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The exceptional discovery of burials about 9,000 years old - probably containing the oldest human remains ever found in Corsica (France) - will allow a better understanding of the history of early settlement of the island and of the Mediterranean. On a hill near the village of Sollacaro, Southern Corsica, nestled under a huge ball-shaped block of eroded granite which served as a shelter for prehistoric peoples, the location has been excavated by a team of archaeologists from several French universities, assisted by a Danish colleague... Having uncovered the bones of four or five adults, a teenager, and a baby...

The rise of farming in late Stone Age Europe was no smooth transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles but a bloody takeover that saw nomadic populations wiped out by farmer-settlers in a few generations, a new study has found.In fact, twice in just a thousand years, the population of southern Scandinavia was entirely replaced by newcomers to the area, whose remains bear next to no trace of their predecessors in DNA profiles, analyzed by an international team of researchers."This transition has previously been presented as peaceful," explains study author and palaeoecologist Anne Birgitte Nielsen of Lund University...Using a technique called shotgun sequencing,...

Archaeologists in Cyprus have discovered what they believe could be the oldest evidence yet that organized groups of ancient mariners were plying the east Mediterranean, possibly as far back as 14,000 years ago... about 30 miles away from the closest land mass, may have been gradually populated about that time, and up to 2,000 years earlier than previously thought... The discovery at a coastal site on the island's northwest has revealed chipped tools submerged in the sea and made with local stone which could be the earliest trace yet of human activity in Cyprus. U.S. and Cypriot archaeologists conducting the...

In southern Spain’s Cave of the Bats, starting almost 10,000 years ago, people buried their dead with stunningly crafted baskets that wouldn’t shame the finest arts and crafts markets today.Armed with elaborate baskets made of the tough local grass, the first to bury their loved ones at Cueva de los Murciélagos were hunter-gatherers in the Mesolithic (at the tail end of the Ice Age). That activity then ceased for about 2,000 years, at which point a new population appeared in the cave: early farmers of the Neolithic, who interred their dead with a different type of woven-ware – and sandals...

The 11,000-year-old carving was found among the remains of a Neolithic structure in southeastern Turkey.Archaeologists in Turkey have discovered one of the world’s oldest known works of narrative art—and at the center of it is a man clutching his penis.The 12-foot-long carved panel, which forms a bench, was found last year during the excavation of the remains of a Neolithic communal structure at the archaeological site of Sayburç in southeastern Turkey. Details of the discovery were shared this week in a paper published in the latest edition of the peer-reviewed journal Antiquity.The piece, which is believed to be 11,000 years...

A new analysis of ancient footprints in South Africa suggests that the humans who made these tracks might have been wearing hard-soled sandals.Ichnological evidence from three palaeosurfaces on the Cape Coast, in conjunction with neoichnological study, suggests that humans may indeed have worn footwear while traversing dune surfaces during the Middle Stone Age.The study is published in the journal Ichnos.While researchers are reluctant to shoehorn in any firm conclusions regarding the use of footwear in the distant past, the prints' unusual characteristics may provide the oldest evidence yet that people used shoes to protect their feet from sharp rocks in...

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...

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...

Archaeological investigators have found evidence of an ancient road, Bronze Age homes and Roman farmsteads on the site of a new town in Devon.Last year, the team at Sherford found "Ice Age megafauna" including mammoth, rhino and wolf remains...Rob Bourn of Orion Heritage said the latest finds were "fascinating"...The "probable Roman road" runs across the site of Sherford Business Park, which lies partly within the Plymouth and South Devon Freeport.llIts crushed slate surface and "visible" drainage points reflect construction methods of the time, they said.Other uncovered artefacts shine a light on different periods of history.These include roundhouse postholes, which are...

The president of the Portuguese Association of Archeological Research (APIA), Nuno Ribeiro, revealed Monday having found rock art on the island of Terceira, supporting his believe that human occupation of the Azores predates the arrival of the Portuguese by many thousands of years, Lusa reported. "We have found a rock art site with representations we believe can be dated back to the Bronze Age," Ribeiro told Lusa in Ponta Delgada, at a presentation in University of the Azores on the topic of early human occupation of the Azores. The oldest cave art known in Europe is of prehistoric origin, dating...

Thousands of years ago, a swath of land along what is now the western coast of England served as a superhighway for humans and animals alike. Today, the ebb and flow of each passing tide reveals more of the ancient footprints that these long-gone travelers stamped into the once mud-caked route.Reminders of their travels can be seen along a nearly 2-mile-long (3 kilometers) stretch of coastline near Formby, England. The footprint beds show how, as glaciers melted and sea levels rose after the last ice age ended around 11,700 years ago, humans and animals were forced inland, thus forming a...

Over the years rock carvings of a previously unknown civilisation have been found in India's western state of Maharashtra. Now, a cave in the same region is promising to shed more light on the creators of these prehistoric artworks and their lives...The cave, located around 10km (six miles) away from Koloshi village in the Konkan region of western Maharashtra, was discovered by a group of researchers last year. Excavations earlier this year revealed several stone tools in the cave that date back tens of thousands of years...The cave, which is situated in a secluded forest in Sindhudurg, was discovered by...

Abu Hureyra is an archaeological site that was occupied for thousands of years, spanning the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding. While a large body of research has explored this transition across many archaeological sites, much remains to be determined about the specific timeline, including the full range of early animal management practices that may have preceded large-scale herding.To shed new light, Smith and colleagues turned to ancient animal dung. Specifically, they analyzed the presence of dung spherulites—tiny calcium carbonate clumps found in the dung of animals—at Abu Hureyra, and considered this evidence alongside other archaeological, archaeobotanical,...

As early as 9,500 years ago, people in Europe used slash-and-burn methods to make land usable for agriculture. This is shown by environmental data generated by scientists from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment (S-HEP) at the University of Tübingen on the basis of two drill cores from the Ammer Valley. The data were then correlated with results from the Mesolithic scattered finds from Rottenburg-Siebenlinden excavated by the Baden-Wuerttemberg Landesamt für Denkmalpflege (State Office for Monument Preservation). In their study, published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, the scientists investigate to what extent climate or anthropogenic factors played...

Ancient Arctic communities traded with the outside world as early as 7,000 years ago, DNA from the remains of Siberian dogs suggests.Analysis of the DNA shows that Arctic pups thousands of years ago were interbreeding with other dogs from Europe and the Near East, even while they and their owners were living in one of the most remote places on Earth. Along with previous archeological finds, these results suggest that Siberians long ago were connected to a vast trade network that may have extended as far as the Mediterranean and the Caspian Sea, researchers report in the Sept. 28 Proceedings...

Archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences has excavated traces of Mesolithic settlements near the Veletma River in Russia...Evidence of Mesolithic activity was first identified during the 1970’s and 1980’s, but this is the first time that systematic excavations has been conducted to determine the extent of archaeological remains before the construction of the M12 – Moscow – Nizhny Novgorod – Kazan highway.Near the village of Maloye Okulovo, archaeologists studied five sites: Maloye Okulovo – 10, Maloye Okulovo -11, Maloye Okulovo -19, Maloye Okulovo – 20 and Malookulovskaya – 3, covering an area of more...

Gold prospectors first discovered the so-called Shigir Idol at the bottom of a peat bog in Russia’s Ural mountain range in 1890. The unique object—a nine-foot-tall totem pole composed of ten wooden fragments carved with expressive faces, eyes and limbs and decorated with geometric patterns—represents the oldest known surviving work of wooden ritual art in the world. More than a century after its discovery, archaeologists continue to uncover surprises about this astonishing artifact. As Thomas Terberger, a scholar of prehistory at Göttingen University in Germany, and his colleagues wrote in the journal Quaternary International in January, new research suggests the...

Scientists discovered a strange, tall, humanoid wooden figure under four meters of peat in a Russian bog. The figure, dubbed the Shirgir Idol (after the bog where it was found), is more than twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids. Gold miners stumbled upon pieces of the wooden figure in 1894. 100 years later, radiocarbon dating helped researchers trace the sculpture back some 9,900 years, which made it the oldest monumental sculpture in the world. The most recent analysis of the idol, published in Antiquity journal, pegged the figure at about 11,500 years old.

In 1894, gold prospectors near the city of Yekaterinburg in Russia unearthed not gold, but wood, and a very special wood at that. Specifically, they unearthed what's now known as the Shigir Idol, a 5-meter (16-foot) carved wooden statue that was marked with recognizable human faces and hands, as well as several intricate markings. The statue was believed to be merely a few thousand years old, and it simply sat on display at a Russian Museum for many years. In 1990s, researchers conducted a radiocarbon analysis of the statues to finally determine how old it really is, and turned up...