August 31, 2000 - AFP
Archeologists in Germany say they have discovered the remains of a huge prehistoric temple comparable to but earlier than the Stonehenge of the ancient Britons. The early Bronze Age temple unearthed at Kyhna near Deliztsch in the east German state of Saxony is believed to have been built around 5000 B.C., making it about 2,000 years older than the British edifice.
Like Stonehenge and other similar but smaller ancient remains in Europe, the stones of the Kyhna site, north of Leipzig, were laid out in precise alignment with the rays of the sun at the summer solstice. The stones can no longer be seen but their position and that of related earthworks is indicated by a variation in the plant life on the earth's surface.
Aerial photographs of the agricultural land in question clearly show two sets of concentric circles, one of four circles and the other of two, with the largest being 120 metres in diameter. The larger set of circles was apparently entered by four open gates: one to the northeast and one to the southeast have been clearly identified, those to the northwest and the southwest presumed.
Priests are believed to have held pagan rites of sun and moon worship at the site in connection with the changing of the seasons. Skeletons at the site suggest that human sacrifice was also practiced. Archeologists were originally led to an array of early Bronze Age artefacts at the site, after an accidental discovery made during pipe-laying work in 1979. But only 15 years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall which made private plane overflights possible in eastern Germany, did a systematic survey of the area start to indicate the importance of the site.
August 23, 2000 - AP
Archaeologists have discovered an Iron Age temple at an ancient burial site outside the Swedish capital, saying it is the first of its kind found in Scandinavia. The burial ground, with more than 200 graves, was unearthed in the early 1980s at Aaby, 25 miles south of Stockholm, when construction work was planned in the region. But the temple and 30 more graves were found only last week, after two months of renewed excavations prompted by plans to build apartments and a parking lot in the area.
The temple, dating from between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200, is shaped like a pentagon, measuring 46 feet across, said Roger Blidmo of the private excavation company Arkeologikonsult, whose team found the remains. They include a doorway covered with flat stones and marks of corner holes that once supported pillars.
The shape and size of the building indicate it was a place of worship or sacrificial offering, Blidmo said, a theory supported by the fact that no graves were found inside the construction or in an area directly outside the doorway. Iron Age burial buildings have been found in Denmark, but none resembles the pentagon near Stockholm, he said.
June 3, 2000 - AP
An American explorer credited with uncovering several major Indian ruins in Peru's rain forests has pulled back the jungle curtain to reveal another ancient city forgotten by time.
"I think it's Cajamarquilla, one of the fabulous lost cities of the Chachapoyas people," said Gene Savoy, just returned from an 18-day expedition into the high cloud forest in northern Peru.
Savoy on Friday described the Chachapoyas as tall, fierce, fair-skinned warriors who were defeated in the late 15th century by Inca ruler Tupac Yupanqui shortly before the Spanish conquest of Peru.
The Incas so respected their fighting prowess that they made the Chachapoyas their bodyguards, he said. "What we found is the vestiges of a lost jungle empire in the rain forest of northeastern Peru," Savoy told The Associated Press. Archaeologist Miguel Cornejo, one of 47 members of Savoy's expedition, called the find "a completely new discovery that constitutes a major contribution to Peruvian archaeology and the world."
The site, measuring 25 square miles, includes stone roads weaving through a network of massive terraced cliffs and at least 36 burial towers, said archaeologist Alberto Bueno. Both Bueno and Cornejo were assigned by the Peruvian government to accompany Savoy.
"There were many more structures, at least 60 or 70, but they were obscured by vegetation," Bueno said, adding that Savoy may have very well found the legendary Cajamarquilla, mentioned by early Spanish colonial chroniclers.
The deeply set terraces, roads and ornate stone structures, many with protruding carved faces, indicate a large concentration of people lived, farmed and worshipped there, Bueno said.
The robust 73-year-old explorer, who lives most of the year in Reno, Nev., where he directs the Andean Explorers Foundation, has written three books about his expeditions.
Savoy has discovered dozens of Peruvian ruins since the early 1960s. The three most important were Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Incas; Gran Pajaten, a citadel city atop a jungle-shrouded peak; and Gran Vilaya, a complex of more than 20,000 stone buildings in a damp, fogbound region of the Andes that Peruvians call the "jungle's eyebrow."
He says Gran Vilaya, situated on a ridge 6,000 feet above the Maranon River, was the capital of the Chachapoyas empire - one of seven legendary cities strung like a necklace along the heights of the high jungle of northern Peru.
Last September, Savoy reported he had found evidence of another of the lost cities, Conturmarca, in a valley along the Tepna River.
On May 10, he ventured back into the jungle, 340 miles north of Lima, accompanied by the archaeologists, a representative from the National Cultural Institute and an armed detail from the national police.
Savoy said the official entourage was required under new government regulations put into place after a grave robber sacked several of the burial towers he had publicly identified after last year's expedition.
May 25, 2000 - UPI
University of Chicago and Syrian archeologists said Tuesday they have found a settlement in northeastern Syria that challenges conventional notions of when and where civilization began, the university announced Tuesday.
Historians have long held that civilization grew in Mesopotamia - in cities like Ur and Uruk in southern Iraq -- and spread but the new findings indicate civilization developed independently at Tell Hamoukar. McGuire Gibson, a professor at the U of C's Oriental Institute and co-director of the joint expedition with the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities, said the find indicates civilization began about 6,000 years ago, earlier than the 3500 to 3100 B.C. usually cited. The findings were presented this week at the International Conference on Archeology of the Ancient Near East in Copenhagen. "We need to reconsider our ideas about the beginnings of civilization, pushing the time further back," Gibson said. "This would mean that the development of kingdoms or early states occurred before writing was invented and before the appearance of several other criteria that we think of as marking civilization."
Tell Hamoukar covered about 500 acres, the size of some of the largest of the ancient Middle East cities although Gibson concedes the entire area was likely not inhabited at the same time during the area's first occupation between 4000 and 3700 B.C. "Most probably there was a village or a couple of villages that shifted location through those 300 years," Gibson said.
The next occupation began around 3700 and continued to 3500 B.C. and was a well-organized prosperous town of about 30 acres that may have been enclosed by a defensive wall measuring 10-feet high. A 13-foot section of the wall was found. Food apparently was prepared on an institutional scale in igloo-shaped ovens and bits of pottery indicate wheat, barley, oats and animal bones were cooked. Gibson marveled at the craftsmanship of the pottery, noting some was as "thin as the shell of an ostrich egg."
The team also found seals, ranging from simple cross-hatching to elaborate animal portrayals in a kind of precursor to hieroglyphics, as well as eye idols - bone figurines with large eyes - included in burials that may have had religious significance and wells for water. "Seals are prime evidence of some kind of system of accounting or responsibility," Gibson told the Chicago Tribune. "The accounting system is tied to some sort of administrative system. You have a hierarchy of authority, two or three levels of people in which somebody with authority is there to check on the work of subordinates."
Unlike Ur and Uruk, Tell Hamoukar did not sit along a river, but rather along an established caravan route running through the Tigris and Euphrates river regions to the Mediterranean. The site is now dominated by the modern village of Hamoukar, population 750. The Oriental Institute said the largest population in the area was 10,000 to 20,000 people around 2400 B.C.
August 26, 1999 - AP
A baboon-sized ape that lived in East Africa about 15 million years ago may have been one of the first primates to leave the treetops and live on the ground, a key step on the evolutionary path that theoretically led to humans.
The fossilized partial skeleton of the animal is distinctly different from other ancient apes, prompting researcher Steve Ward and his colleagues to identify it as the only member of a new ape genus they call Equatorius.
Ward, a primate anatomy expert at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine in Rootsville, Ohio, is senior author of a study to be published Friday in the journal Science.
Hand, finger, arm and shoulder bones show strong evidence that Equatorius "spent a lot of time on the ground," said Ward in a telephone interview. "This is the first time that we see evidence of that in the fossil record of apes."
He called this "a very important finding" in understanding the evolutionary steps leading eventually to modern primates that spend almost no time in trees and are able to walk upright.
Equatorius is not thought to be a direct ancestor of humans or of modern apes, said Ward. The animal probably was an evolutionary dead end, a species that disappeared after about 1-1/2 million years, but it provides important evidence of a poorly understood era that Ward calls "the golden age of ape evolution."
"There was a large group of primitive apes that appeared in East Africa sometime before 23 million years ago," said Ward. "They exploded in an evolutionary sense into many, many genera and species."
Equatorius, said Ward, was a late representative of that era and was probably among the first to abandon the tree top home of earlier apes species.
Ape species around 10 to 14 million years ago moved from Africa into Europe and Asia where they initially thrived, but eventually most became extinct.
The remains of Equatorius were found in 1993 by a fossil hunter who discovered a single tooth projecting from a solid rock wall in the Tugen Hills of north central Kenya.
Careful excavation of the site uncovered a jaw with more teeth, along with bones from the spine, arms, shoulders, wrists, fingers and hand. Ward said the specimen is the most complete ape skeleton yet found from a critical era of ape evolution.
Equatorius was about the size of an adult male baboon. Its arms and legs were of about equal length. Powerful gripping hands and feet suggest that although it spent much of its life on the ground, it was also adept at tree-climbing, said Ward.
At first it was thought the Equatorius specimen belonged in the genus of another ancient ape called Kenyapithecus. There are only small collections of fossils for this genus and experts thought it contained two species, K. wickeri and K. Africanus.
The sparse fossils from the two species were "a mixed bag", said Ward, and "garbled the signals we were getting from the bones" about that era of ape evolution.
But he said a comparison of the more complete skeleton of Equatorius makes it clear that K. Africanus really belongs in the new genus of Equatorius.
"By recognizing Equatorius for what it is, it helps us to understand a lot about the early ape evolution," said Ward.
It is now clear, Ward said, that Equatorius is more primitive and preceded K. Wickeri in evolutionary history by 1 to 1 2/4 million years.
Other paleontologists praised the new finding, but some are not ready to accept that Equatorius is in a different genus than Kenyapithecus.
"This discovery tells us much more about the diversity of animals from that period of ape evolution," said Eric Delson, a paleontology professor at Lehman College in New York and a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History.
Delson said Equatorius is the most complete fossil collection to indicate that apes of that era lived on the ground. There have been suggestions from other fossils, but that evidence was only "fragmentary," he said.
However, Delson said he is not persuaded that Kenyapithecus and Equatorius belong in separate genera. And, in any case, it is not clear if either of these ancient apes are part of the evolutionary lineage that led eventually to humans and modern apes, he said.
Many theorists believe the primate lineage that eventually evolved into humans and modern apes arose from an unknown common ape ancestor sometime around 6 2/4 to 7 2/4 million years ago in Africa. However, very few African primate fossils have been found for the period from 14 million to 6 million years ago, a time Ward calls the "Miocene gap."
"Those are the key fossils that we need to find," Ward said.
September 9, 1999 - ABC
"Madeleine" is a new fossil star from Indonesia likely to further fuel the debate over where modern humans evolved.
A team of scientists from the American Museum of Natural History and other institutions is still analyzing data from the partial hominid skull which shows features of both Homo sapiens, our forebears, and Homo erectus, an earlier species. Their most stunning conclusion so far is that Madeleine probably had a capacity for language close to that of modern humans.
"We donıt know what the immediate ancestors of Homo sapiens are, really,² says Eric Delson of Lehman College in New York, leader of the scientific team. This creature, he adds, "had the mental capacity to undertake complex reasoning."
Does that make it a candidate? Delson hedges, but admits that when details are published, many paleoanthropologists will think it "might represent a population evolving in the direction of modern humans.²
The specimen was actually unearthed two years ago, but disappeared into the obscurity of the private fossil market. Henry Galiano, owner of the Manhattan natural history store Maxilla & Mandible, returned the skull fragment to Indonesian government officials Aug. 30 in New York.
After the farmer who originally discovered the specimen near Sambungmacan, Central Java, sold it to a local fossil dealer, a short description was published in a journal in Indonesia. Then it vanished, apparently smuggled out of the country. Galiano says he bought it several months ago with items from a collectorıs estate.
Once he removed a thick layer of dirt, Galiano recognized the skull as hominid, but peculiar. "It just seemed odd," he recalls. As he examined it, he says, he realized, "Oh my God, this is important." Galiano contacted several paleoanthropologists to help identify the specimen, which he dubbed Madeleine in honor of a friend's daughter.
Thinking ahead
The brain pattern left on the inside of the skull reveals
a capacity for 'prot-modern human language'.
Among them was Delson, who says it was "immediately clear this was a well-preserved example of either a late Homo erectus or an early 'archaic Homo sapiens,' " and unlike anything discovered in Asia to date.
Officially called PL-1 for now, the specimen has thick cranial bone and heavy brow ridges typical of H. erectus. But instead of that species' flat forehead, Madeleine's rises vertically, creating a dome shape more like H. sapiens. Its most unusual features are on the inside, where impressions remain from the brain itself.
"It has a large degree of asymmetry, which is something we do look for in modern humans," says Doug Broadfield, a doctoral candidate in physical anthropology at the City University of New York and Mt. Sinai School of Medicine.
The group believes that this, combined with other traits, indicates Madeleine "already had the capability for proto-modern human language," says Sam Marquez, also of CUNY/Mt. Sinai.
Family Mystery
The old museum diorama image of our evolution as a single-file progression from ape to human, and from Africa to the rest of the world, has been replaced in recent years by the picture of a complex family tree. There are several contemporary branches, some kissing cousins and a few unexplained gaps.
Gaps and offshoots in man's family tree have foiled
scientists' efforts to find a comon ancestor for us all.
We know our deepest roots are in Africa, where our remote ancestors distinguished themselves from other primates about 4 million years ago by standing up and walking around on two feet. They included the famous Australopithecus afarensis "Lucy."
But it took another 1 million years to make the next big leap to using tools and earning the genus name Homo.
This new breed's ability to butcher meat gave them a nutritional advantage credited with spurring an increase in brain size. And, apparently, wanderlust.
The most enterprising of the group, H. erectus, packed up its tools and walked out of Africa. "Java Man," discovered in 1891 in Trinil, Indonesia, is an H. erectus dating back about 1.6 million years. Paleoanthropologists in Southern China claim to have found 2-million-year-old specimens.
Hazy Origins
What happened next remains hotly debated. Most experts once thought that after fanning out across Europe and Asia, H. erectus settled down, eventually evolving into H. sapiens. That theory, though, is mostly out of favor today for a couple of reasons.
While H. erectus may have been as tall as modern humans, with a brain size at the lower-end of the normal range for H. sapiens, it's still considered a fairly dim-witted cousin. Differences between "us" and "them" seem too great for all H. sapiens to have ended up so similar to each other if we evolved independently in isolated groups.
Then there's timing.
The last 'pure' H. erectus seems to have disappeared around 250,000 years ago and the first modern humans appear only 100,000 years ago. Thus, current theory holds that H. sapiens must have evolved in one place first, probably Africa, and then spread out in one or more new migrations. With the exception of Neanderthals in Europe, most H. erectus descendants were probably long gone and we had the world to ourselves.
Then who is Madeleine?
"This may be one of the last of the Mohicans," jokes Teuku Jacob, an Indonesian paleoanthropologist collaborating with the scientists studying the skull. Based on where it was discovered, he thinks Madeleine is between 100,000 and 200,000 years old and probably a very late version of H. erectus.
April 23, 1999 - AFP
An ancient mummy dubbed the "handsome Yingpan man" has been found in China's remote northwest province of Xinjiang, state media has reported.
Archaeologists from the Xinjiang Archeological Institute found the mummified body when they opened a coffin in a graveyard dating back 1,900 years, Xinhua news agency reported.
The mummy had thick brown hair, a shrunken face and body, and gray and brown skin.
But its beard, eyebrows and eyelashes were clearly discernible and its clothes were intact and retained their bright color, said Xinhua news agency.
The mummified man, believed to have lived during the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 A.D.), was nearly 6 feet tall and might have died at about 25 years of age.
The "handsome Yingpan man" is thought to be comparable to the "beautiful Loulan woman," a 3,800-year-old female mummy discovered in 1980 at the Tiebanhe Delta, about 200 kilometers east of Yingpan, said the report.
Its coffin, which had colorful paintings on the outside, was discovered together with over 150 ancient tombs dating back to the Eastern Han Dynasty at Yingpan near Lop Nur in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
This coffin along with five others had been shipped to Urumqi, the regional capital, and were kept in the institute, unopened, for three years.
The mummy is believed to be significant for the study of economic and cultural exchanges between China and Western countries in ancient times.
Loulan was an ancient kingdom along China's Silk Road in Xinjiang.
A map of the moon with rock carvings superimposed over it
April 22, 1999 - BBC
A map of the Moon 10 times older than anything known before has been found carved into stone at one of Ireland's most ancient and mysterious Neolithic sites.
It has been identified by Dr Philip Stooke of the University of Western Ontario in Canada. He spends most of his time preparing maps of asteroids based on spacecraft observations, but he has also prepared detailed maps of the Moon.
What puzzled him greatly was that there was no recorded map of the moon older than about 500 years. "I simply could not believe this," he told BBC News Online. "I felt there just had to be an older map somewhere."
Prehistoric tombs
So he began looking in old manuscripts and history books as well as the records of excavations of the Neolithic sites of the British Isles.
It took the eye of an expert to see it for what it was. It was carved into a rock in one of Ireland's most remarkable prehistoric tombs at Knowth, County Meath.
"I was amazed when I saw it. Place the markings over a picture of the full Moon and you will see that they line up. It is without doubt a map of the Moon, the most ancient one ever found," said Dr Stooke. "It's all there in the carving. You can see the overall pattern of the lunar features from features such as Mare Humorun through to Mare Crisium."
Before this discovery, the oldest map of the Moon was by Leonardo da Vinci, drawn about 1505. The Knowth map is 10 times older.
Knowth is already a major focus of research into understanding prehistoric man. Now it will become one of the most important scientific sites in the world.
"The people who carved this moon map were the first scientists," says Dr Stooke. "They knew a great deal about the motion of the moon. They were not primitive at all."
The passage tomb at Knowth is estimated to be about 5,000 years old. It was obviously built by men who had a sophisticated understanding of the motions of the Sun, Moon and stars.
It is known that many stone circles and ancient tombs are aligned with the Sun but less attention has been paid to possible lunar alignments. This is despite the fact that at certain times the Moon can rise or set at any location on the horizon that the Sun can.
Series of arcs
Investigations at Knowth almost 20 years ago showed that at certain times moonlight could shine down the eastern passage of the tomb.
Remarkably, the moonlight would also fall on the Neolithic lunar map.
During excavations, the stone in question was named Orthostat 47. Its right-hand section contains a series of arcs.
The circular limb of the moon is not included in the carving. Dr Stooke believes that it may have been drawn on the rock with chalk or with coloured paint.
September 11, 1998 - AP
Archaeologists digging in Indonesia have unearthed evidence that primitive man was capable of crossing the sea to colonize the islands in the archipelago nearly one million years ago, an Australian scientist said here Thursday. Robert Bednarik, said an Indonesian-Australian team and two Australian expeditions working in the islands of Flores, Timor and Roti had made "sensational" discoveries about the seafaring prowess of homo erectus, the human species which preceded homo sapiens.
At several sites near Boawae on Flores, stone tools along with the bones of stegodonts, a species of extinct elephant with long straight tusks, were found at a level estimated to be 800,000 years old. Bednarik said Flores had never been connected either to the Asian continent or to Australia. He said the so-called Wallace Line, a natural barrier created by the sea, had been crossed by very few animal species.
Those who had managed the feat included elephants because they could swim for long distances. Humans however had to use watercraft to cross such sea barriers in sufficient numbers to found new populations, he said.
Bednarik said homo erectus had to cross the Lombek Strait before sailing to Sumbawa and then on to Flores. He said various dating methods all pointed to a human occupation of central Flores about 800,000 years ago. However lower deposits dating from about 900,000 years ago, had shown no evidence of human presence.
Similar evidence of the presence of homo erectus had been found on Timor and on Roti but it had not been possible to date this as precisely, the Australian scientist told the International Rock Art Congress being held in this northern Portuguese town said.
He said the expeditions he is leading, were also working to build rafts using stone tools and materials which were available to early humans during the Ice Age. Some of the crafts will attempt to cross the Lombok Strait, while others would attempt the crossing of the Timor Sea to Australia. The Australian continent is thought to have been first settled by humans about 60, 000 years ago when Neanderthal man lived in Europe.
Bednarik said the work being carried out "completely revolutionizes our understanding of human revolution. Homo erectus must have been technologically and cognitively far more advanced than we ever imagined.
"This species must have possessed language and a sufficiently complex society to organize such colonization attempts. It now appears that seafaring capability first developed in the region of Indonesia, especially around Java perhaps a million years ago. But it took most of that million years to evolve to the sophistication that made it possible to sail distances of several hundred kilometers to a target that for most of the journey remained invisible - which was necessary to reach Australia,' he said.
Saar, Bahrain -June 3, 1998
In ancient times, the land of Dilmun was described as a virtual Garden of Eden, a land where the wolf and the lamb lived in harmony and youth was eternal. Archaeologists today are uncovering more of that once-fabled land, revealing a prosperous trading society that had such abundant supplies of water that palm trees grew heavy with dates almost without effort.
"Fresh water just bubbled up out of the ground," said Jane Moon, one of the directors of the archaeological expedition at Saar. Saar was one of the towns in ancient Dilmun, which at different times encompassed what is now the Persian Gulf island of Bahrain and parts of eastern Saudi Arabia.
In about 1900 B.C., Saar was one of severalbustling towns in Bahrain apparently ruled from a city whose ruins are beneath a medieval fort six miles to the northeast. Merchants in the area grew rich as ships laden with copper from Oman stopped in Dilmun while traveling up the Persian Gulf to Babylon in Mesopotamia, which is in modern-day Iraq. The copper was later mixed with tin or lead to form bronze weapons and tools.
"This very small island ... suddenly got hold of a somewhat monopolizing role," said Dan Potts of Australia's University of Sydney. Dilmun was famous for its dates, which were popular in a region where the fruit remains common. Pearls, believed to have been called "fish eyes" in Mesopotamia, were also traded. In modern times, Bahrain had a famous pearling industry.
Traders' seals found in Saar show motifs such as the double swirl
popular in Anatolia, likely evidence that trade routes stretched as
far as present-day Turkey. Some 50 seals, most round and each
about twice the size of a thumbnail, have been discovered. Dilmun
achieved everlasting fame inMesopotamian religious texts, where
it was lauded in mythological terms.
Archaeologists say the same text shows the Mesopotamians
viewed Dilmun as a land of eternal youth. "Its old woman says
not 'I am an old woman.' Its old man says not 'I am an old man,"'
the text relates. Some experts say Dilmun's role as a port
where ships took on food and water may have led to its glorified
image among the Sumerians and later the Babylonians. Potts notes
Dilmun myths predated major Bahrain settlements snd may have
referred to earlier Dilmun communities in today's Saudi Arabia.
The ruins of Saar -- the only complete town found from the
Dilmun period -- show some 80 stone houses, almost all with
two rooms and a courtyard. It is not clear how many people lived
in each room.
Next to the town is a graveyard with about 1,000 tombs. Bahrain
is famous for having up to 150,000 burial mounds, but it's unclear
why so many exist. At Saar's highest point sat a small temple for
worship of local gods that probably also was used as an
administrative center.
The town was abandoned in about the 17th century B.C. for reasons
that remain a mystery. Moon theorizes a receding coastline prompted
people to abandon the site. Potts says an interruption in the copper
trade or changes in the water supply may have caused the town's
demise. No written records from the settlement have been found.
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In Dilmun, the crow screams not, the dar bird cries not dar-dar, the lion kills not.