Stone Pages Archaeo News: January 2020 Archives

January 2020 index:

21 January 2020: 17,000-year-old Venus statue in Romania stirs controversy; The alleged discovery of a 17,000-year-old Venus figurine in site near Piatra Neamt, in North-Eastern Romania, has stirred controversy after journalists reported that the figurine was found by two amateurs,...
: Damage to prehistoric burial mound in Wales; Welsh police are investigating 'appalling damage' at a Bronze Age burial mound which dates back 3,000-4,000 years. Gwent Police Rural Crime Team said the destruction was caused by off-road vehicles...
: Rock art scraped off in Greece by vandals; Archaeologists and historians are lamenting the destruction of several 3,000-year-old rock carvings on the Pangaion Hills near Kavala in northern Greece and calling for measures to protect the remaining samples...
: Australia wildfires reveal ancient aquaculture system; Australia's wildfires have revealed an ancient aquaculture system built by indigenous people which is thought to date back to 4,600 BCE. The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape is situated south-west of...
: Neolithic house orientations finally solved; Human behaviour is influenced by many things, most of which remain unconscious to us. One of these is a phenomenon known among perception psychologists as 'pseudo-neglect'. This refers to the...
23 January 2020: Ancient Chinese people experimented with different methods of making beer; Ancient Chinese people were working hard to create the perfect recipe for making beer 6,000 years ago, scientists reveal. Nine Neolithic amphorae shards - used for transporting beer, wine and...
: Unique Stone Age Ring made from deer antler discovered in Denmark; A prehistoric ring made of deer antler was discovered at a Neolithic site in Denmark that has been hidden for millennia, having been swallowed by the sea thousands of years...
: Neolithic Italy was home to networks of metal exchange; During the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE, Italy was home to complex networks of metalwork exchange, according to a study by Andrea Dolfini of Newcastle University (UK), and Gilberto Artioli...
: Prehistoric farmers helped African wolves have a population boom; Humans were not the only species that experienced a population boom after the development of farming - so did the recently described African wolf (Canis aureus lupaster). According to a...
24 January 2020: Children's graves reveal genetic diversity of ancient West Africa; Africa is the ancient homeland of our species, yet only a handful of sites bearing human fossils have successfully yielded ancient DNA, which is essential for grasping the genetic make-up...
: Study suggests two megalithic cultures were separate groups; A team of researchers from the U.K., Belgium and Spain has found evidence that two groups of people in Late Neolithic Europe living approximately 5,500 years ago belonged to two...
25 January 2020: Grave of an elite Bronze Age man reconstructed in 3D; A new 3D rendering of a 2,000-year-old aristocrat's grave shows how the tribes inhabiting the Małopolska region in Poland buried their elites. The richly-equipped kurgan, one of only a dozen...
: Triple Copper Age burial discovered in Croatia; While excavating one of the trenches in the highest part of Kovači in 2019, we discovered a triple Copper Age burial, possibly dating to the period of Kostolac Culture (3250-3000...
: 10,000-year-old cave paintings discovered in Sinai; A newly discovered cave in Sinai, Egypt, is the first of its kind in the region to be found decorated from floor to ceiling with colorful ancient paintings. Egyptologists with...
30 January 2020: Early modern humans cooked starchy food 170,000 years ago; Excavations at the Border Cave, about 400 kilometres north-northeast of Durban, South Africa, have revealed 55 small charred cylinders which researchers recognised as rhizomes. All appear to belong to the...
: Ancient humans engineered stone tools at Olduvai Gorge; Early Stone Age people engineered stone tools in complex ways between 1.8 and 1.2 million years ago, based on evidence from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania - one of the world's...
: Homo erectus may not have evolved in Asia; Indonesia is hugely important for understanding human migration and settlement patterns in Asia during the Early Pleistocene - a period that ended around 780,000 years ago. According to new research,...
: Ancient metalworking in Dubai; Now at the northern edge of the Rub al-Khalil desert in southern Dubai, the town of Saruq Al Hadid specialised in copper smelting until the pre-Islamic period, about 300 CE....
: Neanderthals could swim and dive?; Over 100,000 years ago at the Grotta dei Cavalli (Cave of Horses) on what is now the northwestern tip of Sicily, a group of Neanderthals made tools from clamshells -...
: Mounds in the USA could be older than previously thought; Earlier research concluded that earthen mounds on what is now the Louisiana State University campus in Baton Rouge were built 5,500 to 6,000 years ago, but LSU geology professor Brooks...