Red Ochre Burial at Goat's Hole Cave Dated to 29,000 bp

One of Britain's best known residents of the Upper Palaeolithic just drifted back in time by about 4,000 years, to an era when the weather was warmer and Neanderthals were still a recognisable, if rarely encountered, presence on the landscape. This from BBC News...

The Red Lady of Paviland has always been a little coy about her age - but it appears she may be 4,000 years older than previously thought. Scientists say more accurate tests date the earliest human burial found in the UK to just over 29,000 years ago. When discovered in a cave on Gower in the 1820s the bones were thought to be around 18,000 years old, but were later re-dated to between 25,000 bp and 26,000 bp.

Not only does this former occupant of Goat's Hole Cave have an alarming tendency to age faster than anyone alive today, but their very gender is still the object of mistaken identity - the Red Lady of Paviland, so named because of the red ochre that stained the bones - 'she' is a 'he', although it is unlikely now that the name will ever be changed.

The presence of red ochre is also notable, as it appears to be just one more link in a long chain of burials and decoration stretching back at least 400,000 years to the Tan Tan figurine, found in Morocco - testament to the fact that red ochre must be the only mineral of its type to have been used by humans for so many hundreds of thousands of years - indeed, it could be argued that red ochre has illuminated our view of archaic humans in a way that not even stone tools have been able to do.

This is because although we can see by stone tool use that people were obviously adapted to the practicalities of everyday life in the Great Outdoors, the use of symbolic applications such as red ochre, tell us that there was something else going on in the heads of people who clearly thought beyond the necessities of everyday survival - daubing the bones of your dead ancestors with coloured pigment is not at first something we could readily predict from our modern outlook - if by chance, all the human skeletal remains we had found had somehow lost their ochre coatings, due to whatever processes of nature, the chances are we would never have had the faintest idea that a) this activity ever happened, and b) that this ostensibly eccentric practice spanned maybe hundreds of thousands of years, across just about the entire globe. And while we're considering archaic symbolism, here's a brief description of artefacts that were recovered from Goat's Hole Cave...

The remains were found along with a number of artefacts including ivory wands, bracelets and periwinkle shells.

For a little more detail regarding these artefacts, British Archaeology Magazine has this to offer us from 2001...

The new study began with a radiocarbon dating programme and resulted in the dating of some 40 radiocarbon samples of fauna, artefacts and the bones of the 'Red Lady' himself. The skeleton was re-dated to 25,840 ± 280 BP and an age of the order of 26,000 years confirmed. None of the ivory or shells associated with the 'Red Lady' was dated because of problems of potential contamination by preservatives, but charred bone dates are earlier and centre on 28,750, and so are plausibly Aurignacian.

Of the ivory pieces, 75 per cent are ornaments, virtually all associated with the burial of the 'Red Lady', although the well known perforated ivory pendant made from a growth in a mammoth's tusk is later at 24,000 BP. Bone artefacts include three bone spatulae dated to 23,000 BP. The latest phase of human presence with a firm radiocarbon date is represented by ivory-working of 21,000 BP.

At the time when the young man was ritually interred, there is no substantive evidence in this remote part of Europe for a human presence that was other than episodic. Indeed, faunal compositions and densities probably oscillated over time and space. Human presence in the British early Upper Palaeolithic may plausibly be linked to a 'biomass expansion', an overall increase in the availability of animals and other forms of food, centred on the 29th millennium.

The coincidence of the dating of burnt bones to this period, combined with the presence of burnt Aurignacian artefacts, supports this as the most likely time for Aurignacian presence at Paviland. Radiocarbon dating of an Aurignacian bone spearpoint to around 28,000 bp at nearby Uphill lends additional weight to this interpretation. Gravettian visitation is attested by a scatter of large tanged points occurring across southern Britain, including Paviland. Such points are generally dated to 28-27,000 BP, although their use may possibly extend down to the time of the 'Red Lady' burial.

All of which would accord with these recent comments from Dr. Higham...

It would mean The Red Lady lived in an age when the climate was much warmer than it would have been 4,000 years later. Dr Higham added: "The data that we have got now is making a lot more sense." He said it was important for "our understanding of the presence and behaviour of humans in this part of the world at this time".

He also said it "might" suggest that the custom of burying people with artefacts originated in western Europe rather than eastern Europe as had previously been thought. "This raises new questions about the way in which these people spread and lived on the continent," he added.

The remains of the Red Lady are to form part of a new exhibition opening at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff in December.

The full findings of the new research are due to be published in the Journal of Human Evolution early next year.

I'm not sure whether some or all of the described artefacts will comprise part of the exhibition, but assuming that they're slated for an appearance, it should be very well worth visiting.

update 01/11/07: Archaeozoology has a link to the perriwinkle, shells of which were found with the skeleton, and although at first I was unaware of the medicinal properties associated with the perriwinkle, their presence at the site indicates that people living 29,000 years ago may well have had a good working knowledge of natural resources they encountered and were able to exploit for the benefit of their health. The additional presence of wands might tempt some to contend that the male 'Red Lady' may himself have been a dispenser of natural medicines to others in his community - and even that the wands could have been associated with some sort of ritual which we might interpret today as casting a beneficial spell on either the 'medicines', the patient, or possibly both.

see also : British Archaeology Magazine : Great Sites : Paviland


image of Paviland Cave from AHOB II

Researchers Posit New Ideas About Human Migration from Asia to Americas

News from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, reporting on a paper they've had published in PLosONE, titled "Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders", and in which the authors have come to a number of interesting conclusions - but before looking at those, here's the abstract...

Native Americans derive from a small number of Asian founders who likely arrived to the Americas via Beringia. However, additional details about the initial colonization of the Americas remain unclear. To investigate the pioneering phase in the Americas we analyzed a total of 623 complete mtDNAs from the Americas and Asia, including 20 new complete mtDNAs from the Americas and seven from Asia. This sequence data was used to direct high-resolution genotyping from 20 American and 26 Asian populations. Here we describe more genetic diversity within the founder population than was previously reported.

The newly resolved phylogenetic structure suggests that ancestors of Native Americans paused when they reached Beringia, during which time New World founder lineages differentiated from their Asian sister-clades. This pause in movement was followed by a swift migration southward that distributed the founder types all the way to South America. The data also suggest more recent bi-directional gene flow between Siberia and the North American Arctic.

For all the specific genetic data that were gathered and analysed, it is necessary to read the paper in its entirety over at PLos ONE, but for the purposes of this post, I'm just going to concentrate on the linked report from the page at University of Illinois, which begins thus...

Questions about human migration from Asia to the Americas have perplexed anthropologists for decades, but as scenarios about the peopling of the New World come and go, the big questions have remained. Do the ancestors of Native Americans derive from only a small number of “founders” who trekked to the Americas via the Bering land bridge? How did their migration to the New World proceed? What, if anything, did the climate have to do with their migration? And what took them so long?

A team of 21 researchers, led by Ripan Malhi, a geneticist in the department of anthropology at the University of Illinois, has a new set of ideas. One is a striking hypothesis that seems to map the peopling process during the pioneering phase and well beyond, and at the same time show that there was much more genetic diversity in the founder population than was previously thought.

“Our phylogeographic analysis of a new mitochondrial genome dataset allows us to draw several conclusions,” the authors wrote. “First, before spreading across the Americas, the ancestral population paused in Beringia long enough for specific mutations to accumulate that separate the New World founder lineages from their Asian sister-clades.” (A clade is a group of mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs ) that share a recent common ancestor, Malhi said. Sister-clades would include two groups of mtDNAs that each share a recent common ancestor and the common ancestor for each clade is closely related.)

Or, to express this first conclusion another way, the ancestors of Native Americans who first left Siberia for greener pastures perhaps as much as 30,000 years ago, came to a standstill on Beringia – a landmass that existed during the last glacial maximum that extended from Northeastern Siberia to Western Alaska, including the Bering land bridge – and they were isolated there long enough – as much as 15,000 years – to maturate and differentiate themselves genetically from their Asian sisters.

The first question that springs to the mind of the authors is to ask why these archaic Beringians remained more or less static for as much as 15,000 years, and why they didn't spread out much more quickly and begin to populate North America and in so doing head south and escape from the worst effects of the glacial maximum.

Of course that doesn't mean that nobody from that Beringian population migrated south, but if so, it was likely to have been in very low numbers, or at least too low to create significant amounts of descendants - hence the apparently isolated finds of what have been suggested as pre-Clovis artifacts found across North America, at sites like Topper, South Carolina, and possibly even the 40,000 year-old footprints at Valsequillo, down near Puebla in Mexico, though whether this would also have applied to Monte Verde in Chile isn't immediately clear, as there are thoughts that this occupation may have represented a coastal migration down the western coast of the New World.

But we might think that those putative southerly travellers would have got word back to Beringia that there were limitless stretches of land, well stocked with a mega-faunal larder that was still extant before the time of the massive extinction event at the Holocene boundary. Moreover, if one travelled far enough south, the climate would have warmed considerably, and we might expect that this prospect alone would have been enough to entice people who spent millennia shivering in their snow-shoes to abandon their northerly domain for the warmer south.

On to the second conclusion...

"Second, founding haplotypes or lineages are uniformly distributed across North and South America instead of exhibiting a nested structure from north to south. Thus, after the Beringian standstill, the initial North to South migration was likely a swift pioneering process, not a gradual diffusion.”

The DNA data also suggest a lot more to-ing and fro-ing than has been suspected of populations during the past 30,000 years in Northeast Asia and North America. The analysis of the dataset shows that after the initial peopling of Beringia, there were a series of back migrations to Northeast Asia as well as forward migrations to the Americas from Beringia, thus “more recent bi-directional gene flow between Siberia and the North American Arctic.”

To investigate the pioneering phase in the Americas, Malhi and his team, a group of geneticists from around the world, pooled their genomic datasets and then analyzed 623 complete mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) from the Americas and Asia, including 20 new complete mtDNAs from the Americas and seven from Asia. The sequence data was used to direct high-resolution genotyping from 20 American and 26 Asian populations. Mitochondrial DNA, that is, DNA found in organelles, rather than in the cell nucleus, is considered to be of separate evolutionary origin, and is inherited from only one parent – the female.

The team identified three new sub-clades that incorporate nearly all of Native American haplogroup C mtDNAs – all of them widely distributed in the New World, but absent in Asia; and they defined two additional founder groups, “which differ by several mutations from the Asian-derived ancestral clades.”

What puzzled them originally was the disconnect between recent archaeological datings. New evidence places Homo sapiens at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in Siberia – as likely a departure point for the migrants as any in the region – as early as 30,000 years before the present, but the earliest archaeological site at the southern end of South America is dated to only 15,000 years ago.

“These archaeological dates suggested two likely scenarios,” the authors wrote: Either the ancestors of Native Americans peopled Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum, but remained locally isolated – likely because of ecological barriers – until entering the Americas 15,000 years before the present (the Beringian incubation model, BIM); or the ancestors of Native Americans did not reach Beringia until just before 15,000 years before the present, and then moved continuously on into the Americas, being recently derived from a larger parent Asian population (direct colonization model, DCM).

There has been much discussion in recent years regarding the viability or otherwise of the Beringia Land Bridge, or whether the earliest Native Americans arrived by boat - either from Siberia itself, or indeed whether there was a Solutrean incursion from south-western Europe at around 20,000 bp. These are very difficult questions to answer, not least because no marine archaeology has ever been found to support this, and the coastlines that would have existed during the Upper Palaeolithic are now for the most part submerged beneath the elevated sea-levels which were prompted by the Great Melt. On to the final part of this summary...

Thus, for this study the team set out to test the two hypotheses: one, that Native Americans’ ancestors moved directly from Northeast Asia to the Americas; the other, that Native American ancestors were isolated from other Northeast Asian populations for a significant period of time before moving rapidly into the Americas all the way down to Tierra del Fuego.

“Our data supports the second hypothesis: The ancestors of Native Americans peopled Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum, but remained locally isolated until entering the Americas at 15,000 years before the present.”

All in all, a very interesting study, and one that will doubtless stimulate some heated debate - but before we go, here are three related abstracts, which were posted recently to Anthro-L, and once again they focus on a variety of genetic data, but with the emphasis on a proposed coastal migration to the Americas...

Parasites, Paleoclimate, and the Peopling of the Americas

Alvaro Montenegro, Adauto Araujo, Michael Eby, Luiz Fernando Ferreira, Renée Hetherington, and Andrew J. Weaver,

"Parasites, paleoclimate, and the peopling of the Americas,"
Current Anthropology, volume 47 (2006), pages 193–200.

Abstract: Paleoparasitological findings and paleoclimate modelling simulations indicate that early peoples migrating via the "Clovis first" route across Beringia into North America could not have traversed the required distance in time to provide a reasonable explanation for the presence of the hookworm in the pre-Columbian Americas.

The introduction of the hookworm into the Americas by a land migration at around 13,000 years BP could have happened only under extraordinary circumstances and even then would have required displacement rates that appear to have no parallel in the archaeology of the continent. This implies that while the Clovis people may have been the first migrants to the Americas, they were almost certainly not the only such migrants.

Nicole M. Waguespack

"Why we're still arguing about the Pleistocene occupation of the Americas"
Evolutionary Anthropology 16: 2 (2007), 63-74.

Abstract: Although empirical issues surround the when, how, and who questions of New World colonization, much of current debate hinges on theoretical problems because it has become clear that our understanding of New World colonization is not resolute.[1] In fact, the central issues of debate have remained essentially unchanged for the last eighty years.

The now classic and probably incorrect story of New World colonization begins in Late Pleistocene Siberia, with small a population of foragers migrating across Beringia (13,500 calendar years before present (CYBP) (Box 1) through an ice-free corridor and traveling through the interior of North America. High mobility and rapid population growth spurred southward expansion into increasingly distant unoccupied regions, culminating in the settlement of the Southern Cone of South America.

Armed with the skills and weapons needed to maintain a megafauna-based subsistence strategy, early colonists necessarily had the adaptive flexibility to colonize a diverse array of Pleistocene landscapes. For a time, this scenario seemed well substantiated.

The earliest sites in South America were younger than their northern counterparts, fluted artifacts were found across the Americas within a brief temporal window, and projectile points capable of wounding elephant-sized prey were commonly found in association with proboscidean remains. The Bering Land Bridge connecting Asia to Alaska and an ice-free corridor providing passage between the Pleistocene ice masses of Canada seemed to provide a clear route of entry for Clovis colonists. However, recent archeological, paleoenvironmental, biological, and theoretical work largely questions the plausibility of these events.

Donald Jackson, César Méndez, Roxana Seguel, Antonio Maldonado, and Gabriel Vargas,

"Initial occupation of the Pacific coast of Chile during late Pleistocene times,"
Current Anthropology, volume 48 (2007), pages 725–731.

Abstract : The record of the initial settlement of South America has significant geographical gaps, especially along the Pacific coast. The study of small sites with brief occupation spans can open windows on high-resolution contexts in which associations and activities are clear. Through the use of a program designed to identify lacustrine Pleistocene environments in which the initial human populations would presumably have settled, Quebrada Santa Julia, a site attesting to human presence dating to 13,000 calibrated years BP, has recently been located on the semiarid coast of Chile.

It is the only known Paleoindian site with fluted projectile points in unambiguous association with extinct megafauna on the Andean Pacific coast. It represents a small lakeside camp with a brief occupation span in which multiple activities, including the processing of prey transported from a nearby location, were conducted. The present of extra-local lithic raw materials argues for movements into the interior, as has been suggested for other early settlements in the Andean region. Notwithstanding its proximity to the littoral, the site has not yielded any evidence of the exploitation of marine resources.

Time permitting, I will endeavour to write up the Current Anthropology papers in more detail, though I don't have access to Evolutionary Anthropology. Here are details of the authors of the 'Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders'...

Erika Tamm¹, Toomas Kivisild^1,2, Maere Reidla¹, Mait Metspalu¹, David Glenn Smith³, Connie J. Mulligan⁴, Claudio M. Bravi⁵, Olga Rickards⁶, Cristina Martinez-Labarga⁶, Elsa K. Khusnutdinova⁷, Sardana A. Fedorova^1,8, Maria V. Golubenko^1,9, Vadim A. Stepanov⁹, Marina A. Gubina^1,10, Sergey I. Zhadanov^1,10,11, Ludmila P. Ossipova¹⁰, Larisa Damba^1,10, Mikhail I. Voevoda¹⁰, Jose E. Dipierri¹², Richard Villems¹, Ripan S. Malhi^13*

1 Department of Evolutionary Biology, University of Tartu, Estonian Biocentre, Tartu, Estonia, 23 Department of Anthropology, University of California at Davis, Davis, California, United States of America, 4 Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States of America, 5 Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Celular, La Plata, Argentina, 6 Department of Biology, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy, 7 Institute of Biochemistry and Genetics, Ufa Research Center, Russian Academy of Sciences, Ufa, Russia, 89 Institute of Medical Genetics, Tomsk Research Center, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Tomsk, Russia, 10 Institute of Genetics and Cytology, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia, 11 Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America, 12 Instituto de Biologia de la Altura–Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, Jujuy, Argentina, 13 Department of Anthropology, Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, United States of America Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Department of Molecular Genetics, Yakut Research Center, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Yakutia, Russia,

Stonehenge, the Vatican Observatory and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence

Having paid a quick visit in a previous post to the ongoing restoration work at Silbury Hill, it's now time to turn our eyes and thoughts once more in the direction of Stonehenge, (map) about which archaeologist Dennis Price has recently penned a new article, which as we will see, marks something of a departure from his recent discussions regarding Pytheas of Massilia and Vespasian's Camp. This from the introductory paragraphs, amongst which the question regarding possible uses for Stonehenge is raised...

All the evidence suggests that Stonehenge was in active use as a temple of Apollo when Pytheas saw the place in 350 BC, which is remarkable when we consider that from the standard archaeological viewpoint, it had fallen into disuse around thirteen centuries beforehand, in or around 1,600 BC. Be that as it may, it does not follow that Stonehenge had always functioned as a temple, as we can see from the following point made by Professor John North in his book Stonehenge, Neolithic Man and the Cosmos, when discussing the possibility of chariot races having taken place on the Cursus:

“It is hard to see what evidence one could ever find in support of these ideas, but when we consider the matter at all we are forced to acknowledge one important truth; from the fact that a monument was laid out with reference to the heavens it does not of necessity follow that it was always used with that reference in mind. The rituals of foundation are not necessarily the rituals of use.”

So, with this in mind, we return to what must surely be the most frequently asked questions about Stonehenge - what was it used for when it was first built? Is there one way in which we can describe an original function of these mesmerising ruins with confidence? Furthermore, would this be a description that the visionary and engineering geniuses who built Stonehenge would agree with, if we were able to have a conversation with them? In my opinion, the answer is yes.

Bearing in mind that Stonehenge went through various configurations during the many hundreds of years over which it was built and re-built, it's worth bearing in mind that at different times this monument might have meant quite different things to successive generations of people, although we in the modern era are to a great extent, completely in the dark as to the true purpose(s) of the structure which looms up at us out of the Salisbury Plain, as we see...

To begin with, Stonehenge wasn’t originally made of stone, because earthen and timber structures preceded the famous stone ruins that we’re all familiar with today. Neither was it a henge, strictly speaking, primarily on account of its internal bank, as Mike Pitts makes clear on pages 26 & 28 of his book Hengeworld (UK/US). So, right from the start, it’s clear that some of the fundamental terminology relating to Stonehenge is misleading.

Indeed, the earliest recorded evidence of activity at the site can be found in the car-park at Stonehenge, wherein three while circles mark the spot where three enormous wooden posts were erected around 10,500 years ago. I'm not aware of any archaeology to suggest any intermediate activity until the first phases of the main construction began, more than 5,000 years later - which would appear to indicate that there was no specific cultural connection between the two eras of construction. It has been suggested elsewhere that the alignment of the Mesolithic post-holes is similar to the three pyramids on the Giza Plateau, and that they in turn mirror the configuration of Orion's Belt, but there has never been specific confirmation that this is the case.

However, the henge site up at Thornborough might be a better match, as it is within a closer geographical context, but again, the vast difference in scale and the apparent yawning gap in time between the two sites would cause many to question why, if there was a direct connection, we don't see any similar sites during the intervening millennia.

It's time we headed back to Eternal Idol, where Dennis Price is patiently waiting to continue with his discourse, and having our attention once more, he now addresses previous explanations for the possible uses to which the dressed stone monument may have been put...

There is also the idea that Stonehenge was a calendar, but if this was the case, it was the only calendar I know of that required an interlocking circle of lintels in order for it to operate as such. The function of a calendar as a system by which the beginning, length and subdivisions of a given period of time are fixed may well have been incorporated into the structure of Stonehenge, but it’s hard to see this as the primary function of a monument that was under construction for almost two thousand years. Purely as a keeper of time, Stonehenge would only have been of any value to those who lived in its immediate vicinity, while it clearly possessed properties other than this to draw the man now known to us as the Amesbury Archer to the area from as far away as the Alps in 2,300 BC.

There’s a certain attraction about Stonehenge as a kind of prehistoric Lourdes, where the sick and the lame came to be cured. This idea arose from the existence of healing wells in the Preseli Hills in south Wales, from where the bluestones originated, but there remains the question of how the stones functioned without their most precious asset i.e. the healing wells themselves. However, my principle reservation concerns the vast sarsen uprights and lintels, structures whose sheer size, unique architecture and precision of engineering suggest that they were put in place for a purpose other than to simply enclose some supposed healing stones that had been uprooted from elsewhere.

As far as more general descriptions are concerned, one of the most common is that of Stonehenge as a temple, something that seems reasonable on the face of it, but I doubt that this was ever the case, at least in prehistoric times. A temple is a place where a deity is worshipped or else where a deity is believed to reside, but I’ve not seen any persuasive evidence for this at Stonehenge. There seems to be a general consensus that its builders revered the Sun and the Moon, or at least took a very close interest in their movements through the heavens, but this idea is a world away from the notion that these deities somehow resided within the monument, temporarily or otherwise.

This is ostensibly quite a radical departure from the author's suggestions in his earlier essay which discusses Pytheas of Massilia, and the account of his putative visit to Stonehenge...

“And there is also on the island both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple decorated with many offerings…spherical in shape [and] a city is there which is sacred to this god… and the kings of this city and the supervisors of the sacred precinct are called Boreades, since they are descendants of Boreas…”

As the suggestion that an observatory might have been the intention of the original builders of the first phases of Stonehenge, it might have been the case that what Pytheas described, or referred to as a 'temple', was something else, and that he used the word as a point of reference rather than recounting the true nature of what Stonehenge was then being used for. I asked Dennis Price for a little clarification on this point, to which he kindly replied thus...

I don't entirely rule out Stonehenge having functioned as a temple when it was first built, but I don't think it possesses enough convincing characteristics of a temple for it to be described as such without some serious reservations.

I was also at pains to point out what Prof North said about "the foundations of ritual not being the foundations of (later) use." It might well have been used as a temple in much later years, but I don't think the original builders had this concept in mind when they first put together their masterpiece in stone.

The archaeologists think that it fell into disuse in or around 1,600 BC, which is around 1,300 years before Pytheas saw it and described it as a temple, just as he described Vespasian's Camp as a city. 1,300 hundred years is a long time, the length of time from the birth of Christ to the trial of the Templars, for example, so I don't know if Stonehenge was in continuous use up until the time that Pytheas saw it.

As I've written, I think I can identify Stonehenge as the temple that Pytheas described, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was one. However, if he saw priests of Apollo singing hymns there, then it's reasonable for him to assume that the finely-crafted structure in which they were conducting these activities was a temple, but as we know that the Druids of that time were obsessive sky watchers, then it still fits the broad description of an astrological or astronomical observatory, to my mind at least.

I don't have the link to hand, but I remember reading that the Stonehenge Riverside Project had re-evaluated some dates from Stonehenge itself and they're now sure that the sarsens were put in place around 2,600 BC, or three centuries earlier than had been previously thought. This means that something like 2,300 years had elapsed before Pytheas saw it, so it's natural that its usage might have changed slightly over the course of such a huge length of time.

I know I've kept referring to the temple that Pytheas saw, but that's just easier than repeatedly writing "the structure that Pytheas saw that he described or interpreted as a temple because priests of Apollo were singing there, although the Druids' fascination with the movement of celestial bodies suggests that it was still being used as an observatory of sorts."

The point here being, of course, that although DP uses the nomenclature of 'temple', to describe Stonehenge, this is more of a shorthand reference than a specific description - as opposed to modern-day interpretations that imply that it was used as a temple in the same sense we would understand today.

One of my favourite observations on Stonehenge was made by another astronomer, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who once wrote, “Only one thing can be stated with certainty about such structures as Stonehenge: the people who built them were much more intelligent than many who have written books about them.” I entirely concur with this observation about the intelligence of the builders of Stonehenge, but I believe that it’s possible to state at least one other uncomfortable truth about Stonehenge.

Whilst we briefly have Arthur C. Clarke in our minds, a small quote from his short story 'Jupiter Five' comes to mind, as it also addresses the idea of mistakenly, or at least incorrectly, associating enigmatic structures with the concept of a temple. Here he is telling us about a giant building, containing some 20 million exhibits of art, that has been discovered inside the abandoned planetoid sized and shaped spaceship, some 30 km across, that had transported the mysterious Culture X from their unknown origin in interstellar space to our solar system, and which had been abandoned some 5 million years previously...

"The building was huge, even by the standards of this giant race. Like all the other structures on Five., it was made of metal, yet there was nothing cold or mechanical about it. The topmost peak climbed halfway to the remote roof of the world, and from a distance - before the details were visible - the building looked not unlike a Gothic cathedral. Misled by this chance resemblance, some later writers have called it a temple; but we have never found any trace of what might be called a religion among the Jovians (Culture X). Yet there seems something appropriate about the name, 'The Temple of Art', and it's stuck so thoroughly that no one can change it now."

I should add at this point that there are those, such as archaeologist Francis Pryor, (I think) who opine that Stonehenge itself wasn't built with any ultimate purpose in mind - it's importance lay in that it was an enormous and ongoing project that had been undertaken and successfully completed by the community over many centuries - and it was these feats of planning, designing and physically building the various structures that were of most value to the communities involved in the gargantuan efforts that went into the various incarnations of Stonehenge.

A similar suggestion had been put forward regarding pyramid construction in dynastic Egypt - the entire community from across rural and urban areas are thought to have been involved, rather than specifically employed architects, builders and artisans skilled in the arts of erecting huge monuments comprising vast monoliths and millions of tons of limestone blocks, all done with minute attention to detail.

There would likely have been a great element of social cohesion and shared purpose present, and it may have been felt by those ruling and overseeing the State, or its contemporary equivalent, that it was better for the wider community to be united in a common purpose - except when at war with another nation - as it lessened the risk of damaging unrest, argument and possible conflict within a (designed) society which itself was still a relatively new phenomenon, some 5,000 years ago.

I briefly wondered if there was anything else outside Britain that might have had a similar design or function to Stonehenge that dated from the same era, and to do that, we need to go back just a short skip in time to November 2004, when a report at Discovery, and emanating from Russia indicated that a contemporary structure had been found, prompting archaeologists in this country to comment on the apparent similarities it may have shared with Stonehenge...

Russian archaeologists have announced that they have found the remains of a 4,000-year-old structure that they compare to England's Stonehenge, according to recent reports issued by Pravda and Novosti, two Russian news services.

If the comparison holds true, the finding suggests that both ancient European and Russian populations held similar pagan beliefs that wove celestial cycles with human and animal life.

Since devotional objects and symbols are at the Russian site in the region of Ryazan, their meanings might shed light on pagan ceremonies that likely also took place at Stonehenge...

Ilya Ahmedov said he and his team found ground holes indicating a monument with a 22.97-feet diameter circle consisting of 1.6-foot thick wooden poles spaced at equal distances from each other. Inside the circle is a large rectangular hole with evidence that four posts once stood in that spot.

The archaeologists believe the central structure would have led to spectacular views.

"Within the circle, two couples of the poles (in the rectangular area) make up gates," Ahmedov told Pravda. "Sunset can be seen through the gates if an observer stands in the center of the circle. One more pole outside the circle points at the sunrise."

The researchers found a small ceramic vessel in the central hole. The vessel is decorated with a zigzag design, which Ahmedov said resembles the rays of the sun, and wavy lines that he believes symbolize water. Lying next to the vessel was a bronze awl in a birch bark casing and an "altar of animal bones," according to a press release from Informnauka, the Russian science news agency .

Outside of the circle, the archaeologists excavated two other vessels without any ornamentation. The research team said forest dwellers that originally came from Iran likely made these two objects. They lived in the Ryazan area during the Bronze Age 4,000 years ago.

Fragments of human bones and teeth also were found outside the circle's boundary. Ahmedov and his colleagues think they might have belonged to a tribal chief who was posthumously sanctified. Burial tombs also exist near Stonehenge.

Ahmedov explained that solar and lunar cults were related to a fertility cult and to the mythological link between life and death. The circular shape was thought to hold magical properties because it has no beginning or end and was regarded as a symbol of eternity.

So, might we be seeing a connection to the two sites, which at first reading, seems a distinct possibility?

"(A) parallel can be drawn to Stonehenge, which is close to our monument in terms of the erection date and initially also was made of wood," Ahmedov told Pravda. "However, no blood relationship could have existed between the peoples who erected Stonehenge and the Ryazan observatory. The latter evidently indicates the influence of (an) alien population (the Iranian forest dwellers) from the South-East of the Eurasian steppe."

Mike Pitts, author of the book "Hengeworld" and the editor of British Archaeology magazine, told Discovery News that he doubts Stonehenge directly influenced the construction of the Russian monument.

"There are no known connections between Russia and Britain at the time Stonehenge was built, so if there were any similarities between the two structures, they would have to be coincidence," Pitt said.

He added, "Stonehenge is unique, but it is possible to see precursors and inspiration for its design in timber structures that are now quite common in Britain, not least around Stonehenge, but as yet seen nowhere else, not even across the Channel in France."

Ahmedov and his team plan to excavate the Ryazan site again in the summer, when they hope to investigate another line of pole holes that they spotted 32.8 feet away from the circular monument.

Despite the physical distance between the two sites, I'm not sure it's possible to state conclusively that there was no direct link of any kind between the two sites, or rather the people involved - after all, if we accept that Pytheas of Massilia, as well as Greeks, with whom it has been said prehistoric inhabitants of Britain had a friendly relationship, it's not too much of a stretch that links between Britain and Eurasia - however tenuous or short-lived, might have existed at one time or another.

I next followed this link, and to my surprise, found that it too has been suggested as a site that was an observatory, rather than a temple, which for the purposes of this essay, happens to coincide quite well - here's some further detail about what has been found there...

The scientists have already finished preliminary data processing and can refer this monument to the observatory type installations, it is estimated to date back to four thousand years - the end of the third - beginning of the second millenium B.C. The dating was determined by the kind of the vessel in the central pit. This is a small ceramic jug decorated by a fine ornamental pattern - small lines highlighting the zigzag, which reminds of the Sun rays, and the rows of wavy lines - a symbol of water - are on the top.

The most surprising thing is that the Sun-vessel is made a compliance with the traditions of the steppe peoples who used to populate the South of Eurasia at that time. According to Ilya Akhmedov, similar crockery was found in Sintashta, legendary town of ancient Aryans in Siberia. The vessel has evident similarity to the vessels of the Abashevo culture spread in the Volga region and near the Urals.

Two more pits surrounded by poles were found at the distance of fifteen meters from the sanctuary, probably there had been four pits there but the location was ruined by a ravine. Two more vessels of absolutely different in appearance were found in these pits - the vessels are big, thin-walled, with a round bottom but without ornamental pattern, they are rather crudely made as compared to the steppe jug. Such crockery used to be made by balanovtsi - the forest people of the Bronze Age. The unusual thing is that the goods of different traditions were stored in the same place. In the middle of one of the pits the researchers found human bones accurately laid near the 'forest' jug fragments - two fragments of arms and legs and part of the lower jaw. Those are the traces of a sacrifice.

Very interesting to note that a supposed observatory should also be associated with sacrifice and death, and that is a theme to which we will return in a forthcoming post - as I said before, there is, in my opinion, a chance that contact, whether it was direct or indirect, might have existed not only between Stonehenge and the Oka River site in Ryazan, but maybe other places on mainland Europe which until now have remained undiscovered. Bearing in mind that Stonehenge survives today because it is made of stone, there could be any number of earthen and wooden equivalents lying below the surface and beyond our immediate gaze.

We next learn how there has been a southern access point or opening to Stonehenge from at least a thousand years before any 'healing bluestones' were installed on site, and for the next few paragraphs we look at some of the explanations from past and present that have sought to clarify how Stonehenge was built, as well as what are considered to be various misrepresentations as to how it may have looked at various times in its history - we also learn of a plan to recreate Stonehenge as it is believed by some to have looked some 4,000 years ago - it is to be hoped that this ghastly sounding plan never gets off the ground - as Mike Pitts suggests in Hengeworld, it might be better to spend money on projects such as a proper Stonehenge musuem, wherein all the recovered artifacts could be housed under one roof, rather than lying scattered to the four winds under different curators and owners, as is currently the case - but more of that idea another time.

And thus we move onward through the essay and upward to the heavens, as we get to the point where we begin to consider whether Stonehenge may have been used to observe the night sky, as explained in the following excerpt...

So, is there at least one factually accurate way to describe what took place at Stonehenge in prehistory? It seems to that one indisputable function of the monument has been staring everyone in the face for centuries, yet it is a description that “dare not speak its name.”

Every serious writer that I know of has concentrated their gaze on the heavens when writing about Stonehenge. In 1995, Professor John North wrote a superb study of the astronomical aspects of the ruins and landscape in a book entitled Stonehenge, Neolithic Man and the Cosmos, in which he concluded that “the evidence is overwhelming that early religion was intimately bound up with the stars, Sun, Moon and the heavens in general”, while elsewhere, he suggests that the builders of Stonehenge may have regarded the stars as their stellified ancestors and the Moon as a destination for the dead.

Well, I personally have a high regard for what Professor John North’s studies, but what do others think of his ideas? Writing in the Spectator, John Michell had this to say “The mass and quality of his new evidence point inevitably to the conclusion he reaches, that the builders of Stonehenge and their Stone Age ancestors were adepts at astronomy and ritual magic.”

This view is echoed by the renowned astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, who wrote, “We have long waited for a proper treatment: that is to say a book which is entirely factual and very readable. Professor North has provided a masterful survey of the whole subject which, in my view, will supersede all earlier works.”

I can't recall having heard the name of the venerable Sir Patrick Moore being mentioned in the same breath as Stonehenge before now, and neither have I read Professor North's book, 'Stonehenge, Neolithic Man and the Cosmos', (UK/US) even though it was published as long ago as 1995. More from the linked essay...

In his 1991 book 'Stonehenge' (UK/US), Julian Richards wrote, “In brief, Stonehenge is far removed from the modern concept of an observatory, with its high scientific overtones. Instead, it may mark the beginnings of an astronomical awareness…” while the British astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer wrote of the narrow gaps between the upright stones of the trilithons at Stonehenge as “…the walls of a dark, observing place like the passage of a chambered tomb.”

In his 1987 book The Stonehenge People, (UK/US) Aubrey Burl dwells on the veneration our ancestors had for celestial bodies such as the Sun and the Moon, while in Hengeworld, Mike Pitts speaks of the early timber phase of Stonehenge as being a place where the earth was replete with the dead, while the space above was alive with spirits.

Indeed, so self-evident is the connection between Stonehenge and the entities who inhabited the heavens that even Inigo Jones, in the seventeenth century, clearly saw the ruins as a temple dedicated to Caelus, the Roman Sky God.

Finally, in a discussion with the archaeologist Professor Vance Tiede, the late astronomer Gerald Hawkins spoke of Stonehenge in the following terms: “There seems to be no practical value in what was going on at Stonehenge. One does not need Stonehenge to know when to plant seeds or when to breed cattle. Perhaps part of the purpose might have been for the handmaiden of astronomy - astrology.

Continuing in the same vein, we are given an expanded view of what this might have entailed in the distant past, to nameless people interacting with this monument, whose name back then will almost certainly never be divined by us, divided as we are by several thousand years and the complete absence of any written records, or indeed, verbal accounts from the time...

I could quote such examples at great length, but there’s no doubt whatsoever about the fascination that the night sky held for our ancestors who built Stonehenge. All the evidence I’ve presented and all the eminent sources I’ve quoted speak of our ancestors gazing at the heavens and fervently calling out to the black void in an attempt to make contact with sentient beings in the form of gods, spirits and ancestors. At the same time, they were trying to make sense of the Earth and Sky around, beneath and above them, all the while wondering at the true nature of striking phenomena such as comets, shooting stars and other visitors from the depths of space.

In other words, if Stonehenge was anything, it was a place where our ancestors undertook a prolonged search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, whether you define intelligence as information that we glean from repeated observation, or whether you regard it as any form of sentient existence in the gulf of space beyond this world.

Of course, the term “the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence” immediately conveys images of visiting alien spacecraft or of distant civilisations on worlds orbiting other stars, which is probably why no other archaeologist would dream of using such a description of Stonehenge, but is a highly accurate one nonetheless. In exactly the same vein, no one argues with highly evocative but entirely appropriate terms like “The Pillars of Creation” to describe distant cosmic wonders such as those captured below, by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Our modern SETI programme began life in 1960, using an increasingly sophisticated array of technology to scan the heavens for signs of intelligent life elsewhere, whereas the people who built Stonehenge used the naked eye to seek out supernatural entities such as gods and stellified ancestors, as well as omens like inverted rainbows, portents, harbingers and a meaningful design behind the celestial bodies and phenomena they observed. To my mind, given the gap of 5,000 years or so between the two sets of “watchers of the skies”, the two activities are virtually indistinguishable.

Of course we don't know exactly how the night skies and the stars which illuminate it would have been perceived at the time - a dark veil, through which tiny pin-pricks of light emanating from some or other realm could be observed by night, or lights that had been lit by an unknown hand.

How for example would they have explained that despite the apparent peace and tranquillity of the night sky, all those bright lights, including the Moon, would move of their own accord around and across the sky, sometimes in different and opposite directions over the course of months and years; we might even ask if they somehow worked out that the Earth, or whatever it was they called this world, was a giant spinning globe, speeding around the Sun at 66,000 mph on its non-stop, multi-million mile annual journey around the centre of our solar system - or indeed whether they had otherwise rationalised the cosmos in ways that we can but now hardly imagine.

There's a place in Arizona with strong links back to Papal Rome, as we see here...

The Vatican has an observatory in Arizona that regularly organises international conferences on astronomy. While the staff at the Vatican Observatory are self-evidently men of profound religious beliefs, they also possess extensive qualifications in their chosen field, so I thought that this combination of learning, experience, science, religion and highly disciplined thinking would be the sternest possible test of my ability to make a convincing case for Stonehenge to be defined or classified as an early SETI structure.

I wrote to Christopher J Corbally, the Vice President of the Vatican Observatory and a man with an impressive list of qualifications that includes a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics with Honours, a Master of Science in Astronomy, a Doctorate in Astronomy and a Bachelor’s Degree in Theology with Honours, in addition to the various posts he’s held, such as Dean of the Vatican Observatory Summer School.

I pointed Chris towards this site, as well as inviting him to make whatever enquiries about me he chose to, on the internet and elsewhere, and he was good enough to find the time to reply. As the time period under discussion is prehistory, a period without written records, he naturally qualified what he had to say by pointing out that “this is speculation, based on a sense that humans have been asking the same kind of questions over the ages, even though our scientific tools have changed”.

I wouldn’t expect anyone applying themselves to a serious consideration of this matter to ignore the aspect of a lack of written records, but Chris also wrote “I think that you are correct in thinking those people who built Stonehenge would have pondered about life, and intelligent life, elsewhere.”

When I presented my case to Chris, I mentioned the Moon on a number of occasions, including the concept of the Moon as a destination for the dead, although with the benefit of hindsight, there was no real need for me to remind a senior Vatican astronomer of the existence of this huge, silver world orbiting in such close proximity to our own. Be that as it may, Chris also observed, “From the Greek Atomists on (and no doubt before them), it seems that anyone who thought that our Earth was not unique would have entertained ideas about extraterrestrial life.”

For a quick look at the philosophy of atomists and others, this page at The Royal Institute of Philosophy offers the following comments...

The Greek atomists invented atomism as an answer to the scientific question which the Ionian philosophers were asking, namely ‘what permanent stuff is the physical world made of?’ As an answer to that question, the theory proved far better than suggestions like water and air which had been made before. Indeed it was so successful that it was taken up by the founders of modern science in the seventeenth century. And it served physics extremely well from Galileo’s time to Faraday’s. During those two centuries, physicists were able to follow it in attributing all change to the collisions between hard, unchangeable ultimate particles known as ‘atoms’. This meant merely that they were simple, indivisible things, and were supposed to bounce off each other like billiard-balls.

As we now know, however, this model finally proved inadequate. At microscopic levels, billiard-balls themselves turned out not to be solid. They were indeed still seen as made of particles, but these particles now appeared to be held together by electrical attraction in a great deal of empty space. The balls’ bouncing was not, then, due to their solidity, but to electrical repulsions at the surface. At this point it emerged that the particles of which the world was made were not really stern individualists who ignored each other. Instead they were intrinsically social items, patterns of energy that tend to form still wider patterns by actively attracting and repelling one another in ways that are continuous with the wider system around them.

Interaction, then, is real. Modern physics has ceased to be atomistic in the full sense that the Greek atomists intended. It no longer believes that what ultimately constitutes the world is a set of essentially distinct, immutable particles. But this new understanding is not only a new doctrine in physics. It has brought with it a profoundly different view of what explanation itself is.

To the atomists, and to most Greek thinkers, the project of explaining change meant finding something permanent outside change which could account for it. Change in itself was assumed to be unintelligible and therefore illusory. Explaining it was therefore a one-way journey to a terminus which had to be something immutable, something outside the natural system. The Greek Atomists thought of themselves as sternly rationalistic because they found this terminus in physical atoms rather than in supernatural beings. But atoms as bizarre as those that they proposed were in fact supernatural. They stood outside the realm of nature because the whole of nature is subject to change.

When physicists abandoned this kind of atomism, they began to realise that change as a whole does not need explaining in terms of something else. It is the normal state of things in the cosmos. It is not - as most of the Greeks tended to think - some kind of illusion which has to be explained away. As Heraclitus put it, everything is in flux and you can never get into the same river twice.

Indeed, there is really no such thing as the same river. Everything is impermanent. When we want to explain particular changes, we can do so by examining their context and comparing it with the general behaviour of other changing things. As far as physical science is concerned, ‘explaining’ these changes is, in fact, simply answering whatever questions actually arise about them by looking for evidence in the natural world relevant to these questions. Of course we do not always manage to find it. We are often too ignorant and incompetent to do so. But we would not succeed any better by trying to penetrate to a hidden metaphysical realm behind them instead.

I'm on uncertain ground when discussing matters philosophical, but we can nevertheless maybe see here some of the foundations of what the builders of Stonehenge themselves may have had in mind when trying to construct something on Earth that was permanent, but was used to observe something like the night sky, that was in some ways permanent in that it appeared every night - whether obscured by clouds - but it was impermanent in that the stellar elements that comprised the night sky were ever changing, as the stars - and planets, which they might not have thought of as planets as we do, were in constant motion, as was the Moon.

And of course, the Moon not only moved across the sky, but appeared in a constant sequence of of phased change - as opposed to the Sun that divided the night and day, and moved across the sky, but nevertheless retained its shape - i.e. it was always 'full', never crescent or semi-circular in shape.

But even the seemingly reliable Sun moves across the horizon as it rises and sets during the course of the year, and much has been made of Stonehenge's possible alignments to these rising and setting points, the length and brevity of days and so on. Moreover, eclipses would have been observed, albeit infrequently, and these too would naturally have been a source of wonder and discussion amongst interested parities.

Of course, I can't say for sure whether any or all of these thoughts were in the minds of those who conceived Stonehenge - but as the author notes, it would be most odd indeed if people as intelligent as the builders of Stonehenge didn't look up at the sky in an effort to see something beyond the comparatively mundane realities of the physical world around them down on terra firma - and the difference between the cyclical and ephemeral, yet constantly appearing night sky would have exercised the brains and mouths of many an inquiring mind back in the day.

But whether they would have practised astronomy in the same way as we do, or attempt to use it as a supernatural guide by which to divine their own lives - and possibly their after-lives as well isn't known. But given similar pre-occupations that prevail to the present day, despite our incredible advances in technology - and possibly culture, though that must remain a moot point, I can quite easily imagine Stonehenge and other constructions in the same era as being palces where people - possibly elites, but possibly just anyone who was interested, could gather at Stonehenge to observe, discuss and probably argue - maybe in a more informal way than such gatherings are sometimes reconstructed for TV shows and documentaries.

And even if these ancestors of ours were observing the night sky, there might have been other purposes for their collective gaze skyward - because it would have been apparent that no matter how much time they spent watching and contemplating what they saw above them, the Sun, the Moon and the stars were always far beyond their physical, if not mental reach.

This might have struck people as odd - after all, the other physical elements of which their lives were composed were constantly available - and if something or someone was far away, a journey could be undertaken to reach that object or person. But the celestial bodies above them never approached Earth, and could never be visited. It might have appeared that some Full Moons were much bigger than others, and that would have seemed odd - why did the Moon sometimes appear to be approaching Earth, only for it to then diminish in size as it backed away again.

So would it be reasonable in any shape or form to assume that part of the intention of the original builders was instead of trying to make an impossible journey to the sky to visit them, instead to try and entice, or even pull the Sun, the Moon, or indeed the stars themselves, to come down from their celestial realm down to the very Earth itself - and that the constructions of Stonehenge and contemporary structures were a means of attracting the heavenly bodies, in effect making them a message from mankind to the heavens.

And we might wish to bear in mind that when considering the worlds that may or not exist beyond our own, in both the physical and the abstract, the themes of life and death are ever present, and it is likely that our ancestors would have found themselves pre-occupied with such burning questions as to what life as they experienced it represented, and whether everything they could discern with their vital senses was all there was, or whether there was something the other side of the veil that could either empower them in this life, or the one that might to them have beckoned from beyond.

We should also bear in mind that Stonehenge the monument, as we see it today, didn't necessarily exist in splendid isolation from the rest of the world, or even its surrounding landscape, and regardless of its suggested uses, it is likely to have been a component in a grander scheme of things as well as perhaps having one or more specific functions in its own right over the years that it was in use.

And on that note, we conclude Part I of this discussion, the second instalment of which will appear here in due course, when we'll be looking again, from a slightly different angle, at the hulking monoliths that sit upon an ancient plain beneath an eternal sky.

Archaeologists In Moravia Discover 7,000 year-old Hollow Sculpture

Here's news of a find of an unusual hollow statue from a village near Znojmo, called Masovice in southern Moravia, and as it has been provisionally dated to the Neoloithic, it's probably the oldest known sculpture of its kind. This from Radio Prague...

On Wednesday, (17th October?) experts from the Brno Archaeological Institute marked a discovery that could change the way historians look at the era of 7 000 years ago, known as the Neolithic Age. During an emergency survey on a building site in the community of Masovice, some 8 km north of Znojmo in South Moravia, they discovered fragments of a ceramic female sculpture. Archaeologist Zdenek Cizmar, who was the first to lay his hands on this unusual find, explains the significance of the discovery.

"The sculpture is unique for two reasons; one of them is its size. The fragment we have found is 30 centimetres tall, from its feet to the waistline. We therefore estimate its overall original height to be 55 to 60 centimetres; this means that it is the largest statue of the Moravian Painted Ware culture ever found in the whole Middle Danube Basin".

Zdenek Cizmar, photo: CTK

The people of the Moravian Painted Ware culture formed a part of the Neolithic civilization of central Europe in the period between 5000 and 4000 BC and they were particularly distinguished for their pottery skills. Many other figurines have been found in sites across Moravia, Slovakia, Hungary and Austria, but the recently discovered statue is different in yet another way - it is hollow. As Zdenek Cizmar says, archaeologists are still not quite sure why.

"We have two possible explanations. It could either be some sort of a technological issue to make sure the statue was easier to dry and burn. It is also possible that the sculpture, which surely served some ritual purposes, could also be used as a vessel to pour liquid from during ritual ceremonies."

Efforts will be made to recover more of this most unusual of discoveries, and eventually it is planned to exhibit the finds at the South Moravian Museum in Znojmo, and in the meantime there will hopefully be updates to this story - maybe the discovery of some of the missing pieces might shed light on the reason for the hollowness of the sculpture - which might indicate it was filled with something, or possibly that by being hollow, it was possible to to strike it with something in such a way as to make it reverberate with sound - or of course, there could have been a completely different application involved.

see also: Na Moravě objevili unikátní sochu starou 7000 let

Orkney Arrowheads Find Points To Scotland's Earliest Settlement

Here's a quick look at a story that came out a week or so ago, and might add a new dimension to what we know about Scotland at the Upper Palaeolithic/Mesolithic boundary. This from The Scotsman...

Two flint "tanged points" or arrowheads found on the island of Stronsay are thought to have been used by hunters between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, just after the Ice Age. The arrowheads were found among a collection of scattered artefacts, including bladed tools, on a farm by Naomi Woodward and a team of MA students on an archaeology course at Orkney College.

The discoveries were made during a two-week research trip in April, but have just been made public. Two points from the late upper Paleolithic period (13-10,000BC) had previously been found in Orkney, at Ness of Brodgar, and on Stronsay - but both were lost in the 1920s.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this last paragraph, because during the Upper Palaeolithic, this part of the world would presumably have been covered by part of the 2km high sheet of ice that covered most of the British Isles, so I don't know how stone tools would have made their way to the location at which they were found. The more recent finds were made on the surface, which would make them difficult to accurately date, although I assume the dating in this case is based on the tool type rather than any kind of carbon dating relating to organic matter found in context.

If the recent finds do turn out to be Mesolithic, it would be interesting to know how the original owners of the stone tools got to a remote island, which would at the time only have been accessible crossing the sea by boat, unless of course there had been a resident population that had been stranded by the Great Melt at the end of the glaciation a few thousand years earlier, which seems unlikely.

However, it is planned that further work will continue at the location, and there are hopes that an archaeological site might yet be lurking beneath the surface upon which the finds were made.

Update: 26th October, 2007

Following an email regarding this post, I found this article over at Orkneyjar, from where we learn a little more about the finds and their possible implications...

Naomi Woodward, of Orkney College, found the tanged points – thought to have been used between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago - in a flint scatter collected during the Stronsay Archaeological Survey in April 2007.

Flint experts Caroline Wickham-Jones and Torbin Ballin subsequently identified them as very early forms of prehistoric arrowheads – a type derived from a classification known as Ahrensburgian, found across the plains of north western Europe.

The flints were probably used by the mobile, hunter-gatherers of the period, perhaps on a hunting expedition, or temporary camp, on what would eventually become Stronsay.

Naomi explained: “We think its either very early Mesolithic or late Paleolithic, dating from around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. They’re incredibly rare, especially for Orkney.”

“There’s been two other finds of this sort of point from the 1920s but they’ve been lost. One came from the Ness of Brodgar, while the other came from Stronsay. In fact, the latest finds came from an area a mile, or a mile and half, from where the 1920s example was picked up.”

Although this type of arrowhead has been found before, they have generally been without context – in other words, lying loose in the ploughsoil with nothing around about to fix a date. But it is hoped the Stronsay flints could indicate the presence of a site – in which case it could be incredibly significant to the archaeology of Scotland, let alone Orkney.

Naomi said: “Although these are just surface finds at the moment, we’re hoping that with this collection there could actually be an assemblage of them which would make it a very early site for Orkney, if not Scotland.

“We want to go out and try test trenches over the area they were found. Traces of any activity would be quite ephemeral, just post holes, charcoal, temporary shelters and the like.”

The Ahrensburgian link could indicate these early settlers were from the northern European plains. A mobile population, they would have travelled around the area, setting up temporary camps for their hunting and fishing expeditions.

As I mentioned earlier, I was slightly puzzled by the apparent lack of ice so far north in what would have been the final stages of the Late Pleistocene, and again we hear from Caroline Wickham-Jones, who makes the following observations...

Caroline Wickham-Jones, an expert in the early settlement of Scotland, said: “The problem with the Ice Age is that there is no actual research as to when Orkney deglaciated. So we don’t actually know what happened in Orkney”

However, going on research from elsewhere in Scotland, we can make some guesses.

After the Ice Age, and around 12000 BC, much of northern Scotland – and presumably Orkney - was free of ice, with temperatures rising to levels similar to today. Two-thousand years later, however, around 11,000 BC, the climate began to deteriorate again. Temperatures began to drop, marking the start of the period known at the Loch Lomond Stadial around 9,000BC. Arctic conditions returned to northern Scotland, where glaciers reformed in mountainous areas, permafrost was widespread and winter temperatures fell to 20 or 30 degrees below current levels.

Caroline added: “If the flints turn out to be from the Upper Paleolithic, we could have settlement in the period prior to the Loch Lomond Stadial. This would be really exciting because it pushes back the known settlement of Scotland by several thousand years.

“Alternatively, if they date from the early Mesolithic, the flints would represent human activity in the period soon after the Loch Lomond Stadial, when temperatures were rising and the climate improving. We know nothing of the very first inhabitants of Scotland after the Ice Age and it is exciting to think that some may have had northern links.”

Hopefully, the forthcoming proposed investigations, slated for Spring 2008, will shed yet more light on this northerly site, giving us a clearer picture regarding the mobility and origins of the people who unintentionally left these artefacts to be found in the modern day.

see also: Silent Victims Of The Sea: Rising Tides Threaten Archaeological Sites

History of Papa Stronsay and Orkney

In pictures: Inside Silbury Hill

BBC News have a mini-feature regarding the ongoing work inside Silbury Hill, as efforts continue to stabilise the prehistoric structure. There are half a dozen pictures, and as the accompanying descriptions contain some interesting comments, I've included them here...

Building work has been going on to stabilise the ancient monument of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire for six months but before sealing up the tunnel, media were allowed inside it.

Parts of the 4,400-year-old Neolithic site were thought to be collapsing because of the tunnels dug by archaeologists over many centuries - the last of which was created in 1968.

As engineers worked to stabilise the monument, archaeologists have tried to unlock the site's ancient secrets and find out how, why and when it was built.

Discoveries include medieval postholes on top of the hill and iron arrowheads, indicating there may have been a huge military building there during the Saxon or Norman periods.

One theory is that the top of the hill was lopped off around the time of the Battle of Hastings or even earlier.

From next week, the tunnel will be repacked with chalk to stabilise the hill for future generations to appreciate.

Why anyone would wish to have sliced off the top of what would presumably have been a more conical monument, back in the days of the Norman Conquest, is something of a mystery, unless they decided to exploit Silbury Hill's height as a natural spot from which to overlook the surrounding countryside, lest any of the defeated but rebellious Anglo-Saxon population decided to make their feelings clearly known in the guise of armed insurrection.

From the top of Silbury Hill it is possible to survey the land for many miles in every direction, and it's easy to imagine windswept Norman sentries casting their eyes out over this newly conquered land, watching for the slightest indication of trouble from afar - however, it may have been the Anglo-Saxon population itself that carried out this act of uncivil engineering, and maybe they in turn were, rightly, worried about incursions from overseas into southern England.

Many will be hoping that these current efforts will indeed be enough to shore up this ancient monument, as it there has been an alarming series of reports over the past few years, which have indicated that the structural integrity of the site was under considerable duress.

image from here

TED | Talks | Aubrey de Grey: Why we age and how we can avoid it (video)

Having last week pondered the somewhat gloomy suggestion by Sir Martin Rees, that humanity may become extinct within the next century, we turn this week to biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who proposes that we could be on the brink of making breakthrough discoveries to halt and repair pathologies associated with ageing, which in turn might allow people who are currently around 50 to live on for at least another 30 years, and possibly till 150, if refinements to the initial breakthrough discovery are made. He further contends that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old may even be alive today, but as he points out, it is at the moment impossible to know when those first breakthroughs will be made.

He first tackles the concept of ageing, and why there is opposition to the idea that we should attempt to stop ageing, foremost amongst which is the danger of over-population - he thinks we will have to make a choice between a low birth rate or a high death rate. He discusses metabolism, and how homeostatic processes such as metabolism are eventually overtaken by pathologic processes, which cause damage and death.

He talks of fundamental breakthroughs, and the refinements that follow - he uses the history of flight technology that has evolved over the past century - and mentions computers and medicines - which echoes to an extent the thoughts of Ray Kurzweil, who showed how successive leaps after initial breakthroughs, both in organic and technological evolution, occur with greater frequency over time.

Very interesting talk, which is followed at the end by the speaker taking a few questions from the audience - such as why it would appear that species have evolved to die, to which he responds that ageing is a product of evolutionary neglect, and that we can step in and alter that process.

It remains to be seen whether it is useful to a human being to be able to live for centuries - in fields such as long-distance space travel, there would obviously be advantages, but the question of what one would actually do in the course of a natural terrestrial existence through the sweep of centuries to make all that extra life worthwhile, is something that as yet we cannot answer.

see also: Ocean Quahog Clam, Aged Between 405 and 410 years

Four Stone Hearth XXVI @ The Primate Diaries

Eric at The Primate Diaries has posted the latest edition of Four Stone Hearth, which as he rightly points out, is the first edition of its second year. And a roaring start it is to this second year, with an impressive array of contributions from around the blogosphere, including entries from a few blogs that were hitherto unknown to me, particularly in the Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology sections, so I'll look forward to checking out these sites, as well of course all the other entries in the Archaeology and Biological/Evolutionary sections.

The next edition of Four Stone Hearth will be with us in two weeks' time, and on this occasion will be hosted by Sam Wise over at Sorting Out Science on November 7th. So until then, enjoy reading the current edition, and many thanks to Eric at The Primate Diaries for compiling such a good collection of posts, as well as to everyone who kindly submitted content.

See you all on November 7th.

Archaeologist Uncovers 11,000-year-old Artefacts At Djade-al-Mughara In Syria

More the news last week from northern Syria, of the earliest known wall paintings dating back to 11,000 years - in reference to a comment I saw on a another site, which questioned whether these were really the oldest known wall paintings, these are different from earlier Palaeolithic parietal paintings, in that the walls which they adorned at Dja'de were constructed by humans, rather than on cave walls which were constructed organically by natural processes. This from Middle East Online...

"The wall paintings date back to the 9th millennium BC. They were discovered last month on the wall of a house standing two metres (6.6 feet) high at Dja'de," said Frenchman Eric Coqueugniot, who has been leading the excavations on the west bank of the river at Dja'de, in an area famous for its rich tradition of prehistoric treasures.

The etchings are "polychrome paintings in black, white and red. The designs are solely geometric, and only figurative. The composition is made up of a system cross-hatched lines, alternating between the three colours," Coqueugniot said.

They were found in a circular building, around 7.5 metres (25 feet) in diameter.

The excavated house features three solid blocks where the paintings were located. The main pillar has been completely excavated and stands almost two metres high displaying the new murals, said Coqueugniot, a researcher for the Paris-based National Centre for Scientific Research. The remains of the building, much larger than the small and rectangular domestic dwellings of the period, "must have been used as a meeting place for the whole village or for a clan," he added.

The age of this site recalls the even earlier 12,500 year-old site at Gobleke Tepe in modern day Anatolia, which shows that people were using constructed buildings for public use whilst much of Europe and elsewhere was still in the Mesolithic, indicating that what we call the progress toward modern civilisation may have started earlier in the Near and Middle East. In addition to the red, white and black wall paintings, artefacts have also been recovered at the site...

Carved stone tools, flints, seed-grinding implements and brick-grinding stones have been recovered. Many bone objects were also found -- both remnants of the animals that made up part of the daily diet and intricately fashioned tools. The dig also uncovered several figurines made of gypsum, chalk, bone and clay. The most recent discovery, an 11,000-year-old statue of a man is "particularly important and well preserved," Coqueugniot said.

This item will allow comparisons with other similar sculptures found on sites in the Urfa region of southern Turkey, added the French scientist, who has overseen archaeological projects at Dja'de for 15 years. "The figures could have had religious significance.

The female statuettes could also have been fertility symbols. But they could have had entirely different ritual meanings," Coqueugniot said "We can only offer hypotheses," he added. "It is still very difficult to say what was the significance of this 11,000-year-old statue of the woman."

This period of time is referred to here as the Epipalaeolithic, described as the transition from the Upper Palaeolithic - and it would appear, that Dja'de wasn't the only important site in this region, as we see here...

Many artefacts from this period have been discovered in northern Syria, in particular at Jerf al-Ahmar, a site destroyed by the Tishrin dam, Coqueugniot said. It was one of several built over the past three decades that have flooded a number of archaeological sites.

For example, the dam at Tabqa flooded an area of around 650 square kilometres (250 square miles) after it was erected in 1976. Prior to that, the government approved testing of 56 sites, 20 of which were spared when the dam was built.

Work looks set to continue at Dja'de, and it will be interesting to learn what further discoveries may yet see the light of modern day.

See also :: Terrae Antiquae : Neolithic Temple Discovered in Northern Syria, which has additional images.

and France Diplomatie, which has some more information on the site and the research (in French)

Binnall of America : Audio - Season III Premiere - Jim Marrs

Although these days I rarely venture into the realms of esoterica, Tim Binnall got in touch to let me know that Season 3 of BoA: Audio had kicked off, with Jim Marrs giving an interview on the subject of remote viewing, as well as promoting his recently (re-)published Psi Spies. Following Tim's advisory note, I headed over to the site, and downloaded the 2 free mp3s that comprise the two half-hour segments of the show.

Here's some of Tim Binnall's own description of this show...

For the third year in a row, BoA : Audio kicks off its new season with legendary esoteric researcher Jim Marrs. This time around the bend, we'll be discussing Psi Spies, which was re-released this past Summer with a wealth of new material. In our conversation, we discuss the US Army Remote Viewing program, its birth, evolution, and demise. We delve into the weirder elements, like international Psi spy confrontations, the Enigma files, the curious case of Phobos II, and how the UFO phenomenon fits into the Psi Spy story. We'll also discuss the controversy within the RV community, once the Psi Spy unit disbanded, and how the field has changed since moving into the private sector. Plus, thoughts from Jim on the past year in Ufology & the 911 Movement, and, of course, tons and tons more.

The one part of the show I wanted to quickly mention was in the second half of the show, where the mysterious Major Ed Dames turns up - he's the guy who appears on Coast about 4 times a year, comes out with the biggest load of garbage you could wish to hear, and yet is still treated as some sort of bona fide character - from predicting a doomsday event when Hale Bopp zoomed past about 10 years ago, to promising Art Bell that he was about to find a load of gold, and informing the vast audience of Coast that his remote viewing field agents were on the verge of finding the missing Steve Fossett, never has one man got so much so consistently wrong - and yet they keep bringing him back for more.

Maybe if Coast could get some of the much more articulate exponents on - i.e. the people who try and discuss what remote viewing is - and is not - rather than making preposterous predictions live on air, we the general public might have a little more information on which to judge for ourselves whether there is anything to remote viewing or not.

There was an opinion expressed that he might be some kind of Disinfo Dan, deliberately foisted on the world to discredit remote viewing - intentionally or not, he's been doing an excellent job of it for years - unless he really is as clueless as he appears to be - results oriented, this man is not.

Jim Marrs remarked at one point, when discussing the supposed involvement of the CIA and US, that it was the remote viewing activities of both sides in the Cold War, and their ability to discover everything about the perceived enemy, that ultimately caused that Cold War to end.

Detractors might argue that not only did both sides in the Cold War have extremely efficient and talented spy networks, but the amount of intelligence that was simply handed on a plate by various defectors to either side gave both the US and the Eastern Bloc a fairly comprehensive idea of what the other was up to.

As such, I remain unconvinced about remote viewing, mainly because I have no way of ascertaining whether it exists, or works, or not - and because most of the popular literature tends to be anecdotal, as opposed to being written up in scientific journals, most people from within the scientific community will remain sceptical as to whether there really is something that can be clearly defined as 'remote viewing'.

We can trace the human desire to see into the future, and to seek advice and guidance from one or another abstract realm going all the way back to places like the Oracle at Delphi, through any number of ritualistic behaviours associated with magic, for the past few thousand years, leading in the present day to such maligned practices as astrology - and it's my guess that people were probably engaged in similar activities throughout at least the latter stages of prehistory, maybe going back much further. Maybe there's something inherent in our human nature that expresses a desire to know what under ordinary circumstances cannot be known, for a vast variety of reasons, and that seems unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

Remote viewing apparently offers not only the opportunity to see into the future, but into the (distant) past, or indeed across the planet in the present day, and, so it is claimed, out to the planets and stars. However, the ways and means by which one might go about learning this most unusual of skills aren't immediately clear - interested parties are advised to read the literature - Paul Smith, Ingo Swann, Russell Targ and Joe McMoneagle are but four of the best known figures who have written extensively on the subject, and who are indeed reputed to be expert practitioners of what has been described as something akin to learning and practicing a martial art.

Jim Marrs suggested that any one of us, with enough time, instruction and practice, could sit at a piano and play Chopin, and he suggests that so it is with remote viewing - the last time I looked, can't remember where, courses were being offered at several thousand dollars a time, which would immediately place it well beyond the means of many who might be interested to try their hand.

Having said that, for anyone familiar with, and interested in the field, some of its main protagonists and associated lore, including the Phobos II story, there will plenty in this chat between Tim Binnall and Jim Marrs to listen out for - Tim Binnall is as good as ever - he always knows enough about the topic of discussion to be able to engage the interviewee and ask pertinent questions at the right time, whilst always allowing the interview to flow. For his part, Jim Marrs, who has worked as a reporter, and has published several very popular books, is as articulate and full of good anecdotes as ever, and he has now become something of a permanent feature in opening Tim Binnall's new audio series.

I've mentioned in the past that I rarely cover esoteric subjects on this blog, or at least much less often than used to be the case. This is mainly because my instinct is to follow anthropology and archaeology, and I have a hard enough job finding the time to cover those subjects to even a fraction of the degree which I would like to. Moreover, my knowledge of these esoteric subjects is at best limited, and other than offering passing comments and thoughts, I'm not sure I have very much to contribute in that direction - however, it has to be said that I have spent many hours over the years listening to radio shows such as this - the good old days of the Art Bell Show are long gone, and there is precious little out there that comes close to emulating that.

But I've always enjoyed listening to Binnall of America, and in my opinion it is unrivalled on the Web - especially bearing in mind that it has always been free, and looks set to be so for the foreseeable future - but even though they are supported to some extent by the donations of listeners, it's likely that at some point BoA will need to start covering their costs by charging for subscriptions, as expenses inevitably rack up, but even then, I get the impression that they'll make a big effort to keep it as far from being commercial as possible.

TB has stated in the past that he's all in favour of keeping this freely available for as long as possible, which I think is fair enough - if you want to take an interest and listen you can do so for free, and offhand I can't think of a single other show of its type that is also freely accessible to listen and download; this makes BoA an ideal show for people who are already acquainted with the lore and some of its best known contributors, as well as for those who might be unfamiliar with the topics discussed, but don't want to have to part with cash in order to be able to check it out.

This is likely to be the only show of this kind that I do cover, and indeed BoA audio will probably be the only representative of the esoteric field that will be covered here at all - and while I can't promise to cover every single episode, we are promised some of the best known researchers in future shows, so I'll attempt to write up at least some of them, as time and other factors permit.

On a final note, Tim Binnall mentioned that his fellow workers at Binnall of America had carried the site during the summer months, as he had been somewhat preoccupied by a family bereavement, and as such, this blog extends its sincere condolences to Tim, and notes that despite this difficult time, he has nevertheless managed to get this third season up and running in style, with many of the shows already recorded, for which he and his team, should be highly commended.

image: 'The Biography of a Carbon Atom' by Dan McCarthy from here

Four Stone Hearth 26 @ The Primate Diaries, Wed. 24th October - Call For Submissions

A quick reminder to anyone and everyone considering submitting content for the forthcoming 4SH - this from Martin at Aardvarchaeology...

Wednesday 24 October will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at The Primate Diaries. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Eric ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)

There's an open hosting slot on 5 December and further ones closer to Christmas. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.

"Neanderthals Could Build Stuff" - A Very Remote Period Indeed

Here's a good example of exactly the type of Palaeolithic news that should be making the world's headlines, and although in this case it's in French, Julien at 'A Very Remote Period Indeed' has offered us something of a translation, which I quote here in its entirety...

The Mousterian site of La Folie, which is located just north of Poitiers (France), is the subject of an extremely well-done website (in French, unfortunately with no English translation). The site is dated by TL to about 57.7 +/- 2.4 kya and had thus far been the subject of a few preliminary reports that emphasized its contextual integrity and the identification of activity areas within it (Bourguignon et al. 2002, 2006).

One of the key aspects of the site is that a number of approaches were combined to confidently establish the existence of regularly spaced postholes around its periphery (indicating the existence of a relatively large man-made structure) and discrete activity areas within the area circumscribed by this structure (slightly under 250 squared meters, over a thickness of about 10 cm). The absence of evidence for a central or transversal posts that would have been needed to support a roof suggests that the structure was a large (i.e., ca. 10m in diameter) windbreak rather than a tent or hut.

The postholes were surrounded by limestone blocks used to anchor the wooden posts used in the structure, traces of which have clearly been identified through micromorphological analysis in at least one of the holes. Likewise, micromorphology identified a large area along one side of the structure that was devoid of archaeological remains, save for decomposed plant materials, which suggest that it represents a bedding area.

Use-wear and technological analyses show that the lithic industry used at the site is characteristic of the Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition, and that it included a Levallois production strategy aimed at producing sharp flakes used to work a variety of materials (e.g., wood, skin, soft plant material). A few of these blanks were retouched to produce, among other things, retouched backed knives, but most of the lithics appear to have been produced and used relatively expediently. The investigators argue that the site served as a task site likely used in food procurement, although there are only scant details about this interpretation provided on the website.

All in all, this is a very eloquent presentation of the results of this excavation and it demonstrates how relatively dry archaeological data can be presented in an engaging way to the public at large. On a more technical level, as had already been documented at the Middle Palaeolithic site of Tor Faraj in Jordan (Henry et al. 2004), this confirms that Neanderthals were able to partition and clearly organize their living space, in contrast to claims that "well organized sites" only appear in the Upper Palaeolithic.

References:

Bourguignon, L., Sellami, F., Deloze, V., Sellier-Segard, N., Beyries, S., Emery-Barbier, E. 2002. L’habitat moustérien de « La Folie » (Poitiers, Vienne) : synthèse des premiers résultats. Paléo 14:29-48.

Bourguignon, L., Vieillevigne, E., Guibert, P., Bechtel, F., Beyries, S., Émery-Bariber, A., Deloze, V., Delahaye, C., Sellami, F., Sellier-Segard, N. 2006. Compléments d’informations chronologiques sur le campement moustérien de tradition acheuléenne du gisement de la Folie (Poitiers, Vienne). Paléo 18:37-44.

Henry, D. O., H. J. Hietala, A. M. Rosen, Y. E. Demidenko, V. I. Usik and T. L. Armagan. 2004. Human Behavioral Organization in the Middle Paleolithic: Were Neanderthals Different? American Anthropologist 106:17-31.

The linked page makes the point (I think) that we should stop thinking about 'cave-men' and ask how people really organised their living spaces in the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic - I've mentioned before that there is maybe an outside possibility that some of the gridded designs we find painted onto cave walls, particularly in the Magdalenian, might be schematic or symbolic represent ations of nearby or local human settlements.

It might well have made sense for people to construct some sort of organised, albeit make-shift settlements, which may have been occupied on a seasonal basis, or for only a single occupation and never used again -Neanderthals may have been nomads, but even modern nomadic people aren't constantly on the move, and I can easily imagine Neanderthal tribes or communities settling here and there in temporary encampments.

L'habitat Nomade de Neandertal

Inrap

A Very Remote Period Indeed

Pinnacle Point, S. Africa, 164,000 bp - Humans Cooked Shellfish, Used Red Ochre

Yet another in a seemingly never-ending stream of articles that claim a 'first' or 'oldest' in the story of human evolution, and like its predecessors, this story's attached set of conclusions has about as many holes as the combined nets of the entire North Sea fishing fleet; what is undoubtedly a very interesting discovery has been misinterpreted and vastly over-hyped, but such is the world of the popular Press.

First to the details of the find by Curtis Marean, a palaeoanthropologist with the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and three graduate students in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change., as reported in Science Daily...

Evidence of early humans living on the coast in South Africa, harvesting food from the sea, employing complex bladelet tools and using red pigments in symbolic behavior 164,000 years ago, far earlier than previously documented, is being reported in the journal Nature.

The Tan-Tan figurine, covered in red ochre and dating to 400,000 bp, as described by Robert Bednarik, is comfortably older than this discovery, and there are other indications from ochre mines that symbolic behaviour was in evidence hundreds of thousands of years before Pinnacle Point.

In seeking the "perfect site" to explore, Marean analyzed ocean currents, climate data, geological formations and other data to pin down a location where he felt sure to find one of these progenitor populations: the Cape of South Africa at Pinnacle Point.

"It was important that we knew exactly where to look and what we were looking for," says Marean. This type of research is expensive and funding is competitive. Marean and the team of scientists who set out to Pinnacle Point to search for this elusive population, did so with the help of a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Human Origins: Moving in New Directions (HOMINID) program.

I suppose if one is trying to justify a $2.5 million grant, it's important to cast one's discoveries in the best possible light, but simply ignoring previous discoveries in order to make misleading claims of 'first' or' oldest', isn't in my opinion, the way to go - for example...

"Generally speaking, coastal areas were of no use to early humans -- unless they knew how to use the sea as a food source" says Marean. "For millions of years, our earliest hunter-gatherer relatives only ate terrestrial plants and animals. Shellfish was one of the last additions to the human diet before domesticated plants and animals were introduced."

Before, the earliest evidence for human use of marine resources and coastal habitats was dated about 125,000 years ago. "Our research shows that humans started doing this at least 40,000 years earlier. This could have very well been a response to the extreme environmental conditions they were experiencing," he says.

The first paragraph makes no sense at all - coastal environments would in my opinion have been particularly attractive to early humans - abundant food resources, in the guise of shell-fish, crustaceans etc. would have provided plenty of protein, and plant foods such as kelp may also have been available. Archaic humans would likely have been just as adept at exploiting marine resources as their later descendants, and is somewhat unfortunate that many of the beach locations that could have been occupied by early humans have been sunk below the waves for as much as 12,000 years - thus we are seeing only a fraction of the picture when we consider inland sites only.

As these are food resources that require gathering rather than hunting, it would have made sense to live a life with as many reduced dangers as possible, in which occasional forays could have been made inland in search of meat on the hoof, as well as other plant foods and resources. Locations where fresh-water rivers emptied out into the ocean would have made ideal sites for hunting prey animals, although of course, early, and presumably unarmed humans would have been in just as much danger as other prey animals that came to drink from the freshwater sites.

But the main point is that coastal regions that could have been home to early humans are for the most part drowned beneath the sea, victims of rising sea-levels since the end of the Pleistocene, and it could be for that reason that we see what appears to be so little evidence for humans in coastal regions.

"Coastlines generally make great migration routes," Marean says. "Knowing how to exploit the sea for food meant these early humans could now use coastlines as productive home ranges and move long distances."

Results reporting early use of coastlines are especially significant to scientists interested in the migration of humans out of Africa. Physical evidence that this coastal population was practising modern human behaviour is particularly important to geneticists and physical anthropologists seeking to identify the progenitor population for modern humans."

The first point is well made, and could equally have applied to humans living on those now-submerged coastlines, whom for all we know were engaging in what are referred to as 'modern traits' far earlier than the current archaeological record might suggest.

"This evidence shows that Africa, and particularly southern Africa, was precocious in the development of modern human biology and behaviour. We believe that on the far southern shore of Africa there was a small population of modern humans who struggled through this glacial period using shellfish and advanced technologies, and symbolism was important to their social relations. It is possible that this population could be the progenitor population for all modern humans," Marean says.

Possible yes, but not very likely - if he was considering modern humans in an anatomical context, rather than a symbolic one, I'd agree there was an outside possibility that humans today are descended from one or another African individuals from 164,000 bp.

It must be tempting to emphasise the importance of one's own discoveries as much as possible, especially when you've just spent $2.5 million of someone else's cash, but ignoring the fact that 10 million square miles of land disappeared across the world as the result of the Great Melt at the beginning of the Holocene can only skew the picture - we have no idea how densely coastal regions might have been populated, or whether indeed the majority of people back then and before chose to live by the sea - although of course, it's even more difficult to get funding for submerged offshore sites that cannot be easily surveyed beforehand - however it is from such environments that we might ultimately make our biggest discoveries yet of early modern human behaviours, assuming that archaeology can be recovered intact.

Here's a final word from Curtis Marean...

"Archaeologists have had a hard time finding material residues of these earliest modern humans," Marean says. "The world was in a glacial stage 125,000 to 195,000 years ago, and much of Africa was dry to mostly desert; in many areas food would have been difficult to acquire. The paleoenvironmental data indicate there are only five or six places in all of Africa where humans could have survived these harsh conditions."

Unless of course, people in large numbers were already living by the coast, and were therefore more or less immune to the arid period of the Middle Palaeolithic described here. But despite my lack of enthusiasm for the conclusions drawn by the researchers, this is still a very exciting find, and even if it doesn't re-write prehistory as the authors would have us believe, it does at the very least, help fill in the odd blank page here and there.

see also: NYT - Key Human Traits Tied to Shellfish Remains

British Archaeology 96, September/October 2007

I mentioned in an article the other day that this blog had been linked to by another website, but nothing could have prepared me for the shock I got yesterday when I read this page at British Archaeology magazine, and saw that Caroline Wickham-Jones had mentioned this site as one of the few archaeology blogs on the internet - and what's more, it was a favourable mention at that.

As I mentioned in a note to thank her for kindly including this blog in her article, I'd actually had that same print copy of British Archaeology sitting unread in its wrapper, along with several other magazines, on my shelf for the past couple of weeks - I got round to reading some of it over the weekend, but for some reason I just hadn't spotted her article, as I'd been looking in particular at the articles on Iron Age forts and jade axe-heads; I think it's because I'm more used to reading a magazine format wherein the main articles occur after news and links, but now I know there is a regular look at the Web, I hope to be able to give more coverage of future issues.

Apart from being surprised at seeing Remote Central mentioned, it also struck me as notable that there don't seem to be that many archaeology blogs around - as the author of the article suggests, this might be because most archaeologists have more than enough of their own work to be getting on with to even think about writing blog posts, with limited time and resources a key factor.

Two sites, amongst a host of others I might have mentioned would be the weekly 'Amalgamated Friday' feature written by Kris Hirst, which offers a very good look at archaeo-blogging on a weekly basis. And although it doesn't directly relate to archaeology in Britain, I think the ongoing excavations in Hamline, Minnesota, as reported regularly at 'Old Dirt - New Thoughts' is a very good example of how a local project has expanded beyond the format of traditional projects, by not only involving the wider community of Hamline, but also by being regularly updated on Professor Brian Hoffman's blog - I think there are 11 posts to date, with the prospect of plenty more to come. His blog is a very good example of archaeology embracing the wider public, and one that I think could easily be replicated in Britain, and indeed many other countries across Europe and wherever there are sufficient resources and interest in such projects.

I see that Aardvarchaeology and Anthropology.net also got a deserved mention, plus one or two other sites that were previously unknown to me - check the rest of the article to follow the relevant links, plus there are various parts of the magazine that are available to read without purchasing the whole thing, although it's definitely worth splashing out the few euros it costs for this bi-monthly publication - I hope to post something on the Iron Age site of Sutton Common in South Yorkshire over the next few days, but I'm very behind on a load of other posts, so that particular post might not appear for a day or so yet.

see also: Antiquity - Sea Level Change and the Prehistory of Orkney

Caroline Wickham-Jones - 'Orkney: A Historical Guide' UK - 2007/US - 1999

TED | Talks | Sir Martin Rees: Earth In Its Final Century?

This week I have selected a talk given by astronomer Sir Martin Rees back in 2005, in which he discusses topics raised in his book, 'Our Final Century?' - he notes that in the US, the book was released under the name of 'Our Final Hour?', because according to Rees, Americans are keen on instant gratification - if that's true, it's fair to say the rest of the world has picked up on the idea with great enthusiasm.

Although the book has been quite widely covered both in the press and to a lesser extent on this blog, this 17-minute video is still worth watching - as he speaks "first as an astronomer, second as a worried member of the human race"

One interesting observation he makes is that, according to Rees, it would take as many humans to make up the sun as there are atoms in a human body - we are the geometric mean at 50kg, give or take. He cautions against man-made catastrophe that might befall us as a direct result of our own technological advances; as he rightly says, scientific discoveries can often have applications that are bad as well as good.

He also mentions the notion that humans will still be resident on Earth when the Sun expires, but he believes that if intelligent life is on Earth so far into the future, it will be as different from us as we are from bacteria - I wonder if it would detect any trace whatsoever of our own civilisation, or indeed that the human race had ever even existed. Excellent talk from a very good speaker and writer.

Ancient Mexican City of Tamloc Raises Questions About Mesoamerica's Mother Culture

Having recently been referred to as a blog which covers unusual archaeological findings, over at the Bizarre Blogs section of 'The Unknown Highway', I find myself more or less compelled to add this story, although in reality, most of what gets posted here is sourced from quite broad coverage online, as indeed is the linked story regarding the finds at Tamtoc, in the Huastec region of Mexico. This from Tracy Butler, travel editor at My San Antonio.com...

Deep in the Huastec jungle the enormous carved stone monolith stands, suspended over the pool of water where a team of archaeologists discovered it. A powerful woman stands at the center of the carving, flanked by two smaller decapitated women. A stream of liquid flows from the headless women toward the woman in the center.

The women on each side are thought to represent priestesses, and the liquid represents the life force, while the woman at the center represents Mother Earth; so the priestesses seem to be nurturing the Earth with their life force. The truth is, however, nobody knows for sure what these stones mean.

One thing is fairly certain — because of the recurrence of the number 13, the monolith seems to be a lunar calendar of some sort. That's why it set the archaeological world abuzz with discussion when it was unveiled last November. It is believed to have been created around 600 B.C. — 2,000 years before what was previously the oldest discovered calendar in the Americas, the Aztec Calendar, which dates to A.D. 1400.

Although I'm not sure about the Aztecs being the only other people to produce calendars in Mesoamerica - for example, the Maya are noted for having produced one of the most advanced calendar systems in the pre-Colombian the world, and I'm pretty sure the Olmec culture used calendars too - this discovery would seem to indicate an earlier use of calendars than previously known. This discovery also places the origins of the Huastec people themselves much farther back in time...

The discovery was especially surprising given that the Huastec people were thought to be a relatively recent culture. Now archaeologists are wondering whether the Huastecs — or their predecessors, the Proto-Huastecs — might have played a bigger role in the development of Mesoamerica than previously thought. It has also raised questions about whether the Olmecs might have had an influence in the region, since there are cultural similarities, or whether there might have been a third group of people, the so-called Mother Culture, that dominated the area first.

What is known is that Tamtoc was inhabited by a sophisticated people who enjoyed a high standard of living for the time, with one of the most sophisticated hydraulic systems in Mesoamerica. It was first excavated by a group of French archaeologists in the 1960s, but their project was short-lived, and work did not begin on the site in earnest until 2001. It's the only major Huastec archaeological site, and like the Huastec people themselves, it is shrouded in mystery.

It is also something of a surprise to learn that this early Huastec culture appears to have been dominated by women, in stark contrast to the better-known pre-Colombian Mesoamerican cultures, and it will be very interesting to learn how this culture came in to being in the first place, and why none of the subsequent cultures in the Potosí region chose women to prominently participate in their ruling or priestly elites.

The intricate carvings the Huastecs left on the stones leave clues to a culture in which women clearly played a strong role as governors, priestesses and warriors.

"Not just in Tamtoc, but throughout the Potosí region, we have found representations of women dressed as warriors," Ahuja says. "We have a very constant presence of women in the ceramic figurines that have been found, as well as in the stone monuments, which makes me think that the women were participating politically in the decisions of the group. They were an important part of the political life of this society."

Some words on the monolithic calendar...

The monolith seems to have been toppled from its original location, broken into pieces and covered with mud. Ahuja estimates the time period at about the same time that several coastal cities were flooded, probably by a tsunami-type surge, around 300 B.C.

Ahuja believes the sacred tablet was impossible to resurrect, and the people decided to let it lie and create a sacred site where it was buried. The most honored and sacred members of that society were permitted to be buried there. Women became goddesses when they gave birth, and those who died in childbirth were deified, and so they were allowed to be buried along with the Great Mother.

An important item backing this theory was another find: a headless woman's naked figure, carved of limestone and polished to a high sheen. The figure, found in a pool that once stood at the feet of the monolith, was believed to be an offering to the gods. The raised dots on her arms and legs correspond with the number of days in the lunar calendar, according to archaeologist Ricardo Muñoz, while the width of her hips and the fullness of her breasts indicate a woman at the height of her fertility.

The author of the article has also included a video of her visit to the region, and which is split up into three parts, including a look at some of the local people, some natural features in the landscape, a rather odd folly built by an eccentric Englishman, as well as a visit to the archaeological site itself - very well put together, it shows how a good article reporting on a short trip or visit can easily be further enhanced with the aid of a video camera, and presumably some good editing software.

image of 'monolith 32' from Terrae Antiquae

'All In The Mind' - 06 October 2007 - Burma: 'I Resist In My Mind Only'

This week's podcast from Australian radio programme 'All in the Mind' features the work of an anthropologist in Burma; this from the transcript...

"Medical anthropologist Monique Skidmore has conducted field work in Burma for over a decade, carefully probing the ways the State manipulates the emotional life of the Burmese, and the psychological strategies they adopt to survive under a military regime. Fear threads through every conversation and gesture. Also, updates from a health worker in the longstanding refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border. The mental health challenges are immense."

I don't usually report too much on issues of this type, mainly because apart from reiterating what has probably been said hundreds of times before, regarding the injustice of it all etc., I don't have much to offer in the way of solutions, or practical suggestions as to how this or that situation could be improved. In any case, such are the complexities of situations like the one in Burma, that there are almost always no simple answers that can be practicably applied.

Be that as it may, sometimes these things have to be written about, if only to raise one's own awareness, record something of the events, because although it's all very well exploring the distant past through palaeoanthropology and archaeology stories, our own present will in the future will be someone else's distant past, and they should know in as much detail the faults of our own world in order that they at least have the opportunity of avoiding similar disasters in theirs.

It might also tell them something about how resistance and opposition can never be quite quelled in the minds of the oppressed, even if to all intents and purposes they are obliged to conform to the demands of an insane regime through their outward words and deeds in the course of their everyday lives.

They will also learn about how people can be driven mad by fear and hatred, and maybe about however much you try and repress a population, you'd better make sure you watch your back, because one day, one of your victims might just steal up behind your back and claim your life, and maybe reclaim their liberty at the same time. As we see...

Monique Skidmore: The regime's ideology of building up the country to a mountain of gold, as it likes to talk about, of creating a sense of prosperity for the population, of being the only people who can manage economically and politically the nation -- that that moral bankruptness is so utterly pervasive now that I think the regime has in fact lost control...in the sense that it's managed to put the cork back in the bottle, but the anger, the pressure that is building is not going to go away.

Natasha Mitchell: Why does it surprise you?

Monique Skidmore: Because there hasn't been a period in which anger has come out on the streets, even during the last ten or fifteen years of hit and run student demonstrations. Sometimes there are slogans chanted such as 'give us back our army', or 'free Aung San Suu Kyi', or 'freedom or death'. But there hasn't been the sort of verbal abuse being hurled at the regime as people who deny the freedom and the basic human rights of the population. I think that this is the beginning of the end, the end might be several years off but I don't think it's possible now to put the genie back in the bottle.

And whilst the West is often all too eager to go wading into this or that nation, on the pretext of installing or restoring democracy and civil liberties, we in the West have been shamefully inactive in the case of Burma, amongst many other places, including for example Zimbabwe, another so-called 'friendly' state being destroyed from within by the delusions of a madman. So it looks pretty much as if the Burmese people will have to either put up, or rise up in revolt, of their own accord, because apart from the occasional speech here and there, they certainly can't rely on the free democracies of the West to step in and help them in any way.

Natasha Mitchell: From Monique Skidmore's 'Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear'. In recent weeks on the show we've explored the nature of fear; also the deep psychology of state sanctioned violence -- and haven't those themes been writ large, as we've watched events unfold on the streets of Rangoon and imagined the scenes invisible to us now in the country's jails and monasteries. Later an interview with a health worker in refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border.

But the psychological power of Burma's military state has been the focus of much of Monique's anthropological work. She's interviewed sex workers, people in psychiatric hospitals, drug clinics and many others. We know the regime's physical force includes torture, beatings, rape, destruction of villages, forced relocation and labour. But fear and manipulation of the psyche is just as insidious.

Monique Skidmore: I really, really hated the first trip to Burma in 1994, it had some of the world's worst third-world infrastructure, I hadn't understood how terrified the population would be of seeing a foreigner, so I would go into some villages in Shan State and people would physically push me out of the village and in broken English try and see my passport. So I hadn't really understood the level of fear, the degree of informers, and how carefully the state created self censorship in its population.

That last paragraph really brings home the extent of fear that pervades the population - villagers knowing that they risk the lives of not only themselves, but friends and family if they're even seen, or merely suspected to be talking to an outsider - the hallmark of a regime that is so ashamed of its own actions that it cannot bear to be put under the spotlight of public scrutiny across the outside world.

Natasha Mitchell: As an anthropologist you're interested in how Burma's political dictatorship constructs the emotional life of the Burmese, but your own experience of fear figures largely in your fieldwork. So just give us a real sense of that palpable sense of fear that you feel when you are trying to do fieldwork in Burma.

Monique Skidmore: Well many people when they go to Burma feel no fear at all. If you travel in a bus, on a guided tour, you're very carefully kept away from the population, you go to evening puppet shows, or performances -- then it's quite possible not to be afraid. Being afraid happens once you start to identify yourself as someone who works against the aims of the state.

And the aims of the state are so constantly in your mind because of the barrage of propaganda on a daily basis; in sign boards, in newspapers, on state television -- so inevitably over a period of time one becomes more and more aware of the obligations the state puts upon you. Then you become really an activist by proxy whether you like it or not. I was doing things that would have been seen by the regime as subversive, even though they weren't really subversive.

Natasha Mitchell: Have you been confronted by the regime for your own work?

Monique Skidmore: The last formal warning I had was by the prime minister, Khin Nyunt. He was the head of the military intelligence and he was locked up in 2004. And just before he was imprisoned he gave me my last sort of broad access research visa, and he said to me, 'Monique, you're an angel of light who has come to help our country. You obviously have very high karma but it would be a shame to lose that karma and go to hell by associating with negative political elements.'

An apt demonstration of the paranoia inherent in the system is when the personnel in charge of the state apparatus are in just as much danger of sudden arrest, imprisonment and torture as everyone else - Stalin was an expert at this, eventually even going so far as killing off most of his own family. Maybe the best hope for the people of Burma is that the current regime will become so irretrievably corrupt, that the entire rotten structure will collapse under its own weight - alternatively, they might decide to take the casualties and go into open revolution, in the hope that in the process they can persuade sufficient numbers of the armed forces to help them.

A few words on 'fear'...

Fear can register in reaction to an omnipresent menace, when you drive or walk past a gate or turn a corner and are confronted by a physical manifestation of state power such as a tank. But it is not simply the tank, a brooding store of potentially lethality that menaces, it is also the military personnel with their reflective dark glasses, helmets and boots who generate menace. Your eyes involuntarily move over the reflective surfaces to the matt gun, which seems to absorb your gaze, it is hard to stop staring at it. In that instant you're once again assailed by the renewed realisation -- made dull by the continuous nature of the state of emergency -- that this is not a joke, not a game, and not an inflation or paranoid turn of thought. You are shocked with the renewed realisation that these men are prepared to kill you. (Monique Skidmore 2003)...

...Monique Skidmore: I started by working at the Yangon Psychiatric Hospital because I was interested in how people saw their own illnesses. But the interviews started talking about all kinds of magical imagery and religious imagery. And particularly amongst schizophrenics, there was a sense that when they heard voices coming through the radio that these were interviews with senior people in the political headlines -- so they were either military leaders, they were drug lords, or they were leaders of opposition parties such as Aung San Suu Kyi. And I began to see that in the minds of people who were suffering a mental illness that there was a dialogue that wasn't allowed to be spoken out on the street but that was prevalent in people's minds.

It's very well worth reading, or indeed listening to the entire show, because if anything, this particular look at Burma just becomes more alarming with each successive line...

Medical anthropologist Monique Skidmore has found that escapism is a common psychological theme inside Burma.

Monique Skidmore: I think that this is the most common strategy of all to resist the Burmese regime. And it's a very active strategy, although it gets tied up with that terribly inaccurate idea that Buddhism is somehow a non-violent, passive sort of religion where people sit around letting go and forgetting and forgiving. In Burma what's happening is that we have this phenomenon called the new laity; millions of people who will flock to monasteries to meditate. We have hermit monks, forest monks, monks that live on mountains; we have all kinds of ways in which people seek to access realms of psychological existence that are not the current reality.

So for example people will try to attain mastery through meditation and through occult practices to gain access to these psychological realms. For young people who don't have access to that kind of Buddhist and pre-Buddhist cultural law, they try to send their minds flying to places that they imagine we in the west have that they don't -- swimming pools, picture theatres, Disneyland, amusement parks -- they try to envisage realities that are more pleasurable and are distant from their current reality.

Natasha Mitchell: I mean in a sense all this is about resisting in the mind, isn't it, so instead of demonstrating an outward resistance which is what we're seeing on the streets this week, it's an internal resistance in some way?

Monique Skidmore: It is, sometimes I think it is entirely not at the level of consciousness and at other times, particularly through meditation, it's entirely conscious.

The message here is that even if the current regime were to pack its bags and head off to the airport tomorrow, the effects and harm of their maladministration will live on in the population for many years to come, making them just as vulnerable to future miscreants who fancy imposing their own unique brand of dictatorship - and it at this point where the West can for once actually do something useful, go in, set up a decent healthcare system, and takes things very slowly from there, proceeding with care down the long road to recovery and restored physical and mental health.

Aung San Suu Kyi

The National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma

The Burma Campaign UK

Burma images from here

Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Allen Telescope Array Begins Scientific Observations

Despite the fact that the radio telescope used by SETI at Arecibo has signally failed to detect any sign of alien life in all the years it has been operating, Paul Allen of Microsoft fame, has decided to build an array of 350 radio telescopes, with the expressed hope that by 2025, we will have made (crackly) contact.

“This is a great day for the science of radio astronomy and the study of the cosmos,” said Leo Blitz, UC Berkeley professor of astronomy and director of the university’s Radio Astronomy Laboratory, which is building the ATA with the SETI Institute. “Thanks to a unique intersection between the best in science, advanced, innovative technology and bold philanthropy, many secrets of the universe are a little closer to being revealed.”

"This project represents a potential breakthrough in building large arrays of radio telescopes that are extremely cost effective,” said Paul G. Allen, primary funder of the ATA.

“As now deployed and with plenty of room for growth in the future, the telescope can fulfill a multitude of uses, including broad radio sky surveys and the search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology. I’m pleased to be able to contribute to such an important advancement and help build on the work this new telescope will do in the future. My hat is off to the team that worked so hard these last seven years to accomplish this significant milestone.”

I've written before about what seems to be the futility of trying to track down an advanced alien situation, in the hope that they'll be using the same radio technology that here on Earth has all but been consigned a permanent parking spot in the virtual cul-de-sac named 'Technological Evolution'.

With the recent advent of digital communications, many of our radio and TV antennae are fast disappearing - on the off-chance that an alien civilisation is monitoring our own radio emissions, they will be beginning to notice a sharp downturn in the amount of radio traffic leaving Earth - perhaps they will surmise that this decrease in broadcast transmissions indicates our gradual extinction, or instead they might realise that our Pale Blue Dot has recently gone blue in the tooth, and is now a wi-fi world to boot. More from Science Daily...

Every object in space emits radio waves that can be collected and studied. From observation of these signals, radio astronomers can create a picture of astronomical bodies and events at great distances, revealing detail not discernable by telescopes operating at other wavelengths.

The ATA will acquire data in a new way, imaging a large piece of the sky at once. What sets the ATA apart from earlier radio telescopes is its ability to collect and, analyze more information about celestial objects, and do this simultaneously for several projects. In addition, observational surveys can be made with greater speed than any previous or existing radio device.

The above paragraph cites a few reasons which are a more sensible application of the technology - detecting natural radio emissions form across space. The reason that radio is unlikely to be used as an interstellar communication device is because of the very slow speed at which they traverse the immense distances in Big Space. Any kind of two-way communication would involve waiting periods of years - and here we're talking decades and centuries for just the nearest stars - rendering any attempts at meaningful dialogue with alien others something of an exercise in pointlessness.

“For SETI, the ATA’s technical capabilities exponentially increase our ability to search for intelligent signals, and may lead to the discovery of thinking beings elsewhere in the universe,” said astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “It is the first major telescope in the world built specifically for undertaking a search for extraterrestrial intelligence.”

The ATA opens the doors to a new era of scientific progress. The telescope’s potential discoveries include a better understanding of exploding stars (supernovas), black holes, and new, exotic astronomical objects that are predicted but not yet observed. It will also provide expanded search capabilities to determine if intelligent civilizations have evolved around other stars. The ATA is the first panchromatic, wide-angle, snapshot, radio camera ever built. It is the most effective tool to create radio images of a vast area of the sky ever placed in the hands of researchers.

So we can see from the above paragraphs that this array of radio telescopes will be able to help us understand the physical Universe, and as long as the operators stick to those applications, this will indeed meant two things - we can stop wasting time listening for messages that will never arrive, and that the days of SETI are surely numbered - Seth Shostak is sounding upbeat about the project, which probably means he'll end up working there once his own project is shut down.

And like the old X-Files episode, 'Little Green Men' which featured SETI, it will be when the last person has left the building and no-one is looking, that one of the receivers will pick up a tiny, faint signal, the printer will quietly start up and begin printing something along the lines of "Hello? Anyone there? Oh well, never mind..." before once more falling silent, for ever.

see also: Centauri Dreams - Allen Telescope Array Begins Work

image from here

11,000 Year-Old Wall Painting Unearthed at Djade-al-Mughara, Syria

Nice story from Syria, detailing a find from Djade-al-Mughara, as reported by Reuters...

French archaeologists have discovered an 11,000-year-old wall painting underground in northern Syria which they believe is the oldest in the world.

The painting, which measures about six feet by six feet, was found at the Neolithic settlement of Djade al-Mughara on the Euphrates, northeast of the city of Aleppo, said team leader Eric Coqueugniot.

"It looks like a modernist painting. Some of those who saw it have likened it to work by (Paul) Klee. Through carbon dating we established it is from around 9,000 B.C.," Coqueugniot said. "We found another painting next to it, but that won't be excavated until next year. It is slow work," said Coqueugniot, who works at France's National Centre for Scientific Research.

In fact it looks quite unlike anything we might expect to see from this period in prehistory, (although the 11,000 year-old site of Göbekli Tepe is also something of a surprise) and according to the story there is another painting nearby that has yet to be excavated - more from Reuters...

The inhabitants of Djade al-Mughara lived off hunting and wild plants. They resembled modern day humans in looks but were not farmers or domesticated, Coqueugniot said.

"There was a purpose in having the painting in what looked like a communal house, but we don't know it. The village was later abandoned and the house stuffed with mud," he said.

A large number of flints and weapons have been found at the site as well as human skeletons buried under houses.

"This site is one of several Neolithic villages in modern day Syria and southern Turkey. They seem to have communicated with each other and had peaceful exchanges," Coqueugniot said.

Mustafa Ali, a leading Syrian artist, said similar geometric design to that in the Djade al-Mughara painting found its way into art throughout the Levant and Persia, and can even be seen in carpets and kilims (rugs).

"We must not lose sight that the painting is archaeological, but in a way it's also modern," he said.

Hopefully there will be further coverage and more images of the paintings themselves, which appear to be in a pretty good state of preservation.

See also :: Terrae Antiquae, for more coverage of this and other finds, as well as additional images.

Amalgamated Friday 31

Yet another fine compilation of what's been burning up the blogosphere this past week, from Kris Hirst at About.com: Archaeology, and which this week specifically takes a look at the debate that has been raging around the embedding of anthropologists into the military.

Kennewick Man and the Neanderthals are also featured, along with plenty of other links covering what has been a very interesting week for news and comment in archaeology and anthropolgy - AF is a very useful resource, not only for bloggers such as myself, as it often gives me a chance to catch up on stuff I'd otherwise have missed, but I would also imagine it to be a very good page to visit for people who simply don't have time during the week to read every story and article as they come online, and want quick access to a good overview of what's been going on.

Evolution: Mass Death Events: Then and Now

As I ended up slightly rushing through the compilation of the recent Four Stone Hearth, not only did I fail to correctly link this story back to Greg Laden, but neither did I read it thoroughly - so this post will attempt to address the latter of those two issues, the first of which is now fixed.

In his post, Greg Laden begins by discussing the Late Miocene site of Langabaan in South Africa, as described here...

At Langabaan, there appears to be a river channel, criss-crossed by bedrock ledges against which are jammed the bodies of a wide range of now extinct animals, including a polar bear-like ursid. There is evidence supporting the hypothesis that this is a single die-off with a mass accumulation of bones.

There is also support that some of the individuals arrived in pieces and over a period of time. The current model for this particular site is a mixture of the two processes: A mass death in the valley of the river that still (roughly) runs through this area today, caused by some mass-death causal agent like volcanic gasses or whatever, followed by multiple floods that brought the carcasses together in this one spot, but also, continued to bring in partial carcasses and older bones over, perhaps, a few years.

What is interesting about all this is that modern taphonomists have searched for years for examples of this sort of phenomenon, and they are rare. You occasionally get dozens or hundreds of animals dying, and the occasional carcass gets hung up on a river bank. But most riverine processes disperse rather than accumulate bones, and mass deaths are themselves rare.

Not only do such discoveries aid modern study and research, but as we now know, it was only when explorers began recovering strange bones from beneath the ground across the New World, from creatures that were clearly very different from the ones that were then known to been alive at the time, that anyone had the first glimmering of an idea that there may once have been animals and creatures that had lived in antiquity, and had moreover, since become extinct.

This was a radical departure from a world-view which existed at the time, wherein it was assumed, mainly on religious grounds, that the world's fauna, including mankind, were the original inhabitants of this planet, and that everything alive could trace its origins back to the beginning of the time, or at least since this world was 'created'.

The last section of his post recounts a modern-day mass-death event, in which 10,000 wildebeest perished in a single incident whilst crossing a river, though whether their remains will be found by palaeontologists millions of years into our future, seems unlikely from here.

The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes - Richard Firestone, Allen West and Simon Warwick Smith

The other day, whilst writing up a recent report on the Topper site, I mentioned Richard Firestone, who along with Allen West and Simon Warwick-Smith, is one of the authors of what looks like an excellent book on this subject, namely 'The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes' - Flood, Fire and Famine in the History of Civilization - I've only had a quick flick through it, as it's been sitting on the 'Read Me' section of my bookshelf for a while now, but it looks to be packed full of fascinating research and into analysis of past impact events in North America, in which everything from Clovis, the mega-faunal extinction and the Carolina Bays, to considerations of the origins of comets and what happens when they hit Earth - all of which I look forward to reading, once I've finished a couple of other books.

It has about 400 pages, including appendices and a bibliography, and is richly illustrated, so just to whet your appetite, and indeed mine, here's this from the introduction...

"Plato wrote about the catastrophic destruction of Atlantis, which occurred in a day and a night about 11,600 years ago. The Bible vividly describes torrential rains and an immense flood in which most of humanity perished. Native Americans have many rich stories about a enormous cataclysm involving worldwide fires and flooding. Altogether, the myth and folklore of as many as fifty different cultures around the planet tell of similar global devastations during which humanity went through a trial by fire and flood.

Are the cultural legends based on facts, or are they fables? Did a major calamity actually happen? Lacking hard evidence, scientists have dismissed the old tales of epic natural disasters, and even though popular writers have speculated about such catastrophes, convincing proof has been elusive. Until now, no one has discovered decisive evidence of a specific event that caused mass extinction."

So this book sets out to interpret and explain a series of events which began 41,000 years ago, eventually leading to what the authors refer to as the "Event", the catastrophic mystery that hit North America 13,000 years ago, which not only may have caused the end of the Clovis industry, but killed untold numbers of fauna and humans in the process.

The book is divided into three main parts, One: The Search, Two: The Main Event, and Three: The Evidence, with the first section of the work looking at some of the anomalies on the American continent, such as radio-active mammoth bones, the Drumlins, and the previously mentioned Carolina Bays.

What Really Happened? looks at the putative impact event itself, whilst The Evidence heads off into space for a consideration of things cosmological - along with some gorgeous colour plates.

I've only dipped into it here and there, and as soon as I rediscover my temporarily absent ability to sit down and properly read a book from cover to cover, I'll attempt a fuller review.

see also: Astrobiology - Supernova Waves Rolled Over Mammoths

Ice Age Ends Smashingly: Did a comet blow up over eastern Canada?

Amazon UK - US

Bipedalism May Have Evolved 15 Million Years Earlier Than Thought

A startling story has hit the Web, with this article at Eurekalert reporting on a newly published paper in PLoS ONE...

An extraordinary advance in human origins research reveals evidence of the emergence of the upright human body plan over 15 million years earlier than most experts have believed. More dramatically, the study confirms preliminary evidence that many early hominoid apes were most likely upright bipedal walkers sharing the basic body form of modern humans.

On October 10th, online, open-access journal PLoS ONE will publish the report based on research from Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology and from the Cedars Sinai Institute for Spinal Disorders that connects several recent fossil discoveries to older fossils finds that have eluded adequate explanation in the past.

Recent advances in the field of homeotic genetics together with a series of discoveries of hominoid fossils vertebrae now strongly suggest that a specific genetic change that generated the upright bipedal human body form may soon be identified. The various upright 'hominiform' hominoids appear to share this morphogenetic innovation with modern humans. Homeotics concerns the embryological assembly program for midline repeating structures such as the human vertebral column and the insect body segments.

The report analyses changes in homeotic embryological assembly of the spine in more than 200 mammalian species across a 250 million year time scale. It identifies a series of modular changes in genetic assembly program that have taken place at the origin point of several major groups of mammals including the newly designated 'hominiform' hominoids that share the modern human body plan.

I can't as yet access the PLoS ONE article, probably because the site is being swamped with hits - so for now, suffice it to say that the idea of apes living 20 million years ago were walking around on two feet is about one of the most extraordinary claims in human evolution that has ever been made.

(Update :: The paper, "Homeotic evolution in the mammalia: Diversification of therian axial seriation and the morphogenetic basis of human origins.” is available in full, here.

My technical knowledge of anatomy is so scant, that I can attempt no meaningful analysis here, so until more explanatory detail appears online, my recommendation would be to try and get the PLoS ONE page to load. In the meantime, here's the rest of the report from Eurekalert...

From an embryological point of view, what took place is literally breathtaking, says Dr. Aaron Filler, a Harvard trained evolutionary biologist and a medical director at Cedars Sinai Medical Center's Institute for Spinal Disorders. Dr. Filler is an expert in spinal biology and the author of three books about the spine 'Axial Character Seriation in Mammals' (BrownWalker 2007), 'The Upright Ape' (New Page Books 2007), and 'Do You Really Need Back Surgery?' (Oxford University Press 2007).

In most vertebrates (including most mammals), he explains, the dividing plane between the front (ventral) part of the body and the back (dorsal) part is a 'horizontal septum' that runs in front of the spinal canal. This is a fundamental aspect of animal architecture. A bizarre birth defect in what may have been the first direct human ancestor led to the 'transposition' of the septum to a position behind the spinal cord in the lumbar region. Oddly enough, this configuration is more typical of invertebrates.

The mechanical effect of the transposition was to make horizontal or quadrupedal stance inefficient.

"Any mammal with this set of changes would only be comfortable standing upright. I would envision this malformed young hominiform ' the first true ancestral human ' as standing upright from a young age while its siblings walked around on all fours."

The earliest example of the transformed hominiform type of lumbar spine is found in Morotopithecus bishopi an extinct hominoid species that lived in Uganda more than 21 million years ago.

"From a number of points of view," Filler says, "humanity can be redefined as having its origin with Morotopithecus. This greatly demotes the importance of the bipedalism of Australopithecus species such as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) since we now know of four upright bipedal species that precede her, found from various time periods on out to Morotopithecus in the Early Miocene."

Absolutely extraordinary, and seems almost impossible to believe at first glance - in any event, expect plenty more coverage in the days ahead.

Paper:

PLoS ONE. 2007; 2(10): e1019.

Published online 2007 October 10. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001019.

Homeotic Evolution in the Mammalia: Diversification of Therian Axial Seriation and the Morphogenetic Basis of Human Origins

by Aaron G. Filler

see also: BU Alumni Web - 'Planet of the Ancestral Ape'

John Hawks - Fossil Apes

image :: Figure 28 - Lumbar extension in Homo and Pan from...

Homeotic Evolution in the Mammalia: Diversification of Therian Axial Seriation and the Morphogenetic Basis of Human Origins by Aaron G. Filler

Four Stone Hearth XXV - 1st Anniversary Edition

Welcome to this, the 25th and first anniversary 'paper' edition - (although paper in this context of course refers to the tradition of associating various materials with wedding anniversaries), and it is my great privilege to be hosting this auspicious 'birthday' event, here at Remote Central. The blog carnival Four Stone Hearth was started by Kambiz at Anthropology.net, and it is to his credit that we are today celebrating the first birthday of his creation. During the course of the year, the administration of Four Stone Hearth has been very kindly been overseen by Martin at Aardvarchaeology, and it is to him also that we owe our thanks for ensuring the smooth and continued running of this carnival.

The third set of thanks goes to all those who have contributed, directly or indirectly to the various editions of this blog carnival that have appeared during the course of the past year - not only has there been a very good, enthusiastic response to calls for submissions, but the quality of material submitted, has in my opinion, maintained a consistent standard of excellence throughout.

The fourth set of thanks goes to all those who have read, followed and commented upon various of the posts that have been published, whilst the fifth and final set of thanks goes pretty much to the rest of the world of research, academia and related professional and governmental organisations, who between them, provide much of the original written and illustrated source from which material on Four Stone Hearth has ultimately been derived. If I've left anyone out of that list, please consider yourself included as a matter of course.

And so on to this, the 25th edition of 4SH; this time round I've augmented the various submissions I've received with other posts I've selected from checking a few other sites here and there.

Although this is a birthday edition, there are a few posts discussing war and conflict, so on this occasion I'm going to start with these posts, and then gradually work through the rest of the contributions, which include a few on archaeology, some physical and linguistic anthropology, as well as a few towards the end that allude more to topics which may put us more in mind of a birthday event.

As an introduction to the war section, we're first of all going to look at a submission from Greg Laden, who discusses death and destruction in its wider context, and on vast scales, rather than from a specifically human standpoint.

Mass Death Events: Then and Now

"We know that when we dig around for fossils, we occasionally find mass death sites, with hundreds or thousands of individuals represented by zillions of bones, perhaps all jammed into a river channel. These are the kinds of sites that provide very important and extensive information about extinct species."

Next up, we have no less than three essays sent in from 'The Primate Diaries', all of which discuss the recent news that the US military is considering embedding anthropologists within its serried ranks, in and effort to obtain more information on the peoples of other countries, whose culture and characteristics they wish to understand.

Anthropology Goes to War, Part 1

Anthropologists in the war effort from "savages" to "terrorists"

Anthropology Goes to War, Part 2

Anthropology, colonialism and covert operations

Anthropology Goes to War, Part 3

Anthropology and counterinsurgency in Thailand

Next up, we find this at Archaeolog,

Caracol de la Resistencia: Zapatista Symbol References Maya Past

"In an ethnographic interview conducted in June 2007, leaders of the autonomous community of Oventic in highland Chiapas, Mexico discussed with me and a colleague the meaning of the caracol (snail) as a Zapatista symbol. They explained that the ancient Maya ancestors used a conch shell as a horn to summon people to gather in one place as a community.

Their ancestors lived during less technologically advanced times, they noted, when the world moved at a much slower pace than today, much like the slow-moving caracol. Today the symbol of the caracol expresses the ideals of small community government in the face of globalization."

Here's one from me, looking at the first tentative steps of reconciliation in the classrooms of Bosnia-Herzogovina

First Steps Toward Re-unification in Postwar Bosnia's Only Integrated School

Included herein is a look at the war diaries of Zlata Filipović, and I chose to include this partly because it has direct relevance to the linked article, but also because it occurred to me that we use the diary for several reasons at once. Sometimes we use them to plot future events in our lives, such as forthcoming birthdays, anniversaries and holidays, as well as important things we need to remember to start or complete in the days and weeks ahead.

We also use diaries as a means of referencing the present, jotting down our thoughts and ideas of how we perceive the world around us at the time of writing.

And then we use diaries as historical documents, looking back into the lives of those who have gone before us, sometimes many hundreds of years ago, not only to share their thoughts, but to glean details of the world as it was configured around them when they were updating their journals.

BLDGBLOG is a site which in my opinion is unfailingly interesting to read, as well as being well-stocked with very good image content. Here's a final post on our topic of war.

Sitting Amidst War Ruins in the Hills Around San Francisco

My wife and I went out to the Marin Headlands yesterday, on a beautiful if windy October afternoon, to hike through the earthquake-prone hills of an upraised seabed, past the eroding concrete bunkers of the U.S. military – abstract monoliths left stranded in the landscape.

Leading us from this section on war to the next on archaeology, we now take a look at a 16th century sword recently discovered by Martin Rundkvist at Aardvarchaeology, a find which has attracted no small amount of attention and comment.

Djurhamn Sword Excavated

"It's a straight double-edged sword, 92 cm long with a single-hand grip. Nils Drejholt of the Royal Armoury tells me that it's an early-16th century weapon, unusually designed but similar in details to the so-called rikssvärden, "swords of the realm", ceremonial weapons commissioned by King Gustaf I."

We now head across the fields in the direction of Afarensis, whom we find busily engaged in helping to preserve Blake Mound, in Missouri.

Restoring Mounds and Other Fun Stuff

Blake Mound is an unexcavated mound in Missouri. It is currently being watched over by Mark Leach - the creator of the adopt a mound program - who has permission to restore parts of the mound that have suffered damage. Members of various archaeology classes at the St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley (Dr. Fuller's students) were also on hand.

Dennis Price at Eternal Idol has a most interestnig post, looking at the work of Professor R.J.C. Atkinson's work at Stonehenge and Silbury Hill during the 1950s and 1960s. Dennis believes that Professor Atkinson discovered something about the true functions of both Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, but for reasons that elude us, he chose to not only cover up his findings, but actively discouraged others to investigate the sites.

"What I Give Form to in Daylight is Only 1% of What I have Seen in Darkness"

Silbury Hill and Stonehenge both have the highly dubious distinction of having been excavated by the late Professor Atkinson, who was fully aware of their unique value and status. Atkinson dug at Stonehenge from 1950 to 1964; if we take a conservative estimate that each season was roughly three months long, then he was physically present at or else working at Stonehenge for something like 45 months or nearly four years in total.

Staying at Eternal Idol, here's my recent article reviewing the latest from Dennis and his belief that the site of Vespasian's Camp, near Stonehenge, was the lost City of Apollo.

Phylias of Massilia and the Lost City of Apollo, Part III

You may also wish to read Part I, and Part II

And here's a response from Alun at Clioaudio, who finds himself unable to concur with some of the proposed ideas contained therein.

Foundations Beyond Doubt?

"The latest post compares the Tholos at Delphi with the circular design of Stonehenge. Personally I’m not convinced. Stonehenge could be the site descrfibed by Pytheas, but I don’t think the evidence survives to be sure of where the temple may be. Both posts are worth reading, but I think part of the problem is that Price is more willing to move from plausible to certain than I am. I wouldn’t dismiss his idea out of hand, but there are problems. One that there’s likely to be a big shift in what classicists think is certain about the foundations of sites like Massalia."

Carl at Hot Cup of Joe takes a long look at an antiquities scandal in Italy.

The Italian Antiquities Trial - a Brief Review

One of the interesting developments of the antiquities trial in Italy is the attention that has been spotlighted on the role of the collector as well as the museum in the antiquities trade. Indeed, without these entities, there would simply be no market for illicit antiquities.

Kris Hirst at About.com: Archaeology has a nice article on something rare, with promise of more to come.

Materials of Interest: Faience

There's a bunch of other things like this - I mean, cool materials created or manipulated by our predecessors on this planet, with great names like wootz steel and Maya blue and Chinese purple, that I didn't realize before I did some poking around. So, I think I'll start a Sunday series on them with faience.

Moving on in the direction of physical anthropology, we next hear from Kambiz, who very kindly sent in 3 posts from Anthropology .net

How to use common bioinformatic tools to compare two Neandertal sequences

If you’re interested in the intersection of bioinformatics, genomics, and paleoanthropology but haven’t really wondered how to apply these disciplines together, this should w(h)et your appetite. All the tools I will be using are freely accessible to everyone. After this tutorial, you can basically begin to do some of the comparative research that Svante Pääbo et al. did… and you don’t need really any preface, other than DNA is made up of nucleotides and one can compare two or more sets of nucleotides to trace relationships.

Whoa, Neandertals were in Uzbekistan and Siberia

...the hominid remains from the Teshik Tash cave in Uzbekistan and the Okladnikov cave in the Altai region of Siberia are so fragmented and hard to classify, that for a long time paleoanthropologists have just put them aside. Lead author Krause et al. decided to dust off these specimens and break off about a fifth of a gram of bone from each to sequence and compare. Specifically, they harvested samples from the femur of the Teshik Tash kid and from three Okladnikov long bones.

Where cultural anthropology meets entertainment, Discovery Channel’s Last One Standing

During the first episode, three of the six visiting men were selected to be representative warriors for the Kalapalo during one of their ceremonies where neighboring tribes come to wrestle. Richard, Brad and Rajko had to show their manhood by first enduring scratches from piranha teeth. Next, salt and chili powder was rubbed into their open wounds and they were not to show any signs of pain. You can read the personal accounts of Richard and Brad in the first entry of blog the Discovery Channel has set up for the show.

Michael E. Smith discusses how to make the archaeological literature more widely available,

Publishing Archaeology Outside of Archaeology

If we have important information about past societies to contribute to general knowledge, then we need to publish in non-archaeological venues. Archaeologists working on empires, city-states, or chiefdoms should be publishing in political science journals, and those of us studying social inequality should publish in the sociology literature. It’s not reasonable to expect that economists, for example, will peruse the pages of World Archaeology or Latin American Antiquity to find out what archaeologists have learned about craft production systems. We need to actively promote our message beyond archaeology.

Whilst Chris O'Brien at Northstate Science takes Michael Egnor to task regarding his ideas about 'Intelligent Design'.

Bad Analogies at 'Evolution News & Views'

What Egnor and other ID advocates fail to recognize is that archaeology does not assume design. This is a difficult concept to explain. In my archaeology class I show the students an “arrowhead” (better described as projectile points – most “arrowheads” are actually atlatl points – the bow and arrow was a relatively late development). Most students will recognize a projectile point as such, as would most ID advocates, and most will clearly infer a human designer. But then I ask, “How do you know that’s a projectile point?”

In other words, how do we know what we know? Most students will say that they have seen similar items, read about such things in books or articles, or even tried to make one themselves. As we walk through this exercise, students begin to realize that their assumption of human design is correct, but what on the surface seems obvious is in fact built on a large body of previous knowledge.

Now for a quick stroll into the field of linguistic anthropology, looking at the origins and spread of language, as well as efforts to prevent other languages from becoming extinct. First up, it's off to John Hawks, discussing a recent paper by linguist Juan Uriagereka, whom I quote below.

A Quick Language Evolution Rundown

A quasi-paradox has persisted within the field of linguistics, because the sudden emergence of such a complex, limitless system in a single species is hard to rationalize in terms of standard evolution. Its rapid spread makes language seem more like a viral epidemic that swept through the human population rather than a trait inherited through the typical dynamics of evolution.

Whilst John Hawks comments thus:

Human FoxP2 differs from chimpanzees by two derived amino acid substitutions. If Neandertals were different from us (which seems likely, given the recent evidence of selection on the gene), then they would have had only one of these substitutions. It's an answer we don't actually need the Neandertal genome for. Now, if only we could start thinking about some other language-related genes.

On a related note, Yann Klimentidis draws our attention to a study in Indonesia which has prompted the following comment from him,

"The main thing here is that they do their analysis of genetic diversity vs. geographic/language diversity at a very fine scale. They find a strong relationship between language (as measured by cognates: words with a common origin) and genetics (Y chromosome lineages). They do this on Sumba, the island in the south central area of Indonesia, just south of Flores"

Genetic vs. Language Diversity

Here's a quote from the PNAS abstract:

Numerous studies indicate strong associations between languages and genes among human populations at the global scale, but all broader scale genetic and linguistic patterns must arise from processes originating at the community level. We examine linguistic and genetic variation in a contact zone on the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, where Neolithic Austronesian farming communities settled and began interacting with aboriginal foraging societies 3,500 years ago. Phylogenetic reconstruction based on a 200-word Swadesh list sampled from 29 localities supports the hypothesis that Sumbanese languages derive from a single ancestral Austronesian language.

Here's something I spotted via Anthro-L, and looks at a military application and its use in preserving Native American languages.

The Phraselator II

When Terry Brockie first learned of the Phraselator, a speech interpretation device developed by the military as a way to easily translate Arabic words into English, he immediately wanted to get one. He saw great possibilities for using the machine to record the elders of his tribe saying words and phrases in their native tongue, and thus preserve his tribe’s language for future generations. In 2005, Brockie visited a popular tribal elder, 109-year-old Theresa Lamebull, whose collected knowledge amounted to a living linguistic history of a large chunk of the Gros Ventre tribe’s culture.

Next up are a few posts which look at food and drink, which of course no birthday party should be without. Our first contribution is served up by Archaeozoology, and looks at culinary life from a porcine perspective.

The Question of Islamic Pig Prohibition

"This blog looks at dietary taboos, focussing specifically on the prohibition of the pig in Islamic culture and exploring possible reasons for its prohibition."

And lingering a moment longer at the very readable site that is Archaeozoology, a rare and welcome addition to the blogosphere, I thought this would be good topical addition to a birthday-themed blog carnival.

The Archaeozoology of Luxury

"In general, a diet with much variety can be called luxurious because it will contain items that are not strictly optimal in terms of the ratio of costs versus nutritional value. Another possible characteristic of a luxury diet is the selection of the prime quality parts of an animal, or derived from animals killed before their optimal slaughter age.

Given the loss for the producer, this latter makes the product more expensive. The same is true for animals killed outside the optimal slaughtering season.Luxury items are not always easy to detect, however. All archaeological information contains bias. Certain animal food products leave no remains that survive in most soil types e.g. meat or fish that has been filleted and de-boned before being brought onto site."

Julien over at A Very Remote Period Indeed has this offering on that popular drink we obtain from the humble grape.

Wine!

Not much time to post this week since my "free time" has been coopted by the family unit to help in crushing crates and crates of grapes in preparation of this year's supply of Castello Salvatore... I just got home now, and I'm exhausted; we crushed about 40 cases of grapes tonight: Cabernet Sauvignon (yeah!), Pinot Noir (hm), Zinfandel (not my call). Should make for a good range this year, though.

Now, to make this relevant to archaeology, I should mention that the fantastic (and very well-written) book Ancient Wine by Patrick McGovern was brought up in conversation a number of times this evening.

Next, it's time to head back out of the dining room in the direction of imagery and design on which to feast our eyes, and in the first instance we pay a visit to JJ Higgins' site, Random Version. As far as I'm aware, the site is still in development, with more material planned, so it's probably worthwhile checking back for updates from time to time.

Random Version

video files

jj higgins - elsewhere

I'm an artist working in installation (more of an art practice than making the objects that the general population considers art) And my research is in the non-place, the anthropological views of the social space, and the interaction/intervention in social space. The idea of the machine, with the audience as the mechanism, is something of interest to me -through the practice of play. And play we do not enough.

As we don our smoking jackets and spark up those Cuban cigars, it's to the site of the urban anthropology magazine, Stimulus Respond which we now repair; this online magazine is currently in the process of evolving from its published format of 'cyber' to paper - which I hope helps to wrap up, in a semi-symmetrical style, this blog carnival, which as we will recall, opened by noting that the first wedding anniversary is represented by paper itself.

Stimulus Respond

The 'Magic' issue of Stimulus Respond has just arrived from the printers. Looks great! Pre-orders will be dispatched on Thursday in order to avoid the UK postal strike and it's after-effects. After this, our aim is to have the magazine available at stockists from Monday.

Todd Ochoa - His Illness
Carrie Clanton - Scientific Magic
Junko Theresa Mikuriya - On the Walls of the Caves are Shadows
Tolu Ogunlesi - On Beauty
James K Walker - The 23 Enigma

And our very last visit is to Nomadic Thoughts, where the author, who if memory serves correctly, is Will, recently celebrated his own 25th birthday,

XXV

As he included a list of anniversaries that coincided with his own birthday, I followed this link to the History Channel, in order to see their compilation of notable events that took place on previous October 10ths. For their main historical event, they've gone for the Battle of Tours, in AD 732.

At the Battle of Tours near Poitiers, Frankish leader Charles Martel, a Christian, defeats a large army of Spanish Moors, halting the Muslim advance into Western Europe. Abd-ar-Rahman, the Muslim governor of Córdoba, was killed in the fighting and the Moors retreated from Gaul, never to return in such force. Charles was the illegitimate son of Pepin, the powerful mayor of the palace of Austrasia and effective ruler of the Frankish kingdom.

After Pepin died in 714 (with no surviving legitimate sons) Charles beat out Pepin's three grandsons in a power struggle and became mayor of the Franks. He expanded the Frankish territory under his control and in 732 repulsed in onslaught by the Muslims. Victory at Tours ensured the ruling dynasty of Martel's family, the Carolingians. His son Pepin became the first Carolingian king of the Franks, and his grandson Charlemagne carved out a vast empire that stretched across Europe.

Thanks everyone for reading, and the next Four Stone Hearth, number 26, will be hosted 2 weeks from now on October 24th, over at Eric Michael Johnson's blog, 'The Primate Diaries', so until then, I bid you adieu.

image: 'Birthday' - Marc Chagall, 1915

Topper Site Provides Evidence For Ancient Comet Explosion

I just have time for a very quick update from the Topper site, as I'm trawling the blogosphere seeking out extra content for tomorrow's Four Stone Hearth anniversary edition. Back in June the world was alerted to the fact that Clovis technology, and the mega-faunal extinction event in the New World at the Holocene boundary, may have been caused by an exploding comet; to recapitulate from Science News Online...

Evidence unearthed at more than two dozen sites across North America suggests that an extraterrestrial object exploded in Earth's atmosphere above Canada about 12,900 years ago, just as the climate was warming at the end of the last ice age. The explosion sparked immense wildfires, devastated North America's ecosystems and prehistoric cultures, and triggered a millennium-long cold spell, scientists say.

At sites stretching from California to the Carolinas and as far north as Alberta and Saskatchewan—many of which were home to prehistoric people of the Clovis culture—researchers have long noted an enigmatic layer of carbon-rich sediment that was laid down nearly 13 millennia ago. "Clovis artifacts are never found above this black mat," says Allen West, a geophysicist with Geoscience Consulting in Dewey, Ariz. The layer, typically a few millimeters thick, lies between older, underlying strata that are chock-full of mammoth bones and younger, fossilfree sediments immediately above, he notes.

And from the new report...

...Scientists, led by Richard Firestone of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., took soil samples from throughout North America and in Belgium. In a layer dating to about 12,900 years ago, they found high levels of iridium, nanodiamonds and glasslike carbon that could have been caused by a comet explosion and subsequent fires.

How appropriate that someone with the name 'Richard Firestone' should be involved with this cometary research, but I digress; this on the latest from Topper, again courtesy of The News Tribune, in Tacoma, Wa.,...

The Topper site, on the Savannah River, provided compelling evidence, in part because of earlier findings by Al Goodyear of the S.C. Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at USC. Goodyear drew international attention in 2004 when stone points found at Topper that apparently were sharpened by humans (Clovis points) were carbon dated to nearly 50,000 years ago.

That put human beings in North America thousands of years earlier than thought. For generations, scientists have thought the first humans arrived 13,000 years ago via a land bridge from Asia. Goodyear’s work at Topper, along with similar finds in Brazil and Chile, prompted scientific reconsideration of when humans arrived in North America. It also led to skepticism by scientists who didn’t buy Goodyear’s theory. In that regard, he found kindred spirits in the comet group.

“This is a pretty wild theory,” Goodyear said with a chuckle. “I’m glad I’m not doing this one.” He welcomed West to dig at Topper. At the same depth as Topper’s undeniable Clovis artifacts, West found high concentrations of iridium, nanodiamonds and glasslike carbon.

West’s findings prompted Goodyear to do his own study on the disappearance of Clovis points. These stone tools are found throughout North America only in soil dating back about 13,000 years or more. Not long after that, a different style of points began showing up from people scientists have dubbed the Redstone culture.

Goodyear’s recent study found there were four times as many Clovis points as Redstone points at similar sites. That would indicate a huge population drop from the Clovis to Redstone cultures, possibly caused by some natural catastrophe.

I think the current digging season at Topper must have finished by now, so hopefully we'll soon be seeing news of further discoveries that either support or refute this comet theory.

see also: Astrobiology - Supernova Waves Rolled Over Mammoths

Ice Age Ends Smashingly: Did a comet blow up over eastern Canada?

image of Murray Springs layer, courtesy of Nature

Upcoming Four Stone Hearth, Wed., Oct. 10th

As mentioned a while back, this coming Wednesday the 10th, marks the first anniversary edition of the blog carnival 'Four Stone Hearth', and there is still plenty of room for more submissions, either to me via this blog, or to submit@fourstonehearth.net - the choice is entirely yours.

Archaeologists in Serbia Discover Earliest Known Metal-Working Evidence in Europe

It's not often we hear of archaeological news from Serbia, but these latest discoveries from Prokuplje, in the south of the country...

According to National Museum archaeologist Dušan Šljivar, experts found a “copper chisel and stone ax at a location near Prokuplje in which the foundation has proven to be 7,500 years old, leading us to believe that it was one of the first places in which metal weapons and tools were made in prehistoric times.”

Archaeologists hope that this find in southern Serbia will prove the theory that the metal age began a lot earlier than it was believed to have, Šljivar told Beta news agency. He leads the team of archaeologists that have been investigating the site over the past decade.

Šljivar said that this finding, along with 40 similarly valuable ones before it, among which there were more parts of metal tools and weapons, as well as a smelter and furnace, prove that people inhabiting this territory began working with metal more than 5,000 years before the new era.

Prokuplje Museum archaeologist Julka Kuzmanović-Cvetković said that the site “shows that the people living on our territory started a civilization that presented the basics of the technological revolution.”

The name of the actual site is Pločnik, and was accidentally discovered during the construction of a railway in 1927, reminiscent of the way in which Atapuerca came to the world's attention.

If the dates turn out to be correct, this would indeed be a very early Copper Age site, preceding the time of Ötzi, the man in the ice from the Austro-Italian border, discovered in 1991 - at the time, it was thought, before the find of the copper axe found near his body, that the Copper Age had begun much later than his times, around 5,300 years ago, so this find from Pločnik would push back the initial experiments in metallurgy about 2,000 years. Hopefully, more news and analysis will follow in due course.

see also : Vinča culture

Pytheas of Massilia and the Lost City of Apollo - Part III - The Delphi Connection

Following on from his previous two articles which propose that Stonehenge and the nearby Bronze Age (please see amendment at article end) settlement at Vespasian's Camp, may have been the temple and city dedicated to Apollo and referred to by Pytheas of Massilia, comes this third part, in which Dennis Price suggests that the ancient traveller may have been reminded of a Delphic temple when he encountered Stonehenge. Here's part of the introduction...

If we can reasonably single out an individual building that Pytheas was aware of when he saw his famous temple, then we can be more certain still that the structure he described was Stonehenge and that the City of Apollo he mentioned twice was the giant Iron Age earthwork we now know as Vespasian’s Camp. I believe that the magnificent circular building reconstructed in the drawing above figured prominently in the thoughts of Pytheas when he encountered the temple of Apollo in Britain, but to understand why, we have to recreate another voyage undertaken by Pytheas at some point in the fourth century BC.

As we have seen, Pytheas came from Masillia, which is now known as Marseilles, on the Mediterranean coast of southern France, but it is believed that the town could trace its roots back to the eastern Mediterranean, at 600 BC...

...it is beyond doubt that settlers from Phocaea, the most northerly of the Ionian cities in Asia Minor, founded Massilia around 600 BC. By mere virtue of the fact that the Phocaeans successfully established a flourishing city at the opposite end of the Mediterranean in the seventh century BC, it is clear that they were outstanding mariners, while we also learn this from Herodotus, who wrote that the Phocaeans were the first of the ancient Greeks to embark on lengthy journeys by sea.

I'm quite surprised at the late date of 600 BC given here for the first long-distance Greek mariners, as I think there is evidence to suggest that people were regularly navigating the Aegean in the Neolithic, hinting at a much older seafaring tradition in that part of the world. Whilst navigating the short distances between various Aegean islands might be considered a relatively simple business, the skills of craft construction, navigation and seamanship required would probably have equipped Neolithic mariners with the necessary experience needed for longer voyages around the Mediterranean basin. Moreover, there is further evidence to suggest that people were navigating this ocean from at least the Upper Palaeolithic, as indicated by stone tools found on various islands.

Be that as it may, it is nevertheless clear that Pytheas grew up in a community to whom seafaring was familiar, and one that maintained links with the homeland in the eastern Mediterranean, as described here...

We also know that Massilia was home to a temple of Artemis, the sister of Apollo, while there is a suggestion that the Phocaeans once practised human sacrifice in honour of this goddess. The mother of Apollo and Artemis was Leto, who was said by some to have been born in Hyperborea, the land to which Apollo returned for three months every year, hence his title Apollo Hyperboreus.

That aside, as well as building a temple dedicated to Delphic Apollo, the Massiliotes maintained strong physical links with Delphi, because they kept their treasury there. The Treasury of Massilia at Delphi was built of marble at some point in the sixth century BC and we know that in 396 BC, the Romans deposited a golden bowl there to commemorate their victory over the Veii.

It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that Pytheas visited Delphi, if only because he was an accomplished mariner and because the port from which he derived his name kept its treasury at Delphi. As there was a temple dedicated to Delphic Apollo at Massilia, it’s reasonable to assume that Pytheas would have wished to visit the far more important temple of Apollo at Delphi itself, but this is just the beginning.

Next we are given a consideration of the Oracle at Delphi, whose influence over the decision-making processes of individual and state apparatus of contemporary Greece was great indeed. The prophecies of the Oracle were relayed by a woman known as the Pythia, who in turn derived her title from at least one of two sources, as described by Wikipedia...

From a late myth that deviates from much older ones, when young, Apollo killed the chthonic serpent Python, named Pythia in older myths, but according to some later accounts his wife, Pythia, who lived beside the Castalian Spring, according to some because Python had attempted to rape Leto while she was pregnant with Apollo and Artemis. The bodies of the pair were draped around his Rod, which, with the wings created the caduceus symbolic of the god.

This spring flowed toward the temple but disappeared beneath, creating a cleft which emitted vapors that caused the Oracle at Delphi to give her prophecies. Apollo killed Python but had to be punished for it, since she was a child of Gaia. The shrine dedicated to Apollo was originally dedicated to Gaia and then, possibly to Poseidon. The name Pythia remained as the title of the Delphic Oracle. As punishment for this murder Apollo was sent to serve in menial tasks for eight years. A festival, the Septeria, was performed annually portraying the slaying of the serpent, the flight, the atonment and the return of the God. The Pythian Games took place every four years to commemorate his victory [1].

It is believed that Pytheas of Massillia could trace his own name back to these origins, but before we go on, here's some more background on Pythia and the Oracle of Delphi itself...

The priestess of the oracle at Delphi was known as the Pythia. Apollo spoke through his oracle, who had to be an older woman of blameless life chosen from among the peasants of the area. The sybyl or prophetess took the name Pythia and sat on a tripod seat over an opening in the earth. When Apollo slew Python, its body fell into this fissure, according to legend, and fumes arose from its decomposing body. Intoxicated by the vapors, the sibyl would fall into trance, allowing Apollo to possess her spirit. In this state she prophesied. She spoke in riddles, which were interpreted by the priests of the temple, and people consulted her on everything from important matters of public policy to personal affairs.

H.W. Parke writes that the foundation of Delphi and its oracle took place before the times of recorded history and its origins are obscure, but dating to the worship of the Great Goddess, Gaia.^[6]

The Oracle exerted considerable influence throughout the Greek world, and she was consulted before all major undertakings: wars, the founding of colonies, and so forth. She also was respected by the semi-Hellenic countries around the Greek world, such as Lydia, Caria, and even Egypt.

And this from another Wikipedia entry...

There are many stories of the origins of the Delphic Oracle. One late explanation, which is first related by the 1st century BC writer, Diodorus Siculus, tells of a goat herder called Kouretas, who noticed one day that one of his goats, who fell into a crack in the earth was behaving strangely. On entering the chasm, he found himself filled with a divine presence and could see outside of the present into the past and the future. Excited by his discovery he shared it with nearby villagers. Many started visiting the site, until one of them was killed by the experience. From then, only young girls were allowed to approach the chasm and then in conditions regulated by a guild of priests and priestesses.^[7]

According to earlier myths, the office of the oracle was initially held by the goddesses ThemisPhoebe, and that the site was sacred first to Gaia. Subsequently it was held sacred to Poseidon, the "Earth-shaker" god of earthquakes, a later offspring of Gaia. During the Greek Dark Age, from the 11th to the 9th century BC, the arrival of a new god of prophecy, saw the temple being seized by Apollo who expelled the twin guardian serpents of Gaia. Later myths stated that Phoebe or Themis had "given" the site to Apollo, rationalizing its seizure by priests of the new god, but presumably, having to retain the priestesses of the original oracle because of the long tradition. Apparently Poseidon was mollified by the gift of a new site in Troizen. and

Diodorus also explained how initially, the Pythia was a young virgin, but one consultant notes,

“

Echecrates the Thessalian, having arrived at the shrine and beheld the virgin who uttered the oracle, became enamoured of her because of her beauty, carried her away and violated her; and the Delphians because of this deplorable occurrence passed a law that in the future a virgin could no longer prophesy, but that an elderly woman ... would declare the oracles and she would be dressed in the costume of a virgin as a sort of reminder of the prophetess of olden times.

”

The scholar Martin Litchfield West writes that the Pythia shows many traits of shamanistic practices, likely inherited or influenced from Central Asian practices, although there is no evidence of any Central Asian connection at this time.

He cites the Pythia sitting in a cauldron on a tripod, whilst making her prophecies, her being in an ecstatic trance state, like shamans, and her unintelligible utterings.

There has been much discussion of late as to whether the musings of the Oracle were due in some way to hallucinogenic vapours given off by the cleft in the Earth, as we see from this article at National Geographic...

...a four-year study of the area in the vicinity of the shrine is causing archaeologists and other authorities to revisit the notion that intoxicating fumes loosened the lips of the Pythia.

The study, reported in the August issue of Geology, reveals that two faults intersect directly below the Delphic temple. The study also found evidence of hallucinogenic gases rising from a nearby spring and preserved within the temple rock.

"Plutarch made the right observation," said Jelle De Boer, a geologist at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and co-author of the study. "Indeed, there were gases that came through the fractures."

and...

De Boer conducted an analysis of these hydrocarbon gases in spring water near the site of the Delphi temple. He found that one is ethylene, which has a sweet smell and produces a narcotic effect described as a floating or disembodied euphoria.

"Ethylene inhalation is a serious contender for explaining the trance and behavior of the Pythia," said Diane Harris-Cline, a classics professor at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

"Combined with social expectations, a woman in a confined space could be induced to spout off oracles," she said.

According to traditional explanations, the Pythia derived her prophecies in a small, enclosed chamber in the basement of the temple. De Boer said that if the Pythia went to the chamber once a month, as tradition says, she could have been exposed to concentrations of the narcotic gas that were strong enough to induce a trance-like state.

Whether or not the Pythia was exposed to and influenced by these fumes is open to debate, but it should be noted that her prophecies were very eagerly sought and highly valued, which indicates that the information she was giving was good - otherwise her popularity would quickly have waned, as one prophecy after another turned out to be wrong.

But the fact that she must have been getting it right more often than not, consistently over long periods of time, would appear to discount the theory that this phenomenon was merely the result of a woman tripped out on happy gas '"spouting off" whatever came to her mind and mouth - but obviously there will be a great deal of scepticism within scientific circles that a specified human individual was capable of divining the future to what was then one of the most sophisticated cultures on Earth.

However it would appear that there were links to ancient shamanistic practice originating out of Central Asia inherent in the activities at Delphi, and again, although we might today refute the idea of a shaman being able to communicate with an abstract realm in order to pass on, amongst other things, advice to a resident human population living in this physical realm, the fact that shamanism has prevailed for many thousands of years is at least indicative of their having some degree of accuracy in their predictions and promptings.

But as we read on through the Wikipedia entry on Pythia, we are given more detail, telling us that this was not the work of one woman on her own, rather the result of several individuals being present in the Oracle - Wikipedia again...

The Pythia was probably selected, at the death of her predecessor, from amongst a guild of priestesses of the temple, and was required to be a woman of good character. Although some were married, upon assuming their role as the Pythia, the priestesses ceased all family responsibilities, and individual identity. In the heyday of the oracle, the Pythia may have been a woman chosen from a prominent family, well educated in geography, politics, history, philosophy, and the arts. In later periods, however, uneducated peasant women were chosen for the role, which may explain why the poetic pentameter or hexameter prophecies of the early period, later were made only in prose. The archaeologist John Hale reports:

...the Pythia was (on occasion) a noble [woman] of aristocratic family, sometimes a peasant, sometimes rich, sometimes poor, sometimes old, sometimes young, sometimes a very lettered and educated woman to whom somebody like the high priest and the philosopher Plutarch would dedicate essays, other times [one] who could not write her own name. So it seems to have been aptitude rather than any ascribed status that made these women eligible to be Pythias and speak for the God.^[9]

This would certainly fit in well with the way in which some shamans are selected for service to the community- there is no societal hierarchy which dictates that an individual has birth rights to such a position, rather they are thought to be chosen from the 'other side', and that a shaman is summoned to do service, rather than the other way round, and moreover, they are obliged to take up the position whether they wish to do so or not - this is based, admittedly, on a half-remembered documentary about modern-day shamans in Siberia, but I'm assuming that the tradition of one or more individuals being selected solely on their perceived abilities is one that is probably as old as shamanism itself.

It's also very interesting that the women chosen as successive incarnations of the Pythia were relaying the messages might have done so in very different ways, depending on their former social background - hence the idea that an educated woman might have expressed the prophecies in words considered more sophisticated than those of a Pythia who had formerly worked in the fields, and who may well have been more or less illiterate - but of prime importance would have been the accuracy of their predictions, no matter what language or terms they were expressed.

Here's a brief note from Wikipedia on the subject...

It would appear that the supplicant to the oracle would undergo a four stage process, typical of shamanic journeys.

Step 1: The Journey to Delphi - Supplicants were motivated by some need to undertake the long and sometimes arduous journey to come to Delphi in order to consult the oracle. This journey was motivated by an awareness of the existence of the oracle, the growing motivation on the part of the individual or group to undertake the journey, and the gathering of information about the oracle as providing answers to important questions.

Step 2: The Preparation of the Supplicant - Supplicants were interviewed in preparation of their presentation to the Oracle, by the priests in attendance. The genuine cases were sorted and the supplicant had to go through rituals involving the framing of their questions, the presentation of gifts to the Oracle and a procession along the Sacred Way carrying laurel leaves to visit the temple, symbolic of the journey they had made.

Step 3: The Visit to the Oracle - The supplicant would then be led into the temple to visit the adyton, put his question to the Pythia, receive his answer and depart. The degree of preparation already undergone would mean that the supplicant was already in a highly aroused and meditative state, similar to the shamanic journey elaborated on in the article.

Step 4: The Return Home - Oracles were meant to give advice to shape future action, that was meant to be implemented by the supplicant, or by those that had sponsored the supplicant to visit the Oracle. The validity of the Oracular utterance was confirmed by the consequences of the application of the oracle to the lives of those people who sought Oracular guidance.

It would appear however, that during the time that Apollo was associated with the oracle, the Pythia would not be present and available for consultation the whole year round...

In the traditions associated with Apollo, the oracle gave prophecies only between spring and autumn. In the winter months, Apollo was said to have deserted his temple, his place being taken by his divine half-brother Dionysus, whose tomb was within the temple. It is not known whether the Oracle participated in the Dionysian rites of the Maenads or Thyades in the Korykion cave on Mount Parnassos, although Plutarch informs us that his friend Clea, was both a Priestess to Apollo and to the secret rites of Dionysus. The male priests seem to have had their own ceremonies to the dying and resurrecting God. Apollo was said to return at the beginning of Spring, on the 7th day of the month of Bysios, his birthday. This also would reiterate the absences of the great goddess in winter also, which would have been a part of the earliest traditions.

Once a month thereafter the oracle would undergo special rites, including fasting, to prepare Pythia for the event, on the seventh day of the month, sacred to Apollo. Washing in the Castalian Spring, she then received inspiration by drinking of the waters of the Kassotis from the naiad said to be living in the stream that ran beneath the adyton (a Greek word meaning "do not enter") of the temple where she sat.

Descending into her chamber, she mounted her tripod seat, holding laurel leaves and a cauldron of the Kassotis water into which she gazed. Nearby was the omphalos, the navel of Earth, flanked by the two golden eagles of Zeus, and the cleft from which emerged the sacred pneuma.

Consultants, carrying laurel branches sacred to Apollo approached the temple along the winding upward course of the Sacred Way, bringing a black ram for sacrifice in the forecourt of the temple, and a gift of money for the oracle. Petitioners drew lots to determine the order of admission, but big donations to Apollo could secure them a higher place in line. The ram was first showered with water and observed to ensure that it shivered from the hooves upward, an auspicious sign that the oracular reading could proceed. Upon sacrifice, the animal's organs, particularly its liver, were examined to ensure the signs were favourable.

Between 535 and 615 of the Oracles of Delphi are known to have survived since classical times, of which over half are said to be historically accurate (see the article Famous Oracular Statements from Delphi for some examples).

At times when the Pythia was not operating, consultants obtained information from the future in other ways at the site, through the casting of lots, using a simple questioning "Yes/No" device, or by seeking counsel from dreams...

...Plutarch said that the Pythia's life was shortened through the service of Apollo. The sessions were said to be exhausting. At the end of each period the Pythia would be like a runner after a race or a dancer after an ecstatic dance. It clearly had a physical effect on the health of the Pythia.

It's interesting to note that the voyage Pytheas of Massillia made to these islands, i.e. the North, closely matched Apollo's supposed boreal sojourn, and it might be worth considering whether than the voyage undertaken by Pytheas had a ritual component to it, in that he was tracing the footsteps of the god himself, engaged on an unknown quest. Perhaps it was to have a look at the lands that lay to the north, and report back his findings, though whether he would have been expected to locate the exact place where Apollo resided over the winter is a moot point.

Perhaps he was given a prophecy by the Pythia that far to the north, on an island located off mainland Europe, lay a temple and city that were also dedicated to Apollo, or his local equivalent, and it was his task to go there and establish contact, or maybe renew and strengthen cultural ties that existed prior to both himself and his adventures.

Maybe Stonehenge was known back then as having its own 'navel of the Earth' or 'omphalos', and Pytheas was directed there by the oracle, for reasons unknown.

There is as far as I know, nothing to suggest that there was an oracular component at Stonehenge, or at the nearby and putative city, currently residing under the alias of 'Vespasian's Camp', but given that Stonehenge, like Delphi, may have been in ritual use for a considerable amount of time, might suggest that people were visiting for other reasons than various solar and lunar events during the seasonal year, but again, this can only be speculation. If the current idea that Stonehenge was part of a larger complex incorporating Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, which could have served as a ritual landscape for the journey from this life to the next, is correct, then we might conclude that there was no need for extra 'attractions' such as an oracle to draw people towards Stonehenge and the surrounding megalithic constructions.

But if we also consider that shamanism in one or more of its many incarnations may well have been present in Bronze Age and Iron Age Britain, it might seem a fair bet that Stonehenge might be the type of location towards which shamans would feel compelled to visit or otherwise make their presence known. Time we headed back to Eternal Idol, from where we read the following...

... it seems unimaginable to me that Pytheas didn’t visit Delphi before sailing to Britain. His prowess as a mariner, his home city’s devotion to Delphic Apollo, the Massilian treasury at Delphi, the disposition of ancient states and private individuals to consult the Delphic Oracle, the sheer potency of the Delphic Oracle while Pytheas was alive, the links between his name, that of the ancient name of Delphi and the Pythian Games, the belief that Apollo left Delphi each year for Hyperborea in the north, just off the coast of Gaul, the belief that the omphalos stone at Delphi was the centre of the known world - all these things suggest to me that if anyone alive at the time had a good reason and the means to visit Delphi, then it was Pytheas, prior to embarking on his famous voyage.

The ritual of the songs to Apollo and the playing of the cithara at the Pythian Games is so similar to what took place at the temple in Britain that we might be tempted to suppose that Pytheas made the whole thing up, perhaps simply as a tribute to Apollo’s greatness. However, if that were the case, then it seems to me that Pytheas would have described a temple that was rectangular in shape, such as the one at Delphi, but he did not. He described one that was either spherical, vaulted or circular, while he also said that there was a city and the clear implication, as I’ve written elsewhere, is that this city was close by.

The priests continually played in this temple, which suggests that they came and went on a regular basis from some habitation that was nearby. Furthermore, the city was home to overseers or supervisors of the temple, as well as to kings, and we usually oversee or supervise something that’s in plain sight or readily accessible, as opposed to something that’s at the other end of the country. If the city and temple had been at any great remove from each other, then Pytheas would have written that the kings and/or priests had dominion over the temple or something similar, but he did not.

Dennis Price here makes the point that Pytheas could have merely been relating a fable from his travels, rather than reporting factually on what he had seen, and of course there is always that possibility, especially if his voyage had been undertaken as part of some sort of ritualised trek related to the northerly travels of Apollo himself, and he felt obliged to come back with the goods as it were - after all, back in the day, when the vast majority of people had no chance to undertake long-distance voyages of their own to check out for themselves the lay of the land and its attendant cities, temples and other features, it was probably quite easy for travellers to invent all sorts of fabulous peoples and places.

However, there still remains the distinct possibility that Pytheas could very well have made it to Stonehenge, and as I've mentioned before, it is only when archaeology can be conducted on a sufficient scale at Vespasian's Camp that we will being to see whether there really was a town or city located there, and whether it could be connected directly with nearby Stonehenge. Obviously it would be too much to hope for an inscription in Ancient Greek to be found there, detailing exactly what was going on at Stonehenge during these times - although, it might be thought odd that if there was extensive or regular contact between Ancient Britain and Greece, that the concept of writing appears not to have been adopted in the former, but who knows - maybe writing as we know it might only have been permitted to be inscribed on perishable materials such as bark or parchment, with the inscription of stones strictly deeply frowned upon.

For the final part of his essay, Dennis Price alerts us to a mysterious structure known as the Tholos, a building with an architectural design that bore at least a passing similarity to Stonehenge; he first of all refers us to this page, courtesy of Roy George, from whom we learn...

Archaeologically we know but little about the early beginnings of Delphi. Excavations have revealed the site was a Mycenaean village from 1500 to 1100 BCE, during which time the primary religious emphasis was on an oracular cult of the Earth Goddess. Around 1000 BCE the worship of Apollo became dominant when this new god was brought to the region by either Dorians from Crete or northern tribes from Thessaly. The oracular use of the site continued during Apollo's occupation and Delphi achieved Panhellenic fame as a major oracle shrine by the 7th century BCE.

Located roughly one-half mile from the main concentration of buildings at Delphi, Athena Pronaia was the gateway to Delphi. The site, having been occupied since the Neolithic Period (5000-3000 BCE) and later by the Mycenaeans, may actually predate Delphi as a sacred place. Originally dedicated to the worship of an Earth Goddess, the shrine was eventually occupied by Olympian deities, Athena in particular. Athena's shrine stood near the entrance to Apollo's; hence the epithet 'of the fore-shrine', which is confirmed by inscriptions. Athena Pronaia, 'Athena before the Temple', was also called, by a sort of pun, Athena Pronoia, 'Athena of forethought.'

(Pronoia was once defined to me, somewhat differently, by a friend, who surmised that 'pronoia' is in fact the opposite of 'paranoia', and afflicts people who cannot understand why their lives are so good and successful; eventually they come to the conclusion that there is a conspiracy undertaken by those around them, or indeed unknown others, who secretly make it their business to act for the benefit of the concerned individual, making sure that everything works out right, and that what seem like fortuitous events are in fact nothing more than the result of mysterious benefactors working away quietly in the background; whether anyone has ever sought therapy for alleviating this curious notion, along the lines of "For God's sake, doctor, I just want something to go wrong for once...", I haven't the faintest idea.)

But back to the Tholos itself, an unusual and possibly unique structure in Ancient Greece, although as we see, 'tholos' means a round stone chamber...

The next monument is the Tholos (a generic name signifying a round stone chamber), a Late Classical circular building, built ca. 380 BCE - 360 BCE, with 14.76m exterior diameter and 13.5m height. It was probably designed by Theodorus of Phocaea and partly restored in 1938.

Its marble came from Attica. The order is Doric on the outside, with twenty columns. The original number of Corinthian half-columns inside is unknown (some say 10), despite the evidence of early reconstructions.

The building is one of the architectural wonders of the world - an incredible feat of mathematics involving the precise calculation of ratios based on the golden number, represented by the blocks of the stylobate (the top step).

The algebraic complexity of the structure is matched in detail and perfection by its decoration. The moldings are delicate; and the carving, both in bas-relief and in the round, is masterly. There were two magnificent friezes (bad(ly) damaged but partially restored): an exterior one and another around the top of the cella wall, each with forty metopes. The exterior frieze is of a battle between Amazons and centaurs. In the museum we can see parts of the frieze and many more small sculptures and statues from this building.

So there is an obvious, if ostensibly superficial, visual similarity to Stonehenge, although of course, Stonehenge is not known to have supported a roof, unlike Woodhenge, which did...

We know that the Tholos was circular and vaulted, qualities or properties that would have been described in ancient Greek as “sphairoeides”, the same term that Pytheas applied to the temple of Apollo in Britain. Due to its beauty, dimensions and unusual shape, it would also have been “axiologos”, or remarkable, or worthy of mention, another way that Pytheas described the temple of Apollo in Britain.

Every now and again, I read lurid headlines announcing the discovery of a new “Stonehenge” in the Amazon, Russia or elsewhere, but while these structures are invariably fascinating, none of them possess or ever possessed the qualities that make Stonehenge so distinctive, namely uprights capped by lintels. The Tholos was partially reconstructed in 1938 and by a curious coincidence, the most notable feature of the site, and the one that makes it such a draw for visitors wishing to take photographs, is the fact that there are now standing uprights capped by lintels.

Not only that, but the round plan of the ruins, the stumps of former columns and a crescent shape at the centre of the building call to mind the ruins of Stonehenge, so even in the twilight of their former glory, these two structures appear similar in a number of striking ways.

And although there is no suggestion here that the two constructions had anything more in common than a visual similarity, who knows whether the supposedly close links between Bronze Age Britain and Greece allowed for the transmission of ideas concerned with ritual and concomitant architecture - it is noted that the original purpose of both sites has been lost deep in prehistory, and unless some or other enlightening find is made, it's likely that we will never know the real truth of these matters. A final word from Dennis Price...

Finally, for now, I’m extremely grateful to the archaeologist and photographer Adam Stanford of Aerial Cam for his permission to use the superb photograph of Stonehenge below. I’ve seen hundreds of photographs of Stonehenge, but I’ve yet to see one better than this, while it perfectly captures the essence of a “magnificent sacred precinct and notable temple of Apollo, circular in shape.”

Adam’s photograph, which came into being as a result of his expertise and no small amount of patience, is a striking illustration of Stonehenge as a future echo of the Tholos at Delphi, at least as far as Pytheas of Massilia was concerned. In a far-flung northern land on the outermost fringes of the known world, an island devoid of the carefully-sculpted masonry and architecture that he was accustomed to seeing in the Mediterranean in the fourth century BC, Pytheas must have experienced a strong sense of deja vu when he encountered Stonehenge, while the priests of Apollo singing their hymns and playing on the cithara can only have added to this sensation. Little wonder, then, that he described it as “worthy of mention” to his contemporaries.

My final thoughts are somewhat more speculative, in that I can't help wondering whether there may have been yet another connection between the two sites, namely the snake or serpent. It has been noted that the Pythia may have derived her title from the python, and that Pytheas of Massilia may also have received his name form the same source. However, as far as is generally supposed, there is no overt connection between serpents and Stonehenge, although if we pause briefly for speculative thought, there may be the odd clue here and there - and I'm writing this while partly bearing in mind that the recent discovery of the Dinedor Serpent, or Rotherwas Ribbon, may point in the direction of people venerating the serpent in 'Hengeworld' Britain at the same time Stonehenge was going through one of its early construction phases.

In his book 'Hengeworld', Mike Pitts makes reference to one Maud Cunnington, who was investigating the site of Avebury back in 1930, and who in turn was reminded by something noted by the 18th century antiquarian, William Stukeley...

"In his imagination the great Avebury stone circles and the two double rows or avenues were a monumental representation of a sacred serpent. Standing on the tail of the snake, he could see the head. Out on the downs west of Avebury, where Stukely had mapped his serpent's tail, Cunnington could make out a small distant triangular patch in the corner of Mill Field"

I'm not sure that there is a current school of thought which connects Avebury with snakes or serpents, but if we are to accept the idea of Mike Parker Pearson that Stonehenge and Durrington walls may have been connected by the River Avon, which he suggests may have been used to ferry the ashes of the dead from Woodhenge to Stonehenge - wood representing life which was perishable, and stone representing the permanence of death - its notable that the Avon at this point has a distinctly serpentine shape to it during this part of its course. We know that the constellation of Draco would have been as permanently visible in the night sky as it is today, but from here its very difficult to state with any degree of certainty that a serpentine entity was associated with the twists and turns that comprised this putative River of Death that may have been the Avon during the time of henge constructions.

When I first heard the idea that ashes may have been floated along the river between the two sites, I was initially sceptical, because looking at a map, I could see that there were many twists and bends along the way, hardly the type of configuration desirable for the swift dispatch of ashes from Woodhenge to Stonehenge - after all, it would hardly to to have the ashes of venerated or beloved ancestors getting caught up in the turns of the river - unless there was a symbolic reason for associating the river with a snake or serpent. However, trying to get that idea to fly, may be something akin to flying dragon kites in the sky - easy enough to construct, but very difficult to keep airborne, especially given the howling winds of derision that would undoubtedly spring forth, were such a suggestion to come from within academic realms.

On a related note, and in a private email communication, Dennis Price made the following observation...

"there’s also the nearby River Wiley and I gather it’s name derives from a connection with willows and also from its ophidian nature which seems to be synonymous with wily or cunning, something like the serpent in the Garden of Eden."

I was also surprised to learn that in ancient Greece there was no specific concept of religion as a standalone social construct, and indeed there was no one word that meant 'religion' s we would understand it - but more of that in an as yet distant essay.

All in all, another very good post as an addition to the two which preceded it, and who knows what further discoveries made at Stonehenge and Vespasian's Camp may yet tell us - for me it was very interesting to read up a little on the Oracle and the Tholus, of which I was previously unaware, and it remains to be seen whether any conclusive evidence will come to light that can further illuminate the shadows cast by ruined stone constructions, erected in an era that from here seems fabulously rich in symbolism and sophistication, and some might contend, we are all the poorer for its passing.

amendment: Oct. 8th - the author of the linked article, Dennis Price, has quite rightly pointed out that although I describe Vespasian's Camp as being Bronze Age, its origins can in fact be traced back to the Neolithic; although there are barrows dating from the Bronze Age there, it was in the later Iron Age that the entire site appears to have been extensively reconfigured, and in his opinion, it was during this era that a large population inhabited what he contends to have been the Lost City of Apollo.

see also: Discovery of the Lost City of Apollo at Stonehenge

Pytheas of Massilia and the Lost City of Apollo - Part 2

'Hengeworld' - Mike Pitts

10 Ways The World Could End

Although this talk was originally given in 2001, there are enough relevant points and observations within this half-hour presentation to make this worth watching six years on, if for no other reason than that none of the problems discussed have yet been properly addressed, let alone solved.

Photo Essay: Clovis at the Gault Site

Here's another quick look at the Gault site, in Texas, courtesy of Kris Hirst at archaeology.about.com, including a few photos and, as well as links to some recent papers discussing Clovis and its context in the America of 13,000 years ago. First of all, here's a definition, penned by D.Clark Wernecke, site director at Gault...

Gault in central Texas is a stratified multicomponent site with a meter thick Late Prehistoric and Archaic midden overlying a hard packed Paleoindian component. The site is particularly well known for the large quantities of Clovis materials--more than 600,000 Clovis age artifacts have been recovered from less than 3% of the site.

This probably constitutes about 60% of all known Clovis artifacts recovered in North America which makes it an unprecedented research collection. The site is in a small valley with abundant food resources, multiple springs and large quantities of Edwards chert.

The reference to the fact that the excavation of a mere 3% of the site has produced over 600,000 artifacts, shows what an important and unusual site this was, both at the time of its use, as well as today in that it provides such an insight, albeit fleeting, into this as yet poorly understood phase of prehistory in the New World.

For example, in a recent paper, 'Clovis Technology Flowered Briefly and Late, Dates Suggest', Charles. C. Mann proposes that not only did Clovis technology develop much later than thought, but may in fact have only persisted for about 200 years...

On page 1122 of this week's issue of Science, researchers use new radiocarbon data to argue that Clovis culture, once thought to be the progenitor of all later Native American societies, may have flourished for as little as 2 centuries around 13,000 years ago. The dates put the Clovis technology a bit later than thought, making it harder to accept that it was the first in the Americas.

There has been a great deal of speculation in the press this year regarding the idea that Clovis may have come to a full and sudden stop as the result of a comet exploding over Canada at around this time, an event of such catastrophic proportions, that much of the megafauna in the Americas was wiped out in a flash, although as with all major extinction events, the mystery of why some animals, in this case the bison, appear to have lived through the episode relatively unscathed, is something which remains unsolved. - and whether this putative airborne disaster ties in exactly with the cessation of the Clovis industry still needs to be fully resolved.

Moreover, as Michael Waters and Thomas Stafford Jr. surmise in their paper 'Redefining the Age of Clovis: Implications for the Peopling of the Americas', it is thought in some quarters unlikely that Clovis represents the first lithic industry of the nascent New World...

The Clovis complex is considered to be the oldest unequivocal evidence of humans in the Americas, dating between 11,500 and 10,900 radiocarbon years before the present (14C yr B.P.). Adjusted 14C dates and a reevaluation of the existing Clovis date record revise the Clovis time range to 11,050 to 10,800 14C yr B.P. In as few as 200 calendar years, Clovis technology originated and spread throughout North America. The revised age range for Clovis overlaps non-Clovis sites in North and South America. This and other evidence imply that humans already lived in the Americas before Clovis.

Gault has been the subject of archaeological investigation for over 70 years, and as ever, it is only with further work, both at Gault and other Clovis, pre-Clovis and Palaeoindian sites, that a truer picture of exactly how America was first settled in large numbers will emerge. However, it is interesting to note that new discoveries don't always immediately clarify what is currently known, and new finds and data can often reveal a far more complex and unexpected view of the past than was previously imagined.

see also: Texas Beyond History - The Gault Site

Texas Archeological Research Laboratory - The Gault Site

Gault Site Update

image from here

From Iberia to Siberia, and Beyond? Neanderthal Eurasia Extends East by 2,000 km

Those meandering Neanderthals are back in the news again, a testament to their enduring status as the most popular archaic humans of modern times, as well as their apparent ability to extend their domain further into the far eastern reaches of Eurasia than previously supposed. This from New Scientist, reporting on a paper in Nature...

DNA extracted from skeletal remains has shown that Neanderthals roamed some 2000 kilometres further east than previously thought.

Researchers say the genetic sequence of an adolescent Neanderthal found in southern Siberia closely matches that of Neanderthals found in western Europe, suggesting that this close relative of modern humans migrated very long distances.

Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues examined skeletal remains found in the Okladnikov cave in the Altai Mountains and dated as between 30,000 and 38,000 years old . Until now, archaeologists have been unable to determine whether the remains belonged to Neanderthals or another species of extinct hominid because the bones are too fragmented.

So they went for the mitcohondrial component of the DNA, and to their surprise it very closely matched that of a Neanderthals in Europe, and in particular a specimen from Belgium - possibly Spy?

Softpedia are even more enthusiastic in their interpretation of the story, suggesting that as it southern Siberia that the Neanderthals appear to have reached, it's likely that they could have made it down into Mongolia and even China. This might well be an explanation for the recent news that a Mousterian tool assemblage, along with an artificially paved floor, have been found at the Dahe site in China, dating to between 36,000 bp and 44,000 bp. More from New Scientist...

Archaeologists had previously thought that Neanderthals' range only extended as far as modern-day Uzbekistan. This was based on a distinctly Neanderthal skull – with a prominent brow and large nasal area – recovered from the Teshik-Tash cave in the south-east of the country.

The study may not settle the debate over Neanderthal's range definitively, though. Eric Trinkaus at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, US, questions whether it definitively proves the Okladnikov bones to be those of Neanderthals.

Trinkaus suggests that other species of hominids could have had the same mitochondrial DNA sequence as Neanderthals. The mitochondrial sequence found by Pääbo's team can be used to definitively identify individuals as Neanderthals only after scientists study the mitochondrial DNA of other archaic hominids too, he says.

I'm not sure whether Trinkaus is suggesting that the Okladnikov remains belonged to a Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon hybrid, but the fact that a European origin is indicated shows that a corridor from Europe to the Altai Mountains and Mongolia could have been used, though maybe not continuously, over a very long period of time during prehistory - the Cherchen Man mummy, as well as those at Urumchi and elsewhere around the Tarim Basin, all show that people were not only travelling far from Eastern Europe during the Bronze Age, but were settling there too.

If Neanderthals were travelling out there at 40,000 bp, it might be surmised that they were part of a generalised human expansion into that part of the world, or trying to escape the Cro-Magnon influx of western Europe at the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition, and it might yet transpire that surviving Neanderthals lived on as late in some oriental locations as was the case at peripheral European locations such as Gibraltar.

see also: 'The Initial Upper Palaeolithic in North-East Asia', Brantingham, Krivoshapkin, Jinzeng and Tserendavga, Current Anthropology, Volume 42, Number 5, December 2001 (subscription required)