Ancient Seaweed Tells of Earliest Americans: Remains of meals that included seaweed are helping confirm the date of a settlement in southern Chile that may offer the earliest evidence of humans in the Americas. [Discovery]

Past masters: Cro-Magnon people are sometimes depicted as crude, mammoth-hunting cavemen who were little better than grunting savages. The idea is a gross distortion of the truth, of course, as is quickly revealed with visits to the caverns in France and Spain where walls are adorned with their 20,000- to 30,000-year-old art. [Guardian]

85,000-year-old finery recovered in Moroccan cave: Archaeologists have uncovered shells used for finery by prehistoric communities 85,000 years ago in a cave in eastern Morocco, the country’s heritage institute said Tuesday. [Daily Star]

May 9th, 2008 at 9:41 am

This article is filed under Blog, Prehistory.

Buried Dogs Were Divine “Escorts” for Ancient Americans: Hundreds of prehistoric dogs found buried throughout the southwestern United States show that canines played a key role in the spiritual beliefs of ancient Americans, new research suggests. Throughout the region, dogs have been found buried with jewelry, alongside adults and children, carefully stacked in groups, or in positions that relate to important structures, said Dody Fugate, an assistant curator at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico. [National Geographic]

Before the exodus: For two-thirds of its history, Homo sapiens lived exclusively in Africa. Only now are the details of that period becoming clear. [Economist]

April 28th, 2008 at 10:21 am

This article is filed under Blog, Prehistory.

7,000 years older than Stonehenge: the site that stunned archaeologists: What makes them remarkable are their carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. Never mind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers. [Guardian]

Neanderthals speak for first time in 50,000 years: The linguist teamed with Prof McCarthy to simulate Neanderthal speech based on new reconstructions of the Neanderthal vocal tract, based on three 60,000-year old fossils from France. “We are really saying that Neanderthals spoke, just a bit differently than we do,” he says. [Telegraph]

April 23rd, 2008 at 10:22 am

This article is filed under Blog, Prehistory.

Getting Drunk on Chocolate in 1100 B.C.: Not only were the first chocoholics tinkering with cacao around 1100 B.C.—500 years earlier than previously thought—but they might have been doing so to get a tipsy buzz. A recent chemical analysis of 3,000-year-old pottery shards in northern Honduras turned up traces of theobromine (its name means “food of the gods”), a chemical that is found in cacao. [Discover]

Ancient Knives Unearthed in Australia: Tools dating back at least 35,000 years have been unearthed in a rock shelter in Australia’s remote northwest, making it one of the oldest archaeological finds in that part of the country, archaeologists said Monday. The tools include a piece of flint the size of a small cell phone and hundreds of tiny sharp stones that were used as knives. [Discovery]

April 14th, 2008 at 10:06 am

This article is filed under Blog, Prehistory.

Cave Speak: Did Neandertals Talk?: German researchers have discovered Neandertals apparently had the human variant of a gene that is linked to speech and language. A team of scientists, primarily from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, made the discovery during efforts to reconstruct a full genome of the extinct hominid. [Scientific American]

Sacred ruins older then Incas found in Peru: Some of the structures hidden in a forest of eucalyptus trees predate the Inca empire but were then significantly developed and expanded, with a roadway and irrigation, says a team from Peru’s National Institute of Culture. [Telegraph]

March 16th, 2008 at 9:50 am

This article is filed under Blog, Prehistory.

Donkeys served man in 3,000BC: Donkeys may first have been domesticated in ancient Egypt around 3,000BC, research suggests. A study of 10 donkey skeletons found near a pharoah’s tomb has found that the animals were in the early phases of domestication. [Times]

Ancient Bones of Small Humans Discovered in Palau: Thousands of human bones belonging to numerous individuals have been discovered in the Pacific island nation of Palau. Some of the bones are ancient and indicate inhabitants of particularly small size, scientists announced today. The remains are between 900 and 2,900 years old and align with Homo sapiens, according to a paper on the discovery. However, the older bones are tiny and exhibit several traits considered primitive, or archaic, for the human lineage. [National Geographic]

Stone age bones and axes found off Norfolk coast: The weapons of the stone age Norfolk men who hunted mammoths on what is now the bed of the North Sea, and fragments of the beasts they slaughtered, have turned up in Holland, spotted by an amateur archaeologist in a load of gravel. [Guardian]

March 11th, 2008 at 11:11 am

This article is filed under Blog, Prehistory.