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Cambridge Scholar Makes Rare 30,000-Year-Old Find
Psysorg.com ^ | 8-3-2006

Posted on 08/03/2006 10:34:52 AM PDT by blam

Cambridge scholar makes rare 30,000-year-old find

Archaeologists have unearthed a pair of tiny bone fragments dating back almost 30,000 years and featuring minute designs carved by some of our earliest European ancestors.

The thumbnail-sized bone fragments are engraved with parallel lines and match similar artefacts uncovered in the same area during the 19th century. They were carved by hunter-gatherers as they slowly made their way north in pursuit of moving populations of mammoth and reindeer 25-30,000 years ago.

The unusual find was made by a Cambridge scholar, Becky Farbstein, who has been working at Predmosti in north Moravia, in the Czech Republic. The excavation team comprises archaeologists from both the University of Cambridge and the Czech Republic.

Experts are, however, still not sure what significance the markings had and are trying to build up a collection to interpret their meaning. So far such finds have been few and far between.

“There has not been much in the way of decorated objects found at this site for a very long time,” Miss Farbstein said. “They are very similar in design to other decorations that were found a century ago. The designs are pretty enigmatic and understanding their meaning is still a problem. But for that reason any addition to the amount of art we have is valuable as it will enable us to piece that meaning together.”

Miss Farbstein spotted the fragments while sorting through a mixture of solid objects left over from a filtration process which the team are using to identify plant remains. Fortunately, she recently began studying this important collection of early decorated forms and recognised their significance.

“Both pieces preserve a regular series of parallel lines engraved on one side of a bone fragment,” she said. “The lines are the same distance from each other on both pieces, suggesting the two fragments might have originally been part of the same decorated object. The character of this decoration is very similar to other engraved designs found in the past at Predmosti and this addition to the corpus of enigmatic decoration from this site is very exciting.” Sponsored Links (Ads by Google)

The joint excavation team, from the Institute of Archaeology at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the University of Cambridge, is led by Professors Jiri Svoboda and Martin Jones. Predmosti, on the outskirts of the north Moravian town of Prerov, sits at a gap in the central European mountains, the start of a corridor through which these early hunters gradually migrated on to the North European Plain.

Just over 100 years ago, brickyard workers in Predmosti discovered vast quantities of mammoth bone and tusk. Many of the fragments had been cut, broken and burnt by the human communities who once lived there and a few had been fashioned into human or animal shapes, or incised with these enigmatic designs. Much of the evidence was lost to the brickyards, but the fragments that remain form the focus of both the current dig and an open-air museum sponsored by the City of Prerov to celebrate and present to visitors their world-famous prehistory.


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: 30000; cambridge; find; godsgravesglyphs; makes; mammoth; old; rare; schilar; year

1 posted on 08/03/2006 10:34:55 AM PDT by blam
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To: SunkenCiv

GGG Ping.


2 posted on 08/03/2006 10:35:26 AM PDT by blam
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To: blam

Oh, thought they were found on campus, perhaps exposed by erosion along the bank of the Cam.


3 posted on 08/03/2006 10:37:00 AM PDT by RightWhale (Repeal the law of the excluded middle)
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To: blam
Cambridge scholar makes rare 30,000-year-old find

Helen Thomas' birthplace?

4 posted on 08/03/2006 10:38:45 AM PDT by theDentist (Qwerty ergo typo : I type, therefore I misspelll.)
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To: theDentist

No. She was born in Kan tuck ee. Must have been a younger sibing.


5 posted on 08/03/2006 10:41:13 AM PDT by Blogger (http://www.propheteuon.com)
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To: PatrickHenry

Ping


6 posted on 08/03/2006 10:50:57 AM PDT by Vaquero ("An armed society is a polite society" Robert A. Heinlein)
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To: blam; FairOpinion; StayAt HomeMother; Ernest_at_the_Beach; 24Karet; 3AngelaD; ...
Thanks Blam.

To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. Thanks.
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)

7 posted on 08/03/2006 10:55:45 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (updated my FR profile on Thursday, July 27, 2006. https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: Vaquero; Junior; Coyoteman

Thanks.


8 posted on 08/03/2006 11:22:54 AM PDT by PatrickHenry (The Enlightenment gave us individual rights, free enterprise, and the theory of evolution.)
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To: blam

The lines are probably the results of chance - scratches produced by earthquake movements over thousands of years.


9 posted on 08/03/2006 12:38:23 PM PDT by aimhigh
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To: blam

At 30,000 years old, wouldn't these most likely be the work of homo erectus, rather than "our ancestors?"


10 posted on 08/03/2006 1:19:41 PM PDT by Interesting Times (ABCNNBCBS -- yesterday's news.)
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To: blam

Parallel lines are universally a form of recorded counting, aren't they?


11 posted on 08/03/2006 1:21:15 PM PDT by marsh2
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To: aimhigh
The lines are probably the results of chance - scratches produced by earthquake movements over thousands of years.

Nice try.

The normal thing to do with lines like this is take a look through an electron microscope and see what the precise shape is. A flaked stone tool will leave a very different shape than a random rock in a land movement.

(Archaeology is not as easy as it looks. There is a lot of science going on that never makes the TV.)

12 posted on 08/03/2006 5:44:41 PM PDT by Coyoteman (I love the sound of beta decay in the morning!)
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To: Interesting Times
At 30,000 years old, wouldn't these most likely be the work of homo erectus, rather than "our ancestors?"

No. You are off by about 100,000+ years. Modern humans are now placed in the 150,000-200,000 year range.

It used to be thought that modern humans came in some 30-40,000 years ago, but that figure has been changed quite a bit.

13 posted on 08/03/2006 5:47:13 PM PDT by Coyoteman (I love the sound of beta decay in the morning!)
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