Attila The Hun May Have Raided The Roman Empire Because Of Drought
Attila the Hun played a massive role in the Roman Empire’s downfall.
Attila the Hun is one of history’s most notorious warlords – yet while he has traditionally been cast as a bloodthirsty barbarian motivated only by a lust for gold, new research suggests that his constant attacks on the Roman Empire may have been driven by drought.
After analyzing 2,000 years’ worth of tree-ring data, the study authors found that many of Attila’s most epic raids occurred during extremely dry years, and may therefore have represented an attempt to mitigate the effects of an unstable climate.
Though the origins of the Huns remain uncertain, they are believed to have crossed into Eastern Europe from Central Asia sometime around 370 CE, before settling on the Great Hungarian Plain to the east of the River Danube.
Following Attila’s rise to power in 434 CE, the Huns increasingly pillaged the eastern flank of the Roman Empire, and are largely credited with expediting the fall of Rome.
“Historical sources tell us that Roman and Hun diplomacy was extremely complex,” explained study author Dr Susanne Hakenbeck in a statement. “Initially it involved mutually beneficial arrangements, resulting in Hun elites gaining access to vast amounts of gold.
This system of collaboration broke down in the 440s, leading to regular raids of Roman lands and increasing demands for gold.”
However, the researchers say that this diplomatic breakdown alone may not explain Attila’s military incursions, and point out that the period coincided with a series of droughts.
Using stable carbon and oxygen isotope data from oak tree rings, the study authors reconstructed the Central European hydroclimate and found that the most devastating Hun raids of 447, 451, and 452 all occurred during extremely dry years.
“Tree ring data gives us an amazing opportunity to link climatic conditions to human activity on a year-by-year basis,” said study author Professor Ulf Büntgen. “We found that periods of drought recorded in biochemical signals in tree-rings coincided with an intensification of raiding activity in the region.”
Based on these findings, the researchers write that “the Huns’ apparently inexplicable violence may have been one strategy for coping with climatic extremes within a wider context of the social and economic changes that occurred at the time.”
This assumption is strengthened by previous isotopic analyses of fifth-century Hunnic skeletons, which revealed sudden changes in diet that may reflect the various strategies employed by the Huns in response to an uncertain climate.
The authors speculate that some of the group’s raids may have been launched to secure food and livestock, although they concede that more evidence is required to support this theory.
They also say that Attila’s demands that the Romans hand over an extensive strip of territory flanking the Danube might have been a mitigating strategy, as land in a floodplain would have provided greater food security in times of drought.
Furthermore, an unstable climate may have led to major social restructuring within Hun communities, as herders abandoned their flocks to become raiders.
The emergence of these war parties would then have led to a new network of allegiances between warlords, with Attila at the top of the hierarchy.
Such alliances would probably have been maintained with gold subsidies, which may explain Attila’s increasing demands for Roman gold.
“Climate-induced economic disruption may have required Attila and others of high rank to extract gold from the Roman provinces to keep war bands and maintain inter-elite loyalties,” explains Hakenbeck.
Fortunately for the Romans, Attila died suddenly in 453 after choking on his own blood following a nosebleed, and the Huns faded away shortly after. However, the damage they had already inflicted proved cataclysmic for the Roman Empire, highlighting the impact that climate can have on even the mightiest of civilizations.
Tiny flakes tell a story of tool use 300,000 years ago
Tübingen University and Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment team analyze flint chips found in Schöningen, Lower Saxony.
Overview of the flint chips from Schöningen, which were created as “waste” during the re-sharpening of knife-like tools. They are sorted by size in millimeters. In the middle a scale of 3cm.
When prehistoric people re-sharpened cutting tools 300,000 years ago, they dropped tiny chips of flint – which today yield evidence of how the wood was processed by early humans.
The small flint flakes were discovered at the Lower Paleolithic site of Schöningen, Lower Saxony. Now, a multidisciplinary team led by the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (SHEP) in Tübingen has analyzed this very old material for the information it can provide. The study has been published in Scientific Reports.
The 57 small stone chips and three bone implements for re-sharpening stone tools were discovered around the skeleton of a Eurasian straight-tusked elephant that had died on the shore of a lake about 300,000 years ago.
“We can prove, among other things, from these finds that people – probably Homo heidelbergensis or early Neanderthals – were in the vicinity of the elephant carcass,” says Dr. Jordi Serangeli, director of the archaeological excavations in Schöningen. “This site is located about two meters below the famous site of the world’s oldest spears,” he adds.
A snapshot of Stone Age life
Tübingen researcher Flavia Venditti, the study’s lead author, says the story of the Stone Age is told mainly via the study of objects worked by our ancestors.
“One is inclined to believe that large tools such as knives, scrapers and points are more significant than simple flakes, especially when they are small and really just a byproduct of tool production.
But even microscopic stone chips, in the context of the overall evidence, can tell us a lot about the way of life of our ancestors,” she says.
This is how the scene might have played out when people discovered the straight-tusked elephant’s carcass 300,000 years ago in what is now Schöningen. They brought their tools with them.
Most of the fragments studied were smaller than one centimeter, Venditti reports. “Through a multidisciplinary approach that included technological and spatial analysis, the study of residues and signs of use, and methods of experimental archaeology, we were able to obtain more of the Stone Age story from these stone chips,” Venditti says. “The small flakes come from knife-like tools, they were knocked off during re-sharpening.” The chips fell to the ground, where they stayed when the people moved on with their tools, she said.
Evidence of woodworking
Early human – Homo heidelbergensis – working wood with the help of a scraping tool that was later re-sharpened on the spot of the elephant 300,000 years ago in what is now Schöningen.
Fifteen pieces showed signs of use typical of working fresh wood.
“Microscopic wood residues remained attached to what had been the tool edges,” Venditti says. In addition, micro use-wear on a sharp-edged natural flint fragment proved that people used it to cut fresh animal tissue. “Probably this flint was used in the butchering of the elephant,” she says.
These results are further evidence of the combined use of stone, bone, and plant technologies 300,000 years ago, as has been documented several times in Schöningen, Venditti says.
Professor Nicholas Conard from Tübingen and head of the Schöningen research project emphasizes that “this study shows how detailed analyses of traces of use and microresidues can provide information from small artifacts that are often ignored.
This is the first study to produce such comprehensive results from 300,000 years old re-sharpening flakes.
The prerequisite for this kind of research is that the artifacts are handled with extreme care from excavation throughout the analyses.”
The archaeological excavation at the Paleolithic sites in Schöningen and the scientific investigation are a long-term project of the University of Tübingen in cooperation with the Senckenberg Nature Research Society and the State Heritage Office of Lower Saxony. The project is funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture in Hanover.
A princely tomb discovered in the infrastructure project of the A7 Ploieşti-Buzău highway in Romania
An impressive archaeological discovery took place on the Ploiești-Buzău section of the Moldova Highway. The excavations uncovered a princely tomb, most likely belonging to a warrior from the migration period.
The discovery of the warrior princely tomb, which contains various weapons and ornaments, some of which are made of gold, was announced by the national highway company CNAIR.
During the feasibility study for the A7 highway, four archaeological sites were discovered on the Ploiești-Buzău lot. Because not all expropriations had taken place at the time, archaeological research continued after the work began, when four other sites were identified.
In the case of the infrastructure project of the A7 Ploiești-Buzău motorway, archaeologists were limited in their investigations because some portions of the route were not expropriated, which led to the impossibility of accessing the entire land, CNAIR explained.
“Even in this situation, on lot 1 of the mentioned project, on approximately 14 of the 21 km, the intrusive archaeological diagnosis could be carried out during the feasibility study phase, and four archaeological sites were identified,” the company said, adding that, later on, four other sites were found.
Archaeological research at one of these sites led to the discovery of the princely tomb.
The archaeological research is carried out by specialists from the “Vasile Pârvan” Institute of Archeology in Bucharest who tried, in extremely difficult conditions from the point of view of the weather, to collect all the information that this type of discovery provides.
Experts consider this warrior tomb dating back 4 or 5 AD centuries to be an outstanding archaeological discovery.
The tomb amazes with its varied and rich inventory, from elaborately crafted and decorated weapons to gold ornaments for both the deceased and the horse in which he was buried.
In the tomb was also discovered the horse next to which the warrior was buried, weapons, but also ornaments. It is, in total, more than 120 pieces, most of them in gold, inlaid with precious stones.
After the archaeological research, the works will be presented to the public in a special exhibition.
The Egyptian archaeological mission affiliated with the Supreme Council of Antiquities has been working at Tell al-Deir ruins in the new city of Damietta.
Together they discovered 20 tombs dating back to the Late Period of ancient Egypt, while completing the excavation work it is conducting at the site, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziri, said.
He also pointed out the importance of this discovery in rewriting the history of Damietta Governorate.
He added that the discovered tombs varied between tombs made of mud bricks and simple pits.
The mud brick tombs may date back to the Sawi era, specifically the 26th Dynasty, as the architectural planning of the discovery tombs was a widespread and well-known model in the late period.
There are also the technical features and pottery vessels discovered inside it, Ayman Ashmawy, head of the Egyptian antiquities sector at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said.
The mission also discovered golden chips that covered the remains of human burials.
These are embodying the deities Isis, Heqet, and Bastet, as well as the embodiment of the protective eye of Horus (Udjat), and Horus in the form of a falcon while spreading his wings.
Many funerary amulets of different shapes, sizes, and stones, such as scarabs, the headrest, the two feathers of Amun, and many deities: including Isis, Nephthys, Djehuty, and Taweret, were also discovered, Qotb Fawzy, head of the Central Department of Antiquities of Lower Egypt and Sinai and head of the archaeological mission, stated.
The miniature models of canopic vessels for preserving the viscera of the deceased during the mummification process, and statues of the four sons of Horus were also found.
The mission is continuing its excavation work at the site in order to uncover the secrets of the Tell Al-Deir necropolis, Reda Salih, Director of the Damietta Antiquities District, said.
In previous seasons the mission uncovered many burial customs and methods of successive civilizations on the land of Egypt in the Greco-Roman era, at Tel Al-Deir.
Dyed Cotton Fibers Found at Neolithic Village Site in Israel
Around 7,000 years ago, somebody arrived in a prehistoric village in today’s northern Israel with a luxurious novelty: cotton.
Excavation work at the site where the cotton fibers were found.
Cotton was not known to the earliest civilizations rising in the Near East because it isn’t indigenous to the region, and where and when it was first domesticated remains a mystery. But now traces of this alien plant with its exquisitely soft bolls have been detected in Tel Tsaf.
This is the earliest trace of cotton found in the Near East to date by centuries, the researchers say. They believe it originated in the Indus Valley, though do not rule out an African origin.
How did cotton get to Tel Tsaf 7,000 years ago from the Indus Valley (or North Africa)? By trading, suggest Li Liu of Stanford University, Maureece Levin of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Florian Klimscha of the Lower Saxony State Museum (Hannover, Germany) and Danny Rosenberg of the University of Haifa, writing in Frontiers in Plant Science.
Excavation work at the site where the cotton fibers were found.
Good times in the Late Neolithic
Tel Tsaf contains the ruins of a village that arose about 7,300 to 7,200 years ago and would thrive for about 500 years, after which it was deserted for reasons that remain unknown. That in itself is quite the mystery given the abundance of its environs in the central Jordan Valley, south of the Sea of Galilee, Rosenberg notes. But for its time, this had been some settlement.
The wonders found during half a century of excavation there include the most ancient copper object in this part of the Middle East (there’s somewhat older in Iraq), a clay model of a grain silo – possibly indicating ritual involving food cultivation and storage – and a stamped sealing from around 7,000 years ago. This all suggests, the archaeologists surmise, that Tel Tsaf was an extraordinarily wealthy place as Late Neolithic settlements went.
7,000-yeAr-old seal stamp
Earliest copper artifact in the Middle East
Now Liu, Rosenberg and colleagues have detected cotton microfibers, at least some of which were dyed, from 7,000 years ago. This may provide further indication of trading relationships at the cusp of the transition from the Late Neolithic to the Early Chalcolithic in the valley.
It bears adding that the earliest cotton reported previously was in Dhuweila, eastern Jordan, and dates to centuries later – sometime between 6,450 years ago to around 5,000 years ago.
To be clear, it isn’t that humans strolled around in the altogether with their bits flapping in the breeze until discovering the delights of cotton. The thinking, says Rosenberg, is that the earliest garb was animal skins, whether worn to preserve modesty, for reasons of status, for warmth or for some other reason.
But hmo-kind discovered plant fibers at least tens of thousands of years ago. In 2020, archaeologists found no less than three-ply cord in a Neanderthal context in France, taking the crown from 23,000-year-old string found in Ohalo, Israel. What the Neanderthals or humans from Ohalo were doing with string, we do not know. However, the archaeologists note that the ability to create cord is the prerequisite for a host of potential developments, including textile weaving.
Textiles do not preserve well in the archaeological record, to put it mildly. Yet moving on from the Ohalo cord, evidence of early weaving pops up here and there – including an extremely complex woven basket found in a cave in the Judean Desert from 10,500 years ago. Material made of oak bast (the innards of bark), meanwhile, was found in Çatalhöyük, Turkey, from 8,500 years ago.
10,500-year-old basket found in Judean Desert, buried in the floor of a cave
In short, before cotton, people in the region were using bast and flax fibers. And now Liu, Rosenberg and the team report on cotton in Tel Tsaf – definitely from afar, and seemingly before the plant had even been domesticated. And it was dyed, to boot.
What colors were the fibers tinted, and can they speak to Neolithic tastes? They cannot. Rosenberg stresses that the sample of fibers from Tel Tsaf is small (123 microfibers in total), and 16 being observed to be cotton in shades of blue, three pink, one purple, one green and three brown/black means precisely nothing about their preferences. What it does mean, the professor qualifies, is that these late prehistoric peoples were not just making textiles and fibers – they were doing further manipulation and coloring their cloths.
By the way, the most frequently used fiber in ancient Tel Tsaf was bast, and they also used flax and jute, the archaeologists report.
Olive pits found at Tel Tsaf
A story from Pakistan
Let us move onto the cotton’s origin. Why couldn’t the cotton fibers of Tel Tsaf be local? And why do they think it’s Pakistan, not North Africa?
It isn’t likely to have been grown locally because cotton is happiest in tropical and subtropical regions with ample water. It apparently didn’t grow in prehistoric Israel, and the thinking is that like the “invention” of agriculture itself – the cultivation of cotton arose independently around the world, including in the Indus Valley and North Africa. “But cultivation in North Africa was later,” Rosenberg explains.
The earliest archaeological evidence of cotton’s use is in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period at the Mehrgarh burial site in central Balochistan, Pakistan. Cotton threads were used to string copper beads about 8,500 to 7,500 years ago. It bears clarifying that the earliest known cotton fabric is a tiny fragment of actual cloth (albeit stuck to the lid of a silver vase), which was discovered at Mohenjo-daro, also Pakistan, from 5,000 to 4,750 years ago.
So, cotton was known in some context in prehistoric Pakistan at the time of its appearance in Tel Tsaf, Rosenberg says.
What cotton? Wild cotton. The plant apparently wouldn’t be domesticated for at least 2,000 years more, he explains. “Based primarily on evidence from seeds, domestication is thought to have occurred during the time of the Harappan civilization (2600-1900 B.C.E.),” the authors write.
And how might the wild cotton have been used, aside from making threads to string crude copper beads? Weaving textiles is a reasonable assumption, because cotton isn’t the stuff for baskets. As for another clothing source staple, the sheep did join our human story about 10,000 years ago, in parallel with the start of the Neolithic Revolution. However, the archaeological record of perishables is spotty at best and the earliest recognition of the charms of wool as opposed to mutton stew is not clear. Some think wool-shearing and related technology arose in the Chalcolithic; some think that in Mesopotamia it began as much as 9,000 years ago.
Looking toward Jordan from Tel Tsaf.
The invisible technology
Now let us confuse the issue. Archaeological evidence of microfibers – mainly bast but wool too – have been detected going back tens of thousands of years: for instance, in 30,000-year-old Upper Paleolithic deposits in Georgia, and from 28,000 to 13,500 years ago in northern China. Traces of bast have been found in the weird Natufian “boulder mortars” in Israel’s Rakefet Cave from about 13,000 years ago. Uses of these fibers remain mysterious, ditto the mortars.
The thing is that in contrast to stone tools and even bones, textiles decay really fast under most circumstances. It’s extraordinary for any of this “invisible technology” to survive the eons, Rosenberg says. One of the earliest examples of real-McCoy fabric was found in the so-called warrior’s grave by Jericho, from the late Chalcolithic or Early Bronze Age. He was buried with a bow and a big piece of fabric.
As for the thought that the cotton could have reached Tel Tsaf by trade thousands of years before the horse was domesticated – it isn’t a stretch. An obsidian blade originating in Turkey was found in a Neolithic settlement next to Jerusalem from 9,000 years ago and other examples of ancient stuff being where it shouldn’t abound. Asked if there’s any evidence whatsoever of trade between Tel Tsaf specifically with prehistoric Pakistan, Rosenberg has an intriguing answer: maybe.
Obsidian beads from Anatolia.
“The only thing is beads made of olivine crystals, which we think were from Africa from around 7,000 years ago. Chemical testing shows they’re like olivine in Africa – but olivine also exists in Pakistan,” he says. “Maybe we were wrong and the olivine was from Pakistan.” Tel Tsaf also has obsidian beads hailing from Turkey and there’s also that ancient copper artifact: its origins aren’t clear, but they think it’s probably Anatolian.
“Trade” doesn’t have to mean that merchants were walking from Tel Tsaf to Anatolia or Baluchistan; artifacts may change hands over centuries before being lost or otherwise winding up in ruins that we thrill at finding thousands of years later.
In the late Neolithic and early Chalcolithic, there were massive movements of peoples, and there may have been good reason why Tel Tsaf was so prosperous in that early time – hundreds of years before metals and other accoutrements of advancing civilizations would seriously arrive. It was smack on the route of long-distance exchange networks in the southern Levant. Including, maybe, with the Indus Valley.
In Turkey’s Gedikkaya Cave, a stone figurine was discovered inside a 16,500-year-old votive pit
A stone figurine was discovered in a 16500-year-old votive pit belonging to the Epi-paleolithic period, the transition phase from the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic Age, during the archaeological excavation carried out in the Gedikkaya Cave in the İnhisar district of Bilecik in northwest Turkey.
With the permission of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums, the rescue excavation started by the Bilecik Museum Directorate in the cave 1 kilometer away from İnhisar continues.
Traces of life were found in the cave at a depth of 180 meters, a height of about 20 meters, and a width of 30 meters, in two sections, the lower and the upper.
Bilecik Şeyh Edebali University (BŞEU) Faculty of Arts and Sciences Archeology Department Lecturer Assoc. Dr. Deniz Sarı, an ongoing study under the scientific consultancy of sheds light on the archeology of the region.
In the excavation, a flat ax made of diorite (rock type), grinding and hand stones, blades (stone chips), scraper, arrow and spearhead, ocher, spindle whorls, perforated ceramics (pottery), awl, a malachite ingot, and beads were unearthed.
In addition, important information was obtained about the craft branches such as stone and woodworking, mining and weaving carried out in the cave.
Finally, a votive pit dated to the Epipalaeolithic Period, 14500 BC was found in the cave.
The stone figurine found in the votive pit is a stone and stylized example of the Anatolian mother goddess figurines.
Bilecik Museum Director Harun Küçükaydın told Anadolu Agency (AA) that the earliest human traces known in the cave date back to 16,500 years ago, and that a large number of finds dating from 7000 to 5000 BC were found in the radiocarbon analysis.
Küçükaydın continued as follows: ” A partially worked stalagmite was unearthed in this votive pit. We can associate the stalagmite with the Neolithic cultures of the Near East.”
“The seated human figurine carved from this stone can be considered a link between Venus figurines from the European Upper Paleolithic period and mother goddess figurines from Anatolian Neolithic cultures.”
Explaining that they determined that the earliest of the finds obtained during the studies in Gedikkaya Cave dates back to 16,500 years ago, Associate Professor Deniz Sarı said: “This period, of which we know very little, is a process by which European Upper Paleolithic cultures spread to the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Mediterranean.
Excavations in the larger area will provide more concrete data about the location of Gedikkaya in this extension and the pre-human activity at the end of the Ice Ages. However, in 2022, we uncovered a votive pit in the cave in relation to the process in question.”
“We unearthed a naturally formed stalagmite inside the pit surrounded by rows of crescent-shaped stones. The stalagmite is partially embroidered, giving the appearance of a stele.
The pit was probably closed later. The finds inside the pit are extremely important and contain very new and extraordinary data in terms of prehistoric archeology.
One of them is this a stone figurine. The stylized figurine in a sitting position is depicted with its legs spread out to the sides. It is a stone and stylized example of a mother goddess figurine characteristic of the Neolithic cultures of the Near East. In this context, the studies in the cave will make new contributions to the literature in the context of Anatolian prehistoric archeology.”
An ancient coin hoard containing 1.5 tonnes of coins from the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties has been discovered in Jiangsu Province, east China.
The coins were strong together with straw ropes and arranged in tidy stacks.
The underground remains were unearthed in Shuangdun Village, Jianhu County of Yancheng City. The pit mouth of the hoard was square, 1.63 meters long, 1.58 meters wide, and 0.5 meters deep.
Bronze coins connected in series with straw ropes were neatly layered and paved inside. Most were from the Song Dynasty.
The coins that were discovered were well-preserved, and the majority of them had legible inscriptions, indicating a significant value for further study.
In ancient China, such hoards were often buried in the ground so as to preserve precious porcelain, coins, metal tools, and other valuables, said the researchers.
Seventy wells were also found around the coin hoard, which was near the battle frontline of the Song and Jin troops, making the researchers wonder whether the excavation site belonged to a hutted camp.
The majority of the coins in the hoard are Song dynasty wens.
Bronze wens were the common currency until a severe copper shortage forced the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) to issue lower-quality and lower-value coins. Iron was difficult to mint and rusted quickly once in circulation.
Due to a lack of bronze coinage, the government was forced to cut military wages in half in 1161, resulting in the invention of paper money.
In 1170, the state began to require that half of all taxes be paid with Huizi paper currency stepped into the breach.
See a stunning, life-like reconstruction of a Stone Age woman
Oscar Nilsson, a forensic artist based in Sweden, spent 350 hours reconstructing the Stone Age woman’s likeness.
A Stone Age woman who lived 4,000 years ago is leaning on her walking stick and looking ahead as a spirited young boy bursts into a run, in a stunning life-size reconstruction now on display in Sweden.
Although her likeness is new — it debuted last month in an exhibit about ancient people at Västernorrlands Museum — researchers have known about this woman’s existence for nearly a century.
During the construction of a road in the hamlet of Lagmansören in 1923, workers found her skeletal remains buried next to the remains of a child, likely a 7-year-old boy.
“With our eyes and perhaps in all times, you tend to think that this is a mother and son,” said Oscar Nilsson, the Sweden-based forensic artist who spent 350 hours creating the lifelike model.
“They could be. Or they could be siblings: sister and brother. They could be relatives, or they could just be tribe friends. We don’t know, because the DNA was not that well preserved to establish this relationship.”
But as Nilsson molded the woman’s posture and sculpted her face, he pretended that she was near her son who was scampering ahead of her. “She’s looking with the mother’s eyes — both with love and a bit of discipline,” Nilsson told Live Science. This stern but tender gaze looks as if she’s on the cusp of calling out to the boy, telling him to be careful.
This reconstruction is based on the remains of a Neolithic woman who lived about 4,000 years ago in what is now Sweden.
The Neolithic woman and youngster were interred in a cist grave, a burial built with long, flat stones in the shape of a coffin. The woman died in her late 20s or early 30s, and at 4 feet, 11 inches (150 centimeters) in height, “she was not a very tall person,” even for the Neolithic period, Nilsson said.
The woman’s remains didn’t show any signs of malnutrition, injury or diseases, although it’s possible that she died of an illness that didn’t leave a mark on her remains, Nilsson said.
“She seems to have had a good life,” he said. She ate land-based food, an examination of the isotopes (different versions of elements) in her teeth revealed, which was odd given that her grave was found near a fish-filled river near the coast, he said.
When Nilsson received the commission to reconstruct the woman two years ago, he scanned her skull and made a copy of it with a plastic 3D printer. As with other reconstructions he’s created, including those of an ancient Wari queen from what is now Peru and a Stone Age man whose head was found on a spike, Nilsson had to take into account the ancient individual’s sex, age, weight and ethnicity — factors that can influence the person’s facial tissue thickness and general appearance. But because the woman’s DNA was too degraded, he wasn’t sure about her genetic background, hair or eye color.
So Nilsson took an educated guess about her appearance. There were three large migration waves into ancient Scandinavia: During the first, hunter-gatherers with dark skin who tended to have blue eyes arrived between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago; the second wave included pale-skinned, dark-haired and brown-eyed farmers from further south who moved north about 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, when this woman was alive; and the third wave included the Yamnaya (also spelled Yamna) culture from modern-day Ukraine, who were a bit darker-skinned than the farmers and brought the art of metal making with them when they arrived about 3,500 years ago, making them the first Bronze Age culture in the region, Nilsson said.
Based on this information, Nilsson gave the woman brown hair and eyes, and light skin like the farmers’. Even so, the woman wasn’t necessarily a full-time farmer; she likely participated in a mix of hunting and gathering as well as agricultural practices, he said.
“We can’t say for sure whether she was living a nomadic life, if she was living the life of the early farmers; it’s impossible to say,” Nilsson said.
“But we have chosen to make the safest interpretation, which is she was both because, of course, there was a transition period of many hundreds of years when they left the old way of living.”
The Neolithic’s woman’s reconstructed clothes were made from moose and elk, boots from reindeer and beaver, and backpack from fox.
Archaeologists didn’t find any artifacts buried with the woman, but modern artists gave her reconstruction a bird claw necklace.
The skull of the Neolithic woman. It was scanned and 3D printed for the reconstruction project.
The Neolithic woman’s clothing was inspired by those from Indigenous Americans, Indigenous Siberians and Ötzi the Iceman mummy.
Fancy furs, Stone Age style
In the reconstruction, the woman from Lagmansören is dressed head to toe in fur and leather. This is the work of Helena Gjaerum, a Sweden-based independent archaeologist who uses Stone Age techniques for tanning leather.
Before dressing the model, Gjaerum studied the ancient climate, landscape, vegetation, and animal life of Neolithic Lagmansören. Based on what she uncovered, she designed the woman’s clothes out of moose and elk, the shoes out of reindeer, beaver, and the backpack out of fox.
The woman likely stuffed hay inside the shoes for padding, noted Gjaerum, who took inspiration from clothing worn by Indigenous Americans and Indigenous Siberians, as well as the leather clothing of Özti the Iceman mummy, who lived about 5,300 years ago in the Italian Alps.
Preparing the clothes entailed hours of labor. Gjaerum, who acquired real animal remains, scraped the flesh off the skins and then put them in a river — a method that helps loosen the fur from the skin.
Next, she scraped off the fur and slathered on a solution made of moose brain, a fatty mixture that bonds with skin fibers. Without this mixture, the skin would stiffen and could easily rot if it got wet, she said.
The next several steps involved massaging, stretching and smoking the skins and then finally designing the clothing. Gjaerum’s young son, who was about the same height as the Stone Age woman, served as a helpful model, Gjaerum said.
She made the clothing as comfortable and practical as possible — for instance, by not putting a seam at the top of the shoulder, where water might seep in during rainy weather.
Often, modern people think of Stone Age humans as primitive, dressed in ugly, toga-like furs as in “The Far Side” comics. But Gjaerum challenged that perception. “I think it would be crazy to think she’d have primitive clothes,” Gjaerum told Live Science. “I wanted to make her dress like you could dress today” because you are both Homo sapiens.
