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A rare artifact has been discovered by archaeologists at an ancient mammoth kill site near Douglas, Wyoming, which they say is the oldest of its kind ever found in the Americas. The discovery, a tube-shaped piece of bone, is likely to have been a bead dating to around 12,940 years old, potentially making it the oldest known instance of American perforated jewelry. The discovery was made by University of Wyoming archaeology Professor Todd Surovell and his team at the La Prele Mammoth site, a location first revealed to archaeologists in 1986 when mammoth remains were found eroding out of a...

Hunter-gatherers from Mexico migrated into California more than 5,000 years ago, potentially spreading distinctive languages from the south into the region nearly 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, a new genetic study details.The finding challenges the idea that what are known as the Uto-Aztecan languages — which include the Aztec and Toltec language Nahuatl, as well as Hopi and Shoshoni — were spread northward by prehistoric migrants from Mexico along with maize farming technologies...Nakatsuka and his colleagues studied ancient DNA extracted from the teeth and bones of 79 ancient people found at archaeological sites in central and southern California. These...

The New York Times proclaimed in a recent article that humans caused catastrophic wildfires in California, leading to a large and tragic loss of life. The author seemed to blame these fires on man-made climate change and pointed to evidence of humanity’s negative effect on the environment by citing a peer-reviewed study in a prestigious academic journal. The science is clear, the article argues: Human beings caused one of history’s great tragedies through their careless disregard for the environment.

Luzio, a 10,000-year-old skeleton from São Paulo, Brazil, has some familiar-looking DNA.He belongs to the same genetic population as all modern-day Indigenous peoples of the Americas...Luzio was previously thought to have possibly belonged to a different, older, population, who settled in modern-day Brazil around 14,000 years ago...“If there was another population here 30,000 years ago, it didn’t leave descendants among these groups.” [sic]The researchers examined the genomes of 34 fossil samples, each at least 10,000 years old, from four different places on the Brazilian coast.Luzio, among them, is the oldest human fossil found in São Paulo State. He’s named after...

Who lived at Machu Picchu at its height? A new study, published in Science Advances, used ancient DNA to find out for the first time where workers buried more than 500 years ago came from within the lost Inca Empire.Researchers, including Jason Nesbitt, associate professor of archaeology at Tulane University School of Liberal Arts, performed genetic testing on individuals buried at Machu Picchu in order to learn more about the people who lived and worked there...It was once part of a royal estate of the Inca Empire.Like other royal estates, Machu Picchu was home not only to royalty and other...

An ancient Maya relief sculpture that was identified in a German antique shop has been returned to Mexico via the Mexican consulate in Frankfurt on Tuesday. It’s believed that the artifact was looted from Mexico. The relief carving depicts a profile of a skull. Experts believe the block relief would have been part of a wall, where similarly stacked carvings were intended to recall a Tzompantli (skull rack). Mesoamerican palisades were part of a ritual display of skulls belonging to sacrificial victims and prisoners of war. The artifact is thought to have been created during the Late Classic or Postclassical...

Ruins,Of,The,Ancient,Mayan,City,Of,Kabah,In,The Shutterstock/Yucatan Peninsula A team of archaeologists discovered a long-lost Mayan city beneath the jungle in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula in June, filled with pyramids, palaces and even a sports complex. The ancient Mayan ruins, currently named Ocomtun, were identified in the Balamku ecological reserve, which is more than 50 hectares in size, big enough to hide pyramids that rise some 50 feet into the sky, according to a news release from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. The site is believed to have been built and in use sometime around 250-1,000 A.D. and contained a number of large buildings,...

...In 2012, O’Grady’s team found camel teeth fragments under a layer of volcanic ash from an eruption of Mount St. Helens that was dated over 15,000 years ago. The team also uncovered two finely crafted orange agate scrapers, one in 2012 with preserved bison blood residue and another in 2015, buried deeper in the ash. Natural layering of the rockshelter sediments suggests the scrapers are older than both the volcanic ash and camel teeth.Radiocarbon-dating analysis on the tooth enamel... yielded exciting results: a date of 18,250 years before present (14,900 radiocarbon years).That date, in association with stone tools, suggests that...

Archaeologists working in Peru have uncovered a 3,000-year-old sealed corridor dubbed “the condor’s passageway” that likely leads to other chambers inside what was once a massive temple complex pertaining to the ancient Chavin culture. Located around 190 miles (306 km) northeast of Lima, the Chavin de Huantar archeological site is among the culture’s most important centers, thriving from around 1,500-550 B.C. The Chavin are well-known for their advanced art, often featuring depictions of birds and felines. They date back to the first sedentary farming communities in the northern highlands of the Peruvian Andes, more than 2,000 years before the Inca...

New research suggests humans lived in South America at the same time as now extinct giant sloths...Scientists analyzed...pendants made of bony material from the sloths...Dating of the ornaments and sediment at the Brazil site where they were found point to an age of 25,000 to 27,000 years ago...

An elaborately carved, U-shaped stone trophy was returned to Mexico after it nearly went up for sale at an Austrian auction house, the Art Newspaper reported Wedneday. The trophy, which resembles a yoke and is carved from sedimentary stone, is an ornate representation of the protective gear worn around players’ waists during the Mesoamerican ball game pelota. The artifact was recovered by the Mexican Embassy in Austria prior to the sale with help from Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture, and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in Mexico City, according to a statement from...

A Joint Project Involving the Kalispel Tribe and Archaeologists From Washington State University (Wsu) Has Led to the Discovery of 5,000‑year‑old Earth Ovens Near Newport in Washington State, United States.The ovens were found on land purchased by the Kalispel Tribe to accommodate for the construction of new housing near the tribal reservation.A team of professional archaeologists and fourth-year students from WSU is currently working to delineate the features of the ovens and investigate any potential changes in their size and shape over time...Radiocarbon dating of the ovens suggests that they are 5,000‑years‑old, with the oven contents being sent to WSU...

People have inhabited the Andes mountains of South America for more than 9,000 years, adapting to the scarce oxygen available at high altitudes, along with cold temperatures and intense ultraviolet radiation. A new genomic study published in the journal iScience suggests that Indigenous populations in present-day Ecuador also adapted to the tuberculosis bacterium, thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans..."We found that selection for genes involved in TB-response pathways started to uptick a little over 3,000 years ago," says Sophie Joseph, first author of the paper. "That's an interesting time because it was when agriculture began proliferating in the...

The remains of dozens of child sacrifice victims have been unearthed in Peru, and many more are likely waiting to be found, archaeologists say. The skeletons show evidence that the children's hearts were removed, said Gabriel Prieto, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Florida who directs the excavations at Pampa La Cruz, the site near Huanchaco where the remains were found. All 76 skeletons had a "transversal clean cut across the sternum," Prieto said, which suggests that "they possibly opened up the rib cage and then they possibly extracted the heart."

The South American mummies were likely victims of brutal murders...Behaving more like detectives than academics, a research team scanned three mummified bodies from Chile and Peru in South America to look for clues on how the individuals died. One male victim was hit on the head and stabbed in the back, while another male was likely killed after receiving "massive trauma" to the neck, which included dislocation, the researchers revealed....mummified remains can hold secrets that are lost when only bones are preserved. Both the stabbing and the cervical rotational trauma of the dislocated neck would have escaped detection in skeletons,...

Voyage to prove pharaohs traded cocaine By Tom Leonard in New York Last Updated: 2:21am BST 30/05/2007 An adventurer who believes that ancient man regularly crossed the Atlantic Ocean 14,000 years ago plans to recreate such a voyage in a 41ft raft made of reeds and eucalyptus tree branches. Basing his theory on the thinnest of historical evidence, Dominique Gorlitz believes that the discovery of traces of tobacco and cocaine in the tomb of the pharaoh Rameses II proves that there was trade between the Old and New Worlds. He also claims that 14,000-year-old cave paintings in Spain show that,...

American Drugs in Egyptian MummiesS. A. Wells www.colostate.edu Abstract: The recent findings of cocaine, nicotine, and hashishin Egyptian mummies by Balabanova et. al. have been criticized on grounds that: contamination of the mummies may have occurred, improper techniques may have been used, chemical decomposition may have produced the compounds in question, recent mummies of drug users were mistakenly evaluated, that no similar cases are known of such compounds in long-dead bodies, and especially that pre-Columbian transoceanic voyages are highly speculative. These criticisms are each discussed in turn. Balabanova et. al. are shown to have used and confirmed their findings with...

For in Manchester, the mummies under the care of Rosalie David, the Egyptologist [Keeper of Egyptology, Manchester Museum] once so sure that Balabanova had made a mistake, produced some odd results of their own... "We've received results back from the tests on our mummy tissue samples and two of the samples and the one hair sample both have evidence of nicotine in them. I'm really very surprised at this."

The hair of mummies from the town of San Pedro de Atacama in Chile reveals the people in the region had a nicotine habit spanning from at least 100 B.C. to A.D. 1450. Additionally, nicotine consumption occurred on a society-wide basis, irrespective of social status and wealth, researchers say.

An international team of anthropologists and bioarchaeologists has found the primary ingredients of ayahuasca — a plant-based drink that is reported to induce hallucinations and altered consciousness — in a 1,000-year-old leather bundle from a rock shelter in the Bolivian Andes.