums said: “This is the largest Viking Age find of this nature in more than ten years, and we have not seen anything like it before here in North Jutland.”
Excavations will resume in the New Year, with a Carbon-14 analysis on organic remains for more accurate dating, the results of which are expected to be published by the end of 2023.
King Harald Bluetooth, a Viking-born king who turned his back on old Norse religion and converting to Christianity. He is noted for bringing Christianity to Denmark and earned the nickname Blåtand (meaning blue tooth) because of a dead tooth that is said to have been dark blue.
Saint Anthony of Padua revealed in stunning facial approximation
A team of international researchers has revealed a facial approximation of what Saint Anthony of Padua may have looked like.
A facial approximation of Saint Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost and stolen articles.
A newly released image shows what Saint Anthony of Padua, a Portuguese priest who lived and died in the 13th century, may have looked like.
Using CT (computed tomography) scans of the priest’s skull, an international team of researchers created a lifelike facial approximation of St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost and stolen articles.
The final image includes a man with a cap of thinning brown hair crowning his head. The man wears a brown robe, just as Franciscan friars did in the Middle Ages.
However, this wouldn’t be the first time that a facial reconstruction was made of the religious figure. In 1981, Italian sculptor Roberto Cremesini created a replica of St. Anthony’s skull using plaster.
The piece was the result of an exhumation of the saint, which Pope John Paul II authorized, according to the new study, which will be published in the March 2023 issue of the journal Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage.
More than 30 years later, in 2014, researchers from the University of St. Anthony of Padua’s Anthropology Museum, along with a team of international forensic researchers, made another facial reconstruction using only a digital copy of the exhumed skull, according to a Catholic News Agency article.
That image features a man, his face angled to the viewer, also with a balding head of dark hair, dressed in a robe to make him appear more lifelike.
“Today’s work is an update on the technique and shows a clear evolution from the 2014 face,” Cícero Moraes, the study’s lead author and a Brazilian graphics expert who also worked on the 2014 reconstruction, told Live Science in an email.
“The present approximation has greatly improved anatomical coherence…and is more compatible with a real face.”
In addition to the facial approximation, Moraes and his co-authors, Luca Bezzi, an Italian archaeologist, and Nichola Carrara, with the University of St. Anthony of Padua, also made a reconstruction of the endocranium, the skull’s base, which was exceedingly large compared to the average human skull.
In other words, St. Anthony had a very large head. “The fact is that this volume is large even compared to modern individuals,” Moraes said.
St. Anthony died in 1231 in Padua at age 36; he was canonized a year later.
7-foot-long arthropods commanded the sea 470 million years ago, ‘exquisite’ fossils show
Fossils from the Fezouata Shale. From left to right, a non-mineralized arthropod (Marrellomorpha), a palaeoscolecid worm and a trilobites.
Exquisitely preserved fossils in Morocco suggest that some of the earliest arthropods were nearly 7 feet (2 meters) long — gigantic in comparison with the shrimps, insects, and spiders that are descendants of these early invertebrates, according to a new study.
Researchers made the discovery while exploring the site, known as Taichoute, which is part of the Fezouata Shale, a swath of fossil deposits dating to the Lower Ordovician period (485 million to 470 million years ago) that was discovered in 2017.
Now part of the Moroccan desert, Taichoute was completely undersea millions of years ago.
Prior to the exploration of Taichoute, the closest Moroccan fossil sites were near Zagora, a town 50 miles (80 kilometers) away, where giant arthropods make up roughly 1% to 2% of the total fossil material.
At Taichoute, nearly half of the fossils are of these jumbo creatures, according to the study.
“All of our previous knowledge on the Fezouata Shale was solely based on fossil sites near the Zagora region,” Farid Saleh, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, told Live Science in an email.
“The dominance of large arthropods in Taichoute is unique. You can possibly find [many specimens] in one day.”
“These arthropods were active swimmers and dominated this area 470 million years ago,” Saleh said. “Some of these arthropods were described before, but there’s a good number of new species.”
While researchers are currently identifying the roughly 70 specimens collected from the fossil beds during the dig, they unearthed multiple examples of Aegirocassis, an extinct genus of filter-feeding arthropods. They were also “free-swimmers and could move any way they wanted to in the water,” Saleh said.
Being entombed in the mud-caked fossil beds for millions of years has led to the “exquisite preservation of [the] fossils,” Saleh said. In some cases, even soft parts of the animals, including their internal organs, were preserved.
While the upper portions of their external shells were well preserved overall, “they’ve been fragmented to some extent, because they were transported by underwater landslides prior to their preservation.”
Researchers think they have barely scratched the surface of what could be lurking in the Fezouata Shale.
“There’s a lot to do in Taichoute,” Saleh said, “and more fieldwork will bring a lot more in the future.”
Massive graveyard of fossilized shark teeth found deep in the Indian Ocean
Researches collected more than 750 shark teeth at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
A graveyard studded with thousands of shark teeth is lurking nearly 3.5 miles (5.400 kilometers) beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean.
Researchers made the shocking discovery in October during a month-long expedition along the southern tip of Indonesia aboard the RV Investigator, a 308-foot-long (94 meters) research vessel operated by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency.
On the final day of the voyage, and after 26 previous attempts, the researchers sank a trawling net into the deep water hoping to catch fish as part of an ongoing biodiversity survey. Instead, they pulled up a net’s worth of hundreds of shark teeth, according to a statemen.
“It was our very last sample of the trip before heading back to Australia,” Dianne Bray, senior collections manager at the Museums Victoria Research Institute, told Live Science.
“I was a little disappointed at first when we hauled up the net because it was filled with mud and I knew that there wasn’t going to be many fish specimens. And even if there were, they would be rumbled and damaged from all the mud.”
But as the researchers sifted through the mud-caked material, they realized the catch was than just a colossal mud pie.
“We tipped the contents out on the deck of the boat and as we went through everything, we found shark tooth after shark tooth,” Bray said. “We were finding teeth from [modern] mako and [great] white sharks, but also fossilized teeth from ancient sharks like the immediate ancestor of the giant megalodon shark.”
In total, researchers collected more than 750 teeth ranging in size from 0.39 inch (1 centimeter) to a single tooth from the megalodon ancestor measuring 4 inches (10 cm).
The researchers noticed deposits of black manganese nodules growing on many of the teeth, which were the result of the teeth sitting on the ocean floor for so long. Otherwise, the teeth were all in good condition.
“It’s quite remarkable,” Bray said. “The teeth weren’t weathered, rumbled or tumbled. Bacteria consumed all of the organic matter from the teeth and the roots were gone, but otherwise, the enamel was left.”
Researchers aren’t entirely sure why so many teeth accumulated in this swath of the ocean but they don’t think that hundreds of sharks died there, Bray said.
Unlike humans, who are born with one set of baby teeth and replace them with one set of adult teeth during their lifetimes, sharks have an endless supply of teeth that are replaced “like a conveyor belt,” Gareth J. Fraser, lecturer in Evolutionary Developmental Biology at University of Sheffield in the U.K., wrote in The Conversation.
The area where the teeth were found likely hosted a community of ancient sharks.
“The teeth were found on an abyssal plain and not out in the open ocean,” Bray said. “This area was part of an ancient reef covered with seamounts and we think a community of sharks swam around this area long ago.”
As they swam, they likely dropped their used-up teeth.
Bray said that the shark tooth haul barely “scraped the surface” of what was buried there.
Skeletons of 5,000-year-old Chinese ‘giants’ discovered by archaeologists
The tallest of the skeletons uncovered measured at 1.9m (YouTube)
Archaeologists in eastern China have found 5,000-year-old skeletons of people experts say would have been unusually tall and strong.
According to the measurements of bones in the graves at the site in Shandong province, a number of the people would have measured at 1.8m or taller, with one man estimated to have been 1.9m, Xinhua news agency reported.
Although not particularly unusual by 21st-century Western standards, it is thought their height would have seen them tower over many of their contemporaries.
“This is just based on bone structure. If he was a living person, his height would certainly exceed 1.9m,” Fang Hui, head of Shandong University’s school of history and culture, told the agency.
Locals in Shandong see their height as a defining characteristic. A study conducted in 2015 found the average height of 18 men to be 1.753m, compared to the country’s national average of 1.72m.
Confucius, who was born in what is now the Shandong province, was reportedly 1.9m tall.
The excavation site in the village of Jiaojia, near Jinan City, has been found to hold 104 houses, 205 graves and 20 sacrificial pits. A number of colourful pots and jade articles were also recovered.
Archaeologists have been uncovering artefacts and bones from the late Neolithic people since last year, who are understood to have lived mostly off pigs and millet.
The people living in the region 5,000 years ago are believed to have had relatively comfortable lives; the rows of houses that have been excavated suggested their living quarters had separate bedrooms and kitchens, according to China Daily.
Colourful pots were also found in the graves (YouTube)
The area is also believed to have been the political, cultural and economic centre of the Chinese region.
Taller men were found buried in larger graves, which could be due to them having a higher status and having access to better food.
Archaeologists have been uncovering artefacts and bones from the late Neolithic people since last 2016 (YouTube)
Ancient Peruvians gave themselves elongated skulls as a mark of status
The Collagua people would bind pieces of wood to children’s heads to modify the shape of the developing skull (Creative Commons)
Members of the ruling elite in parts of South America would have been very easy to spot 700 years ago – due to their tall, elongated skulls. Their artificially extended heads were apparently status symbols, and could have helped foster a sense of community and collective identity, according to a study.
Over 300 years before the Inca empire swept the south western Americas, members of a small ethnic community known as the Collagua practised intentional head shaping which developed to focus on creating a tall thin skull shape.
According to bioarchaeologist Matthew Velasco of Cornell University the cranial modifications may have bound the powerful elite together, but it may also have polarised other groups, resulting in social inequality.
The Collagua people lived in the Colca Valley in south-eastern Peru, where they raised Alpacas and llamas for wool.
Early Spanish accounts also detail another ethnic group – the Cavanas, who also populated the region. Spanish records say that in contrast to the tall narrow heads of the Collagua, the Cavanas also modified their skulls, widening and flattening them.
The Collagua would use pieces of wood, which were tightly bound to the heads of infants to modify how their heads grew. The practice was banned by the invading Spanish in the 16th Century.
Mr Velasco’s research, published in the journal Current Anthropology is the first time skull shape has been studied as a class differentiator within the Collagua.
By looking at skull shapes from over 200 individuals from a 300-year period, the research team saw that tall thin skulls became increasingly linked to high social status.
Chemical analysis of the bones revealed that Collagua women with purposefully distended heads were more likely to eat a broader diet than those without cranial modifications. The team also observed that these women typically had fewer injuries from physical attacks than women with unaltered skulls, Science News reports.
The study suggests the changes to head shape among those with power may have helped pave the way for a peaceful incorporation for the Collagua into the Incan empire.
“Greater standardisation of head-shaping practices echoes broader patterns of identity formation across the south-central highlands and may have provided a symbolic basis for the cooperation of elite groups during an era of intensive conflict,” says Mr Velasco.
The intensive conflict was due to the encroaching Incas, who originated from the highlands of Peru and through armed takeovers and assimilation, ultimately controlled most of Peru, as well as large parts of what are now Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, in addition to a small part of southwest Colombia.
The civilisation was one of the largest empires in the world when it reached its peak in the 16th century before the Spanish conquistadors arrived.
Archaeologists uncover oldest known projectile points in the Americas
Stone projectile points discovered buried inside and outside of pit features at the Cooper’s Ferry site, Area B.
Oregon State University archaeologists have uncovered projectile points in Idaho that are thousands of years older than any previously found in the Americas, helping to fill in the history of how early humans crafted and used stone weapons.
The 13 full and fragmentary projectile points, razor sharp and ranging from about half an inch to 2 inches long, are from roughly 15,700 years ago, according to carbon-14 dating. That’s about 3,000 years older than the Clovis fluted points found throughout North America, and 2,300 years older than the points previously found at the same Cooper’s Ferry site along the Salmon River in present-day Idaho.
The findings were published today in the journal Science Advances.
“From a scientific point of view, these discoveries add very important details about what the archaeological record of the earliest peoples of the Americas looks like,” said Loren Davis, an anthropology professor at OSU and head of the group that found the points. “It’s one thing to say, ‘We think that people were here in the Americas 16,000 years ago’; it’s another thing to measure it by finding well-made artifacts they left behind.”
Previously, Davis and other researchers working the Cooper’s Ferry site had found simple flakes and pieces of bone that indicated human presence about 16,000 years ago. But the discovery of projectile points reveals new insights into the way the first Americans expressed complex thoughts through technology at that time, Davis said.
The Salmon River site where the points were found is on traditional Nez Perce land, known to the tribe as the ancient village of Nipéhe. The land is currently held in public ownership by the federal Bureau of Land Management.
The points are revelatory not just in their age, but in their similarity to projectile points found in Hokkaido, Japan, dating to 16,000–20,000 years ago, Davis said. Their presence in Idaho adds more detail to the hypothesis that there are early genetic and cultural connections between the ice age peoples of Northeast Asia and North America.
“The earliest peoples of North America possessed cultural knowledge that they used to survive and thrive over time. Some of this knowledge can be seen in the way people made stone tools, such as the projectile points found at the Cooper’s Ferry site,” Davis said. “By comparing these points with other sites of the same age and older, we can infer the spatial extents of social networks where this technological knowledge was shared between peoples.”
Overview of the Area B excavations at the Cooper’s Ferry site in 2017.
Excavator at work recording artifacts excavated from a pit feature at the Cooper’s Ferry site.
These slender projectile points are characterized by two distinct ends, one sharpened and one stemmed, as well as a symmetrical beveled shape if looked at head-on. They were likely attached to darts, rather than arrows or spears, and despite the small size, they were deadly weapons, Davis said.
“There’s an assumption that early projectile points had to be big to kill large game; however, smaller projectile points mounted on darts will penetrate deeply and cause tremendous internal damage,” he said. “You can hunt any animal we know about with weapons like these.”
These discoveries add to the emerging picture of early human life in the Pacific Northwest, Davis said. “Finding a site where people made pits and stored complete and broken projectile points nearly 16,000 years ago gives us valuable details about the lives of our region’s earliest inhabitants.”
Overview of the Cooper’s Ferry site in the lower Salmon River canyon of western Idaho, USA.
Overview of pit feature 78 during the process of excavation.
(A) map showing the location of the Cooper’s Ferry site in the context of Pacific Northwest environments at 16,000 years ago; (B) aerial image (from Google Earth) showing the Cooper’s Ferry excavations; (C) site map showing the locations of excavation Area A and Area B.
The newly discovered pits are part of the larger Cooper’s Ferry record, where Davis and colleagues have previously reported a 14,200-year-old fire pit and a food-processing area containing the remains of an extinct horse. All told, they found and mapped more than 65,000 items, recording their locations to the millimeter for precise documentation.
The projectile points were uncovered over multiple summers between 2012 and 2017, with work supported by a partnership held between OSU and the BLM. All excavation work has been completed and the site is now covered. The BLM installed interpretive panels and a kiosk at the site to describe the work.
Stratigraphic model of the Cooper’s Ferry site, showing the distribution of cultural features (e.g., fire hearths, pits), radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence ages, sediment layers and buried soils as exposed by excavations in Area A and Area B.
Davis has been studying the Cooper’s Ferry site since the 1990s when he was an archaeologist with the BLM. Now, he partners with the BLM to bring undergraduate and graduate students from OSU to work the site in the summer.
The team also works closely with the Nez Perce tribe to provide field opportunities for tribal youth and to communicate all findings.
Characterizing red pigment in ancient bone samples in Peru to reveal their sources
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. and one in Canada has characterized a large number of red pigment samples found on the bones of ancient people who once lived in what is now southern Peru.
In their paper published in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, the group describes their study of the pigments.
Prior studies of the use of red pigments in funeral rites by people who lived in ancient Peru suggest the practice is related to prolonging the existence of the dead.
In this new effort, the researchers used various techniques to analyze red pigments found on bones left behind by members of the Chincha, people who lived around Peru over the years 1000 AD to 1825 AD.
The pigments were found on bones excavated from over 100 chullpas, or mass burial graves. The aim of the research was to determine why the bones were painted and how it was done.
To find their answers, the researchers subjected the 35 bones (25 of which were skulls) to laser ablation, X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and X-ray powder diffraction in order to identify all of the components in the pigments.
They found that the bulk of them were made using iron-based ochres such as hematite. Another major material they found was cinnabar, which had a mercury base.
They also found that cinnabar was not native to the local area—it would have been imported. This suggested its use was likely meant for important or rich people.
The researchers also noted that while there were some women and children’s bones in their collection, most were from adult males.
The researchers concluded that the arrangement of the pigments on the bones indicates it had been applied using either leaves or bare fingers.
The researchers also noted that the arrangement of the bones in the chullpas suggested that the pigments may have been applied long after the people had been skeletonized.
This, they suggest, indicates that the people of the time may have exhumed loved ones and applied the paints to their bones to protect them from European invaders.
