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Carn Glas, near Inverness, is thought to date to the Neolithic period and be about 5,000 years old.It is Scotland's longest chambered cairn, measuring 116m (380ft) in length.Bones were removed from the site on Essich Moor by antiquarians in 1918, according to Historic Environment Scotland (HES).The new photographs include images in false colours that clearly show the shape of Carn Glas...HES describes Carn Glas as having significant archaeological importance due to its potential for improving understanding of Neolithic rituals and funeral practices.It comprises three interlinked cairns.Other sites from the same period in history are close by, and include a stone...

Archaeologists working with Norway’s Secrets of the Ice program recently got a shock when a arrow shaft they had previously dated to the Iron Age turned out to be some 4,000 years old....after the researchers cleaned the glacial silt off one end, they found a notch befitting a stone arrowhead and not an iron one. The team co-directed by Lars Holger Pilø – an archaeologist with the local Department of Cultural Heritage – concluded that the arrow dated to the Stone Age, pending radiocarbon dating.Whatever the results, the arrow joins a wealth recovered by Secrets of the Ice, which has...

...at Vinjeøra in southern Trøndelag County... The first discoveries to make it to the surface... large pieces of flint that were highly reminiscent of early, pioneer settlements...When the excavations in Vinjeøra got under way properly... the researchers found evidence from people who came to Finnmark from the east around 9000 BC.The ice remained the longest in Scandinavia compared to the rest of Europe during the last Ice Age. The Norwegian coast only became free of ice around 12,500 years ago. The first people arrived in what we now know as Norway and Sweden about 1,000 years later.Skeletal analyses have previously...

LIN (Albania) (AFP) – Beneath the turquoise waters of Lake Ohrid, the "Pearl of the Balkans", scientists have uncovered what may be one of Europe's earliest sedentary communities, and are trying to solve the mystery of why it sheltered behind a fortress of defensive spikes. A stretch of the Albanian shore of the lake once hosted a settlement of stilt houses some 8,000 years ago, archaeologists believe, making it the oldest lakeside village in Europe discovered to date. Radiocarbon dating from the site puts it at between 6000 and 5800 BC. "It is several hundred years older than previously known...

Existing archaeological discoveries indicate that the earliest ceramic tiles in the world appeared in Greece circa late 3,000 BC, but only in simple forms. Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating results show that the absolute age of tiles unearthed from the relic site of Qiaocun date back to 2400–2200 BC, proving these as the earliest composite tiles.In the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC), terracotta tile manufacturing was significantly developed in central Shaanxi Province, forming the Longshan Western Zhou culture, which further spread to the rest of Asia including South Korea, Japan, the Russian Far East and Southeast Asia.To avoid the...

More than 2,500 stone and shell beads strewn across the child's upper body, along with a double-holed stone pendant positioned behind the neck and a mother-of-pearl ring laying on the chest, originally formed the impressive necklace, archaeologist Hala Alarashi and colleagues report August 2 in PLOS ONE. Perforations around the upper half of the mother-of-pearl ring held strings or cords for seven rows of beads that connected to the pendant, they say...Artisans fashioned the necklace out of stones and shells imported from different parts of the Middle East. Two amber beads represent the oldest yet discovered.The intricate necklace had come...

...The bottlenose dolphin is thought to have washed up on an ancient shoreline after the last Ice Age.Archaeologists have described the prehistoric discovery in Causewayhead, Stirling, as "the find of a lifetime".The father-of-four said he recognised the dolphin's skull by its long snout, rows of teeth and unmistakable shape.The bones were preserved in clay, around 80cm below the current ground level, for what is thought to have been up to 8,000 years.With them was a broken tool made from deer antler, which would have been used to carve the meat.It is thought the dolphin was made into a meal by...

In the mid-2000s, archaeologists excavating a burial site in France uncovered a 6,500-year-old mystery. Among the remains of more than 120 individuals, one grave stood out. It contained a nearly complete female skeleton alongside a few assorted bones that looked like they had been dug up and moved from another grave.Ancient DNA from the enigmatic relocated remains now shows that they belonged to the male ancestor of dozens of the other people buried nearby. This insight comes from a study that used ancient genomics to build the largest-ever genealogy of a prehistoric family, providing a snapshot of life in an...

The four fish traps discovered by mountain hiker Reidar Marstein last summer consist of long poles that have been driven into the seabed. They form the pattern of a fence that has guided the fish into a chamber. From there, Stone Age folks could easily use a fishing net to catch the fish they needed.Each chamber consisted of around 40-50 poles, and the archaeologists have found remains that are as much as 80 centimetres long. They are so well preserved that they 'might as well have been cut last year', they write enthusiastically on KHM's Facebook page.In the Norwegian mountains,...

Shuwaymis is an area about 370 km southwest of the city of Ha’il, near the town of al-Ha’it, in southern Ha’il province. The petroglyphs were known by local Bedouin for centuries, but only drawn to the attention of authorities by a local school headmaster, Mamdouh al Rasheedi, in 2001. Professor Saad Abdul Aziz al-Rashid, calls Shuwaymis “a unique and very important find.” The setting differs significantly from Jubbah in being surrounded by striking lava flows that impede travel, especially by camels and horses. Wadis are therefore important avenues for herders, and it is in these valleys that Neolithic and later...

Based on sites excavated in the western United States, archaeologists know Paleo-American Clovis hunter-gatherers who lived around the time of the extinctions at least occasionally [emphasis added] killed or scavenged Ice Age megafauna such as mammoths. There they've found preserved bones of megafauna together with the stone tools used for killing and butchering these animals...Unfortunately, many areas in the Southeastern United States lack sites with preserved bone and associated stone tools that might indicate whether megafauna were hunted there by Clovis or other Paleo-American cultures. Without evidence of preserved bones of megafauna, archaeologists have to find other ways to examine...

The Early Neolithic site of KTG, located on the North African Mediterranean coast near the Gibraltar strait (Fig. 1a), predates and partly overlaps in time with IAM2 (Table 1). At KTG a full Neolithic assemblage is found, including a diversity of cultivated cereals, domestic mammals and cardial ceramics. In contrast to the people at IAM, those at KTG are genetically similar to European Early Neolithic populations...Overall, the genetic patterns of local interaction between different groups in northwestern Africa are comparable to those found in Europe: farmers assimilated local foragers' ancestry in a unidirectional admixture process. Cases of hunter-gatherer communities adopting...

Seven tiny, fragile wing-bones discovered at a prehistoric site in northern Israel turn out to have been perforated. They may have served as whistles imitating the calls of predatory birds, Israeli archaeologists reported Friday in Nature Scientific Reports...One of the flutes was discovered complete, the team says.They could have been imitating bird calls in order to attract them, as duck hunters do to this day...Eynan is associated with a Late Stone Age culture, the Natufians, pre-agricultural groups living in Israel and the surrounding region from 15,000 to about 11,700 years ago. They were hunter-gatherers but were among the earliest people...

Every day, hundreds of stone artifact enthusiasts around the world sit down and begin striking a stone with special tools attempting to craft the perfect arrowhead or knife. This craft is known as flintknapping, and for most, it is a skilled hobby or art form that was thought to occasionally require bandages or stitches.However, new research suggests flintknapping is far more dangerous than previously understood. And for early humans who were without the modern conveniences of hospitals, antibiotics, treated water and band-aids, a more severe cut could get infected and be life-threatening...They found Nicholas Gala, at the time a Kent...

La Marmotta was first discovered in 1989 beneath the waters of Lake Bracciano, a Circum-Alpine Lake of volcanic origin in the Italian region of Lazio. The lake owes its origin to intense volcanic and tectonic activity, resulting in the collapse of the magma chamber that created a depressed area now occupied by the lake.During the Early Neolithic Period, a lakeshore settlement was established which today lies approximately 300 metres from the modern shoreline, submerged at a depth of 11 metres.Underwater surveys of the settlement have documented several thousand wooden piles or support posts on the lakebed; the spatial distribution of...

Location of Kaylu archeological site (a no 1), Jebel (a no 2), and Dam-Dam-Cheshme 1 and 2 (a no 3); view of the rockshelter (b1); location of the two burials (b2 and b3); Caspian Sea view from the site (c); human remains state of preservation (d and e); lithic industry from layer 7 of Kaylu (f) – point (1), lunates (2, 3), end-scraper (4), splinted pieces (5, 6), cores (7, 8). Credit: Open Archaeology (2023). DOI: 10.1515/opar-2022-0289 Stone Age humans may have made extended maritime voyages on the Caspian Sea, according to a new study published in the journal Open...

Archaeologists From the University of Alicante Have Discovered Cave Paintings in Penáguila, Spain.The team were conducting a drone survey of the Castellet-Barranc del Salt ravine and Port de Penáguila, revealing Neolithic cave paintings from 7,000-years-ago.The survey is part of a pioneering project, enabling the researchers to study inaccessible mountain shelters by photographing and recording videos of the walls in 18 shallow cavities using small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s).Two of the shelters contained wall paintings, with the most notable being in the del Salt ravine that contains painted figures of anthropomorphic archers, in addition to depictions of deer and goats, some...

Best known as the supposed birthplace of Marco Polo... the latest discovery, which has been posted on Facebook by the Univerity of Zadar - a translation of which is below.In the underwater archaeological research of the submerged Neolithic site of Soline on the island of Korčula, archaeologists found remains that surprised even them. Namely, under the deposits of sea mud, a road was discovered that connected the sunken prehistoric settlement of the Hvar culture with the coast of the island of Korčula.These are carefully stacked stone slabs that were part of a four-meter-wide communication that connected the artificially created island...

Serbian archaeologists say a 7,500-year-old copper axe found at a Balkan site shows the metal was used in the Balkans hundreds of years earlier than previously thought. The find near the Serbian town of Prokuplje shifts the timeline of the Copper Age and the Stone Age's neolithic period, archaeologist Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic told the independent Beta news agency. 'Until now, experts said that only stone was used in the Stone Age and that the Copper Age came a bit later. Our finds, however, confirm that metal was used some 500 to 800 years earlier,' she said. The Copper Age marks the...

Lake Constance is a 63km-long central European lake... formed by the Rhine Glacier during the ice age and is a Zungenbecken or tongue basin lake.No evidence of Palaeolithic finds have been found in the vicinity, but archaeologists have previously discovered stone tools (microliths) and hunting camps, suggesting that Mesolithic hunter gatherers frequented the area without settling.Neolithic activity dates from the middle and late Neolithic, when the so-called pile dwelling and wetland settlements were established on Lake Überlingen (Lower Lake Constance), the Constance Hopper (a bay in Lake Constance) and on the Obersee (Upper Lake Constance).In 2015, a 20 km line...