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