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Seafaring before the Neolithic -- circa 7th millennium BCE -- is a controversial issue in the Mediterranean. However, evidence from different parts of the Aegean is gradually changing this, revealing the importance of early coastal and island environments. The site of Ouriakos on the island of Lemnos (Greece) tentatively dates to the end of the Pleistocene and possibly the beginning of the Holocene, circa 12,000 BP... Obsidian, or 'volcanic glass', has been a preferred material for stone tools wherever it is found or traded. It also absorbs water vapour when exposed to air -- for instance, when it is shaped...

The skeleton of one of Abu Dhabi’s earliest inhabitants has been uncovered on Marawah Island in what historians believe was a “house for the dead”. An archaeological dig on the Western Region island, about 100 kilometres west of Abu Dhabi city, has also revealed the first use of stone-built architecture in the Arabian Gulf, dating back 7,500 years, the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority (TCA) said on Thursday. “This partial skeleton was inserted into one of the already semi-collapsed rooms of the house, indicating that the structure had originally been used as a house for the living, and then...

Excavation unearths oldest archaeological site in UAE By Prerna Suri 8 February 2005 DUBAI — The oldest archaeological site in the UAE dating back to 7,000 years, has been discovered on the island of Marawah, located about 100km west of Abu Dhabi, according to Dr Mark Beech, Senior Resident Archaeologist for the Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey (ADIAS). Dr Beech disclosed the findings at a lecture organised by the Dubai Natural History Group which was attended by a large crowd. The lecture covered important findings and discoveries by ADIAS during their excavation in 2004 including a skeleton of what is...

Remains of oldest inhabitant of Abu Dhabi found (By a staff reporter) 30 June 2004 ABU DHABI - Remains of the earliest-known inhabitant of Abu Dhabi have been found on the western island of Marawah by the Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey, ADIAS, as part of their spring excavation season, it was announced on Tuesday. Marawah is part of the Marawah Marine Protected Area, MPA, which is managed by Abu Dhabi's Environmental Research and Wildlife Development Agency (ERWDA). The excavations were carried out at the site of a 7,000 year old village which has the best-preserved and most-sophisticated stone buildings...

Modern science has held that islands such as Cypress and Crete were first inhabited by seafaring humans approximately 9,000 years ago by agriculturists from the late Neolithic period. Simmons writes that research over the past 20 years has cast doubt on that assumption however and suggests that it might be time to rewrite the history books. He cites evidence such as pieces of obsidian found in a cave in mainland Greece that were found to have come from Melos, an island in the Aegean Sea and were dated at 11,000 years ago as well as artifacts from recent digs on...

builders in a Galician village confused a neolithic tomb with a broken stone picnic table and replaced the 6,000-year-old artefact with a brand spanking new concrete bench. In what one archaeologist dubbed a "monumental error" the ancient tomb, that had heritage status and was therefore meant to be protected, has been completely destroyed. Galicia’s Department of Culture, Education and Universities has launched an investigation after the picnic bench - which sits on a solid concrete slab in the town of Cristovo de Cea in the northwestern region of Galicia - was placed on top of an ancient tomb, classed as...

Thanks to this newly sequenced genome, researchers have been able to determine that farmers from both the Mediterranean and inland routes are very homogeneous and clearly derive from a common ancestral population that, most likely, were the first farmers who entered Europe through Anatolia... Analysis of the genome from Cova Bonica has made it possible to determine the appearance of these pioneer farmers, who had light skin and dark eyes and hair. This contrasts with previous Mesolithic hunters who, as the man from La Braña in León (Spain)—recovered in 2014 by the same research team—has demonstrated, had blue eyes and...

Spanish excavations in Can Sadurní cave (Begues, Barcelona) have discovered four human skeletons dated to about 6,400 years ago. The skeletal remains of the individuals are particularly important as they are in a very good state of preservation. An archaeological campaign carried out previously identified other individuals which were not so well preserved but belong to the same stratigraphic layer. Archaeologists excavating in 1999, also discovered within the cave, evidence for the earliest European beer, which may have been included as part of the death ritual... A small landslip from the outer part of the cave must have taken place...

Archaeological research carried out at the Neolithic site of La Draga, near the lake of Banyoles, has yielded the discovery of an item which is unique in the western Mediterranean and Europe. The item is a bow which appeared in a context dating from the period between 5400-5200 BCE, corresponding to the earliest period of settlement. It is a unique item given that it is the first bow to be found in tact at the site. According to its date, it can be considered chronologically the most ancient bow of the Neolithic period found in Europe. The study will permit...

For a second straight day, opposition protesters erected burning roadblocks and shattered windows in a section of Haiti's capital on Tuesday to press for new elections less than a week before a January 24 presidential and legislative runoff. A few thousand people joined the demonstration in downtown Port-au-Prince, marching through narrow streets and occasionally chanting: "The revolution has started, get your gun ready." Young men threw rocks, smashing windshields and the windows of a bank. They also overturned vendors' stalls to block law enforcement vehicles. Associated Press journalists saw one injured protester with what appeared to be a bullet wound....

Jun. 18, 2006 0:24 | Updated Jun. 18, 2006 10:4511,000-year-old grain shakes up beliefs on beginnings of agriculture By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH Bar-Ilan University researchers have found a cache of 120,000 wild oat and 260,000 wild barley grains at the Gilgal archaeological site near Jericho that date back 11,000 years - providing evidence of cultivation during the Neolithic Period. The research, performed by Drs. Ehud Weiss and Anat Hartmann of BIU's department of Land of Israel studies and Prof. Mordechai Kislev of the faculty of life sciences, appears in the June 16 edition of the prestigious journal Science. It is the...

A geology team has contradicted claims that bluestones were dug by Bronze Age man from a west Wales quarry and carried 240 miles to build Stonehenge. In a new twist, Open University geologists say the stones were in fact moved to Salisbury Plain by glaciers. Last year archaeologists said the stones came from the Preseli Hills. Recent research in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology suggests the stones were ripped from the ground and moved by glaciers during the Ice Age. Geologists from the Open University first claimed in 1991 that the bluestones at one of Britain's best-known historic landmarks had...

A gruesome discovery in eastern France casts new light on violent conflicts that took lives -- and sometimes just limbs -- around 6,000 years ago. Excavations of a 2-meter-deep circular pit in Bergheim revealed seven human skeletons plus a skull section from an infant strewn atop the remains of seven human arms, say anthropologist Fanny Chenal of Antea Archáologie in Habsheim, France, and her colleagues. Two men, one woman and four children were killed, probably in a raid or other violent encounter, the researchers report in the December Antiquity. Their bodies were piled in a pit that already contained a...

High in the skies over Kazakhstan, space-age technology has revealed an ancient mystery on the ground. Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern steppe reveal colossal earthworks — geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest estimated at 8,000 years old. The largest, near a Neolithic settlement, is a giant square of 101 raised mounds, its opposite corners connected by a diagonal cross, covering more terrain than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Another is a kind of three-limbed swastika, its arms ending in zigzags bent...

Whatever their differences, all Indus researchers agree that there is no consensus on the meaning of the script. There are three main problems. First, no firm information is available about its underlying language. Was this an ancestor of Sanskrit or Dravidian, or of some other Indian language family, such as Munda, or was it a language that has disappeared? Linear B was deciphered because the tablets turned out to be in an archaic form of Greek; Mayan glyphs because Mayan languages are still spoken. Second, no names of Indus rulers or personages are known from myths or historical records: no...

At the end of August, Oxford Cotswold Archaeology (a joint venture between Oxford Archaeology and Cotswold Archaeology) completed the excavation of a site on the edge of Thame in Oxfordshire. The work was carried out in advance of new housing being built by Bloor Homes... Later in the Neolithic, a small henge monument was constructed within the causewayed enclosure. A second, smaller, ring-ditch was located close to the henge and this may also be of later Neolithic date. During the Bronze Age, the site saw virtually no activity or, at least, no activity which left a mark in the archaeological...

Archaeological excavations of the Israel Antiquities Authority done prior to laying down a sewer line turned up evidence of human habitation 9,000 years ago... in the Judean foothills moshav (cooperative village) of Eshta'ol... According to Benjamin Storchen, the excavation director on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, "the ancient findings we unveiled at the site indicate that there was a flourishing agricultural settlement in this place, and it lasted for as long as 4,000 years." The archaeological artifacts discovered in the excavation site indicate that the first settlers arrived here about 9,000 years ago. This period is called by archaeologists...

An archaeological team excavating the ancient site of Alacahöyük, one of the most significant centers of the ancient Hittite civilization, cooked pastries belonging to Hittite cuisine that dates back 4,000 years. The foods found on Hittite tablets were cooked without modern technology or equipment. The 4,000-year-old Hittite cuisine was cooked in Alacahöyük, an important Neolithic settlement and Turkey's first nationally excavated area. Aykut Çınaroğlu, the head of the excavations and professor of archaeology at Ankara University, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that Chef Ömür Akkor, an excavation team member, prepared a special Hittite menu in light of the available archaeological findings....

Before there was pottery in Cyprus, there was barbecue. And in the spirit of the Stone Age, archaeologists on the Mediterranean island recreated a prehistoric pit feast this summer — feeding 200 people with pig and goat, slow-roasted underground — to test the cooking methods of Neolithic chefs. A 9,000-year-old barbecue pit was recently discovered at Prastio Mesorotsos, a site in the Diarizos Valley outside of Paphos, which has been almost continuously occupied from the Neolithic era to the present. It took three years of excavations before archaeologists from the University of Edinburgh got to the bottom of the stone-lined,...

The tomb was a relic of the first settlers in the Spanish Cristovo de Cea region and was originally built some 4000 years before the birth of Christ. Every builder, tradesman and DIY enthusiast knows the embarrassment of making a howler on the job, whether it's taps installed the wrong way round or a wonky shelf. But few will know the sheer panic these Spanish workmen probably felt when they discovered they had smashed up a 6,000-year-old Neolithic tomb and replaced it with a concrete picnic table. The tomb was a relic of the first settlers in the Cristovo de...