Extensive Ancient Underground Network Discovered From Scotland to Turkey
German archaeologist Dr Heinrich Kusch, in his latest book ‘Secrets of the Underground Door to an Ancient World’ has revealed that tunnels were dug under literally hundreds of Neolithic settlements all over Europe and the fact that so many tunnels have survived 12,000 years indicates that the original network must have been huge.
‘In Bavaria in Germany alone we have found 700metres of these underground tunnel networks. In Styria in Austria we have found 350metres,’ he said. ‘Across Europe there were thousands of them – from the north in Scotland down to the Mediterranean.
The tunnels are quite small, measuring only 70cm in width, which is just enough for a person to crawl through. In some places there are small rooms, storage chambers and seating areas. Read more.
Contrary to their hunting reputation, Stone Age Siberians killed mammoths only every few years when they needed tusks for toolmaking, a new study finds.
People living between roughly 33,500 and 31,500 years ago hunted the animals mainly for ivory, say paleontologist Pavel Nikolskiy and archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Hunting could not have driven mammoths to extinction, the researchers report June 5 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
On frigid tundra with few trees, mammoth tusks substituted for wood as a raw material for tools, they propose. Siberian people ate mammoth meat after hunts, but food was not their primary goal. Read more.
SHIJIAZHUANG, April 29 (Xinhua) — Archaeologists have unearthed more than 30 pits believed to be New Stone Age garbage sites used by humans 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in north China’s Hebei Province.
The pits, various in size, shape and depth, were unearthed nearby an ancient village relics site within the Jialu village territory in Hebei’s Zhaoxian County, according to Han Jinqiu, director with the Prehistory Archaeological Research Department of Hebei Provincial Cultural Relics Institute.
Archaeologists found that the pits were not located at the center of the New Stone Age ancient village but nearby, said Han. Read more.
Researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have spent many years studying the remains of a Stone Age community in Karleby outside the town of Falköping, Sweden. The researchers have for example tried to identify parts of the inhabitants’ diet. Right now they are looking for evidence that fertilisers were used already during the Scandinavian Stone Age, and the results of their first analyses may be exactly what they are looking for.
Using remains of grains and other plants and some highly advanced analysis techniques, the two researchers and archaeologists Tony Axelsson and Karl-Göran Sjögren have been able to identify parts of the diet of their Stone Age ancestors.
‘Our first task was to find so-called macrofossils, such as old weed seeds or pieces of grain. By analysing macrofossils, we can learn a lot about Stone Age farming and how important farming was in relation to livestock ranching,’ says Axelsson. Read more.
To most people, a useless flint axe is just that. To archaeologist Sigrid Alræk Dugstad, it is a source of information about Stone Age children.
Whereas arrowheads, axes and other formal tools have traditionally received a lot of attention in research, the archaeologist Sigrid Alræk Dugstad now concentrates on what is at the bottom of the hierarchy, namely the production debris and the unfinished and discarded products.
In the article “Early child caught knapping: A novice early Mesolithic flintknapper in southwestern Norway,” she has turned upside down the hierarchy of objects from the Early Stone Age.
“A succession of failed strokes, terminating in many hinge and step fractures, indicates that axe was made by a novice flintknapper, probably a child,” Dugstad says. She refers to archaeological assemblage from an open air-site found on the island of Hundvåg in south-western Norway which she studied in connection with her master’s thesis. Read more.
Some remarkable traces of Stone Age life were unearthed recently in northern Israel, including a pit of burned bean seeds and a carving of a penis that’s more than 6,000 years old, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) reported.
Archaeologists are excavating at Ahihud Junction ahead of the construction of a new Israeli railroad line to the city of Karmiel. They found evidence of ancient settlements from two eras: the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period and the Early Chalcolithic period (7th millennium B.C. – 5th millennium B.C.).
“For the first time in the country, entire buildings and extensive habitation levels were exposed from these early periods, in which the rich material culture of the local residents was discovered,” IAA excavation directors, Yitzhak Paz and Ya’akov Vardi, said in a statement this month. Read more.
A 14,000-year-old engraved reindeer antler is possibly the first piece of early human art ever found. The specimen was uncovered in the 1800s and has been in the vast collections of the Natural History Museum. Its scientific importance, and clues as to how it was made are only now being revealed, scientists report today.
Natural History Museum scientists have pieced together the antler’s history. It was found between 1830 and 1848 in Neschers, France, by local village priest Jean-Baptiste Croizet. There are no known records of early human artwork finds before this time and so it is the first, or one of the first, discoveries of Stone Age portable art. Read more.
The Stone Age could just as easily be called the Roam Age.
Two new studies published February 27 in the Journal of Human Evolution advance the idea that ancient people and Neandertals walked or ran far greater distances than any human groups that followed, including more recent hunter-gatherers and today’s long-distance runners. Fossils of humans and their beetle-browed evolutionary cousins display signs of extremely extended travel that occurred between roughly 120,000 and 10,000 years ago, Colin Shaw and Jay Stock, biological anthropologists at the University of Cambridge in England report in one of the studies.
Shaw and Stock conclude that the Stone Age crowd moved around considerably more than southern Africans from a few thousand years ago who hunted over an area of 5,200 to 7,800 square kilometers. Highly trained athletes today who run 130 to 160 kilometers every week come in third in this mobility comparison. Read more.
