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Aurignacian Lunar Calendar Photo ­- Anonymous / Don’s MapsThe Oldest Lunar Calendars and Earliest Constellations have been identified in cave art found in France and Germany. The astronomer-priests of these late Upper Cultures understood mathematical sets, and the interplay between the moon annual cycle, ecliptic, solstice and seasonal changes on earth. The First (Lunar) Calendar – The archaeological record’s earliest data that speaks to human awareness of the stars and ‘heavens’ dates to the Aurignacian Culture of Europe, c.32,000 B.C. Between 1964 and the early 1990s, Alexander Marshack published breakthrough research that documented the mathematical and astronomical knowledge in the...

Abstract: The Châtelperronian is a Neandertal-associated archeological culture featuring ornaments and decorated bone tools. It is often suggested that such symbolic items do not imply that Neandertals had modern cognition and stand instead for influences received from coeval, nearby early modern humans represented by the Aurignacian culture, whose precocity would be proven by stratigraphy and radiocarbon dates. The Grotte des Fées at Châtelperron (France) is the remaining case of such a potential Châtelperronian–Aurignacian contemporaneity, but reanalysis shows that its stratification is poor and unclear, the bone assemblage is carnivore-accumulated, the putative interstratified Aurignacian lens in level B4 is made up...

Humans and Neanderthals, thought to have coexisted for 10,000 years across the whole of Europe, are more likely to have lived at the same time for only 6,000 years, the new study suggests. Scientists believe the two species could have lived side by side at specific sites for periods of only about 2,000 years, but Mellars claims they would have lived in competition at each site for only 1,000 years... Two new studies of stratified radiocarbon in the Cariaco Basin, near Venezuela, and of radiocarbon on fossilized coral formations in the tropical Atlantic and Pacific have given scientists a better...

PARIS -- Cave drawings thought to be older than those in the famed caves of Lascaux have been discovered in a grotto in western France, officials from the Charente region said Sunday. A first analysis by officials from the office of cultural affairs suggests the drawings were made some 25,000 years ago, Henri de Marcellus, mayor of the town of Vilhonneur where the cave is located, told France-Info radio. He said, however, that the date could only be confirmed by further investigations. Cavers exploring a part of a grotto in the Vilhonneur forest made the discovery in December, the local...

Baby's first word filled Stone Age Papa with pride By David Derbyshire, Science Correspondent (Filed: 22/07/2004) One of the first words to be uttered by Stone Age babies was probably "papa", according to scientists trying to piece together the origins of human language. Researchers believe the word may have been passed down through the generations from a "proto-language" spoken 50,000 years ago. However, other linguists have argued that "papa", "dada" and "mama" are common in many languages simply because they are the first noises made by babbling babies. A new French study has found that the word "papa" is used...

Jan. 27, 2004 ? In a prehistoric battle for survival, Neanderthals had to compete against modern humans and were wiped off the face of the Earth, according to a new study on life in Europe from 60,000 to 25,000 years ago. The findings, compiled by 30 scientists, were based on extensive data from sediment cores, archaeological artifacts such as fossils and tools, radiometric dating, and climate models. The collected information was part of a project known as Stage 3, which refers to the time period analyzed. he number three also seems significant in terms of why the Neanderthals became extinct....

Illustration by Michael Rothman Before An Australopithecus, sporting full-bodied fur about four million years ago. After An archaic human walked fur-free about 1.2 million years ago, carrying fire on the savanna ONE of the most distinctive evolutionary changes as humans parted company from their fellow apes was their loss of body hair. But why and when human body hair disappeared, together with the matter of when people first started to wear clothes, are questions that have long lain beyond the reach of archaeology and paleontology. Ingenious solutions to both issues have now been proposed, independently, by two research groups analyzing...

Narrow skulls clue to first Americans 11:24 04 September 03 NewScientist.com news service Skull measurements on the remains of an isolated group of people who lived at the southern tip of Mexico's Baja California has stirred up the debate on the identity of the first Americans once again. The earliest inhabitants of North America differed subtly but significantly from modern native Americans. The difference is clearly seen in the skull shapes of the first people to colonise the continent, who had longer, narrower skulls than modern people. One theory says it is because two distinct groups of people migrated to...

Eagle talons are regarded as the first elements used to make jewellery by Neanderthals, a practice which spread around Southern Europe about 120,000 and 40,000 years ago. Now, for the first time, researchers found evidence of the ornamental uses of eagle talons in the Iberian Peninsula... "Neanderthals used eagle talons as symbolic elements, probably as necklace pendants, from the beginnings of the mid Palaeolithic", notes Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo. In particular, what researchers found in Cova Foradada are bone remains from Spanish Imperial Eagle (Aquila Adalberti), from more than 39,000 years ago, with some marks that show these were used to take...

An Italian couple and their 11-year-old son died in a freak accident on Tuesday when they fell into a 10ft-deep hole that suddenly opened up in a highly active volcanic area near Naples. Police said the child strayed beyond safety barriers and was swallowed up by the pit, plunging into boiling hot mud at the Solfatara Crater in Pozzuoli, part of a huge volcanic area known as the Campi Flegrei or Phlegrean Fields. His father, 45, reportedly rushed to his rescue but also fell into the sink-hole. The boy’s mother, 42, then went to their aid, but she too was...

Before a volcano erupts, there are usually signs of what’s to come; small earthquakes, heat emission, and ground swelling, to name a few, have all been observed to precede eruptions. Volcanologists also monitor the changing composition of gas emissions at volcanoes in the months leading up to an eruption. However, precursory variations in gas have not yet been verified to occur in volcanoes hosting active lava lakes. To find out if volcanic gas emissions might also be used to predict eruptions at lava lake–hosting, carbon-poor volcanoes, Aiuppa et al. looked at Chile’s Villarrica volcano. Villarrica towers 2847 meters over the...

When Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the Italian city of Pompeii in ash, killing 2,000 people, it was regarded as one of the most catastrophic natural disasters and is still studied heavily today. By comparison, a nearby supervolcano called Campi Flegrei, which means “burning fields,” would put the lives of 500,000 Italians at risk and cause damage that would extend to the surrounding nations.

A volcanic field off the shore of Sicily, near Naples, has become active, scientists report. The Campi Flegrei volcano is much larger than nearby Mt. Vesuvius, the volcano whose eruption destroyed the ancient city of Pompei. An eruption of this “supervolcano” could endanger much of Europe. News of the volcanic activity was made public less than a week after the blood of St. Januarius failed to liquefy when displayed in the Naples cathedral. Sicilians have long believed that when the miracle of St. Januarius does not occur, disaster will follow for the people of Naples. A supervolcano caused the largest...

The Italian name for the caldera — Campi Flegrei, or “burning fields”— is apt. The 7.5-mile-wide cauldron is the collapsed top of an ancient volcano, formed when the magma within finally blew. Though half of it is obscured beneath the crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean, the other half is studded with cinder cones and calderas from smaller eruptions. And the whole area seethes with hydrothermal activity: Sulfuric acid spews from active fumaroles; geysers spout water and steam and the ground froths with boiling mud; and earthquake swarms shudder through the region, 125 miles south of Rome. And things seem...

BEC CREW 22 DEC 2016 It's dangerously close to hitting a critical pressure point. A 12-km wide cauldron that forms a vast supervolcano on the coast of Italy is showing signs of reawakening after almost 500 years of inactivity. Not only is this site rumoured to be responsible for the extinction of the Neanderthals, it’s got 500,000 people living around it right now, and researchers say it appears to be approaching a critical pressure point that could lead to an eruption. You might imagine a supervolcano as like a regular volcano, only supersized, rising up out of the ground and...

A slumbering Campi Flegrei volcano under the Italian city of Naples shows signs of "reawakening" and may be nearing a critical pressure point, according to a study published Tuesday. Italian and French scientists have for the first time identified a threshold beyond which rising magma under the Earth's surface could trigger the release of fluids and gases at a 10-fold increased rate. This would cause the injection of high-temperature steam into surrounding rocks, said lead author Giovanni Chiodini, a researcher at Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Bologna. "Hydrothermal rocks, if heated, can ultimately lose their mechanical resistance,...

Researchers have securely dated a prehistoric human stone tool industry that is thought to have been used by early modern humans, or possibly late Neanderthals, around the time when early modern humans were beginning to emerge in Europe, arguably sometime between 40,000 to 50,000 years B.P... The Uluzzian, a prehistoric stone tool techno-tradition represented by lithic artifacts unearthed by archaeologists at cave locations primarily in Italy and Greece, has been a central contender as a possible "transitional" industry between the typical stone tool types (the Mousterian) used by late European Neanderthals and those (Aurignacian, Châtelperronian) of the earliest modern human...

A hidden "super volcano" near Pompeii threatens an eruption that could make Vesuvius look like a picnic, scientists warn. The Phlegraean Fields zone of intense seismic activity -- which the ancient Romans believed was the gateway to hell -- could doom millions of people in the Naples area if it erupts, Reuters reports. Scientists plan to drill more than two miles below its surface to monitor any signs of a pending eruption in the huge chamber of molten rock, but some experts fear that the drilling itself could trigger an earthquake or eruption. Areas like the Phlegraean fields "can give...

The ground on the western edges of Naples, Italy is rising, spurring worries of a possible volcanic eruption, but scientists now think they know exactly what is causing the uplift and may be able to better predict any potential eruption. Using GPS measurements, a group of scientists at the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology in Italy monitored the ground’s motions for several years, and based on the patterns they observed, they believe the uplifting is caused by magma intruding from a shallow chamber. The rising motions of the ground reached a peak rate of about three feet per year...

The Neanderthals were a hardy species that lived through multiple ice ages and would have been familiar with volcanoes and other natural calamities. But the eruptions 40,000 years ago were unlike anything Neanderthals had faced before, Cleghorn and company say. For one thing, all the volcanoes apparently erupted around the same time. And one of those blasts, the Campanian Ignimbrite, is thought to have been the most powerful eruption in Europe in the last 200,000 years... The researchers acknowledge that there are gaps in the volcanoes theory. For instance, the time line needs to be better defined -- did...