Cultural History » Prehistory

Signs Of An Ancient Paint Factory

Brent — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 23:08:27 +0000

Digging deeper in a South African cave that had already yielded surprises from the Middle Stone Age, archaeologists have uncovered a 100,000-year-old workshop holding the tools and ingredients with which early modern humans apparently mixed some of the first known … Continue reading →

Neanderthals In Britain

Brent — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 13:46:39 +0000

Early pre-Neanderthals inhabited Britain before the last ice age, but were forced south by a previous glaciation about 200,000 year ago. When the climate warmed up again between 130,000 and 110,000 years ago, they couldn’t get back because, similar to today, the Channel sea-level was raised, blocking their path. This discovery shows they returned to our shores much earlier than 60,000 years ago, as previous evidence suggested.

ScienceDaily

A Neanderthal Bedroom

Brent — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 13:36:31 +0000

Anthropologists have unearthed the remains of an apparent Neanderthal cave sleeping chamber, complete with a hearth and nearby grass beds that might have once been covered with animal fur.

Neanderthals inhabited the cozy Late Pleistocene room, located within Esquilleu Cave in Cantabria, Spain, anywhere between 53,000 to 39,000 years ago, according to a Journal of Archaeological Science paper concerning the discovery.

Living the ultimate clean and literally green lifestyle, the Neanderthals appear to have constructed new beds out of grass every so often, using the old bedding material to help fuel the hearth.

MSNBC

Native American Ancestry

Brent — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:24:21 +0000

Anthropologists had long believed humans migrated to the Americas in a relatively short period from a limited area in northeast Asia across a temporary land corridor that opened across the Bering Strait during an ice age.

But government archaeologist Alejandro Terrazas says the picture has now become more complicated, because the reconstruction more resembles people from southeastern Asian areas like Indonesia.

MSNBC

Human Culture Is An Evolutionary Force

Brent — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:24:00 +0000

As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.

New York Times

Domesticated Horses Date Back 5,500 Years

Brent — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:44:45 +0000

New evidence, corralled in Kazakhstan, indicates the Botai culture used horses as beasts of burden — and as a source of meat and milk — about 1,000 years earlier than had been widely believed, according to the team led by … Continue reading →

Ice Age Summer Fashion

Brent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:15:45 +0000

… the threads of at least some Ice Age women included caps or snoods, belts and skirts, bandeaux (banding over the breasts) and bracelets and necklaces — all constructed of plant fibers in a great variety of cloth, from twined and basket wear to plain weaves. While styling varied across Eurasia, the finest weaves are ‘comparable to not only Neolithic but even later Bronze and Iron Age products, or, in fact, to thin cotton and linenwear worn today,’ …

ScienceDaily

New Dates For Clovis Sites

Brent — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:32:35 +0000

New radiocarbon dates kept the controversy over the peopling of the Americas simmering in 2007. An analysis of dates for the best-documented Clovis sites suggests the culture arose later and was shorter-lived than once thought, a finding that some say deals a blow to the “Clovis first” theories that maintain the big-game-hunting people were the first immigrants to the New World.

Archaeology Story

Year Of The Lapita

Brent — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:27:49 +0000

There was no doubt about including in our 2007 Top Ten the discovery that chicken bones from ancient Polynesian sites in Tonga and Samoa and El Arenal, a Chilean site occupied between A.D. 700 and 1390, had identical DNA. The chicken was domesticated in Southeast Asia, but how it arrived in the New World before Europeans arrived was a mystery. Now it seems that Polynesian seafarers brought them, adding to the evidence for trans-Pacific contacts. The presence of South American sweet potatoes and bottle gourds on Pacific islands had already hinted at this, along with some (to my mind less convincing) evidence that complex fishhooks and sewn plank canoes used by southern California Indians had Polynesian origins.

Archaeology Story

Early Austronesian Migration To Luzon

Brent — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:06:01 +0000

In the northern Philippines, interaction between the foragers of the Peuffffablanca cave sites and the early Austronesian farmers of the Cagayan Valley (northern Luzon) was established by at least 3500 years ago. Farmers exchanged earthenware pottery, clay earrings, spindle whorls and shell beads with foragers, possibly for forest products. This exchange, however, did not, on present evidence, include cereal-based foods such as rice. The botanical evidence from the cave sites shows a heavy reliance on wild and arboreal food sources.

BIPPA Article