[Archport] Fwd: Archaeo News no 285 (14 December 2008)

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 Assunto: Archaeo News no 285 (14 December 2008)
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Dear friends,
First of all we'd like to say a big thank you to all the people who
sent generous donations to support our work - almost one third of our
yearly hosting expenses are now covered. This kind of support is of
great help to go on with the publishing of our weekly bulletin and
podcast. You can find the names of the donors at the bottom of this
short editorial - if anybody else would feel like sending a small
donation, please visithttp://www.stonepages.com/news and click the
PayPal button on the right side of the webpage.

Speaking of archaeological news, this week we included three rather
large articles. One is an in-depth analysis of the Stone Age Japan -
for those interested in reading the full article, we strongly suggest
to follow the link put at the bottom of the same news. The second is
about a new and controversial theory claiming that a deluge that
submerged six Neolithic villages in Israel may be the origin of the
biblical flood of Noah. The third one is a series of considerations on
the Göbekli Tepe Neolithic site in Turkey, whose circles of huge
decorated T-shaped stones are at least 5,000 years older than any
other monumental structure ever found.

As usual, enjoy the reading and - once more - our very special thanks
to the Archaeo News donors, along with the ones who decided to remain
anonymous:

B. Duncan, F. Byrne, R. Thacker, P. Shatto, C. Tynes, C. Hughes, S.
Smith, J. Moore, W. Comstock, P. Hoppe, J.B. Aaagaard Nielsen, M.
Mitchell, W.B. Chase, A. Maloney, C. Maris, D. Riddle, S. Johnston, P.
Oliver-Smith, R. Waldron, M. Kennedy, R. Rudnick.

Paola Arosio & Diego Meozzi
Stone Pages
http://www.stonepages.com

****** Archaeo News no 285 (14 December 2008) ******

* Neolithic settlement unearthed in Iran
* Stone Age Japan
* Prehistoric bronze hoard found off Greek beach
* Dig turns up 10,000 years old flint flakes in Texas
* Neanderthals had a varied diet
* Submerged Neolithic villages may have inspired the flood of Noah
* Which came first, monumental building projects or farming?
* Archaeologists find piece of string dating back 8,000 years
* Late Neanderthals and modern human contact in Spain
* Future of British hillfort under the spotlight
* Grave of Kurgan warrior discovered in Iran


Neolithic settlement unearthed in Iran

An archaeological team working on the Kelar Tepe believes that they
have found a Neolithic settlement on the prehistoric mound located in
the Kelaradsht region in Iran's northern province of Mazandaran.
However they have said that more tests are needed to determine an
accurate date for the site.
    "Excavations at the Rashak 3 Cave have uncovered an oven at a
depth of 5 meters," team director Hamed Vahdatinasab said. "We have
also discovered shards in the oven, which are very similar to
Neolithic pottery works," he added. Vahdatinasab said that Ezzatollah
Negahban, the father of modern Iranian archaeology, had excavated the
region about 40 years ago.
    Three human shelters were identified during the excavations,
named Rashak 1, 2, and 3, with the last being most important and
largest according Negahban s research. The region came into the
limelight after the team began studying the Rashak 3 excavation in
2006 and 2007. "The Rashak 3 excavations had been turned into a
sheepfold by the people living in the surrounding region and the sheep
excrements contributed to the preservation of the ancient strata,"
Vahdatinasab said. The samples of the shards have been sent to Oxford
University for carbon-14 dating, he added.
    A number of shards, surmised to date back to Chalcolithic era,
and animal bones have also been unearthed at the site and a team of
experts are currently studying the artifacts. Covering an area of 6000
hectares, the Kelar Tepe is a mound 10 meters in height located in
Kelardasht, a scenic plain in a large valley located in the Elborz
Mountains, north of Tehran.

Source: Tehran Times (14 December 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/6cf275

Stone Age Japan

"The earliest known Jomon man," writes J. Edward Kidder Jr. in "The
Cambridge History of Japan," "was uncovered in 1949. He stood rather
tall for a Jomon person: about 163 cm... X-rays of his bones show
growth interruptions, interpreted as near-fatal spells of extreme
malnutrition during childhood. The joints testify to early aging.
Virtually unused wisdom teeth are partial evidence of a life-
expectancy of about 30 years." He lived sometime between 7500 and 5000
BCE, when Japan's population was probably around 22,000.
    Jomon culture was not new even then. Its defining innovation,
pottery, was already thousands of years old. It goes back to circa
10,500 BCE. It is the oldest pottery in the world, most authorities
agree. A sister art was the crafting of clay dogu (figurines), some
20,000 of which have been reconstructed, shard by shard. A great many
depict pregnant women.
    Rising seas were the prologue to Jomon's emergence. About 20,000
years ago, stirred by a period of cyclical global warming, oceans
submerged parts of northeast Asia and made islands of the continent's
rim. Nomad hunters pursuing big game found themselves trapped on
islands in the making, where the giant beasts died out as the climate
warmed and foraging territory shrank. Succeeding millenniums saw these
new islanders relying less and less on hunting, and more on fishing
and, in particular, gathering.
    Gathering stimulates, and is stimulated by, pottery. Pottery is a
revolutionary technology. It permits storage, and the boiling of
otherwise inedible plants. It fosters settlement. "Jomon people,"
writes archaeologist Richard Pearson in the International Jomon
Culture Conference Newsletter, "achieved residential stability by a
very early date, in comparison with other parts of the world. Villages
of up to 50 people containing pit-house dwellings and storage pits
date as early as 9000 BCE".
    Their very success as hunters, fishers and gatherers helps
explain their failure (or disinclination) to develop agriculture
beyond very occasional, very tentative experiments. "Jomon's existence
in Japan for almost 10,000 years," note Kiyoshi Yamaura and Hiroshi
Ushiro in the Smithsonian publication 'Ainu: Spirit of a Northern
People,' "makes it one of the longest-running single traditions in the
world, whose hunting-and-gathering economy was so well adapted to the
environmental conditions that few economic disruptions seem to have
occurred."
    Generally classed as Neolithic, Jomon people somehow resisted the
typical Neolithic evolution from gathering to cultivating. Resistance
endured longest on the northernmost island of Hokkaido, where the
Ainu, linked by ethnologists to Jomon man with disputed degrees of
consanguinity, maintained a hunting-gathering culture well into the
19th century.
    Japan's first farmers were Jomon's eventual supplanters mainland immigrants known today as the Yayoi. They brought with them
another innovation apparently unknown to Jomon man: war. The oldest
recognizable Jomon site is at Hanawadai in present-day Ibaraki
Prefecture. The Hanawadai site dates back to circa 7500-5000 BCE and
consists of five house pits about 10 meters apart. None contained a
fireplace; warming and cooking fires were set outdoors. "The little
band of occupants," writes Kidder, "could hardly have numbered more
than 10 or 15."
    The ensuing millenniums wrought change, but the pace was glacial.
Neither agriculture nor metal came to disturb the peace or expand the
horizons. Despite a 10-fold-plus rise in population (to 250,000) over
4,000 years, individual life expectancy remained unaltered: 15 years
at birth, 30 in the unlikely event you survived childhood. The odds
were not good. A site in Aomori Prefecture has yielded burial jars for
more than 880 infants   six times the number of adults.
    The name "Jomon" means "cord-marked," and describes a decorative
flourish that adorned their earliest pottery. Jomon pottery presents a
dazzling variety of shapes, surface treatment and artistic motifs. How
the leap came to be made from pots, jars, lamps and burial urns to
human figures is anyone's guess. Containers are common to Neolithic
cultures; ceramic sculpture is not, and Jomon's, affirms Naoaki
Ishikawa, chief curator of the Otaru Museum in Hokkaido, is likely the
oldest of its kind in the world. The earliest pieces are some 12,000
years old, comparable in antiquity to the Cro-Magnon cave art of
France and Spain. The Jomon sculpted women, most of them visibly
pregnant.
    Japan's oldest known dogu figurine, 5.8 cm tall, consists of a
lump of clay representing a head mounted neckless on a lump of clay
representing a torso, with only the swelling breasts to put the object
in perspective and suggest a significance. Thousands of years pass
with much production but little progress, and then, more or less
suddenly, there is a change. By 3500 BCE we discern a heightened
awareness of the face and its peculiar nuances. Centuries pass; the
faces grow more lifelike but less human. One looks strikingly like a
cat. Another is oddly reminiscent of a Buddhist bodhisattva. She is
crouching   one of a number in that posture; the posture of
childbirth, scholars believe.
    One figure, unearthed in Nagano Prefecture and dating from the
Middle Jomon period (circa 3500-2400 BCE), is famous as the so-called
Jomon Venus. Her swollen belly and ample hips are in odd contrast to
her rather perfunctory breasts. She is fertility personified and she
stands 27 cm tall. Roughly contemporary with Venus, dug up in Tokyo,
is a stunning creation. A mother (her head, alas, lost) sits cradling
an infant, her breasts hovering protectively over the child. Latest of
all, towards Jomon's close beginning around 1000 BCE, the faces grow
increasingly strange, as if realistic portraiture, so laboriously
achieved, has at last been cast aside as something outgrown.
   The potters and artists of Jomon were probably women. Men's work
was hunting and fishing. Did the dogu, even the more realistic ones,
depict living women? Do their tattoolike markings, their hair styles,
their facial expressions and body proportions, help us visualize the
Stone Age inhabitants of Japan as they really were? Or were they
idealized beings, spirits? Either way, they were evidently objects of
reverence. An agricultural society can labor for fertility. Gatherers
have no recourse but to pray for it. The female figurines of Jomon may
best be seen as tangible prayers.

Source: The Japan Times (14 December 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/64452q

Prehistoric bronze hoard found off Greek beach

A hoard of 4,500-year-old copper weapons recovered off a northern
beach is the largest of its kind ever found in Greece. A Culture
Ministry statement says the discovery includes at least 110 ax and
hammer heads, but several more should be extracted from compacted
masses of corroded metal. The ministry says they were probably buried
at a time of unrest or war. The hoard would have represented a fortune
at the time. The statement says there were no traces of a shipwreck.
The site was probably a coastal area flooded by rising sea levels. The
tools were discovered near the village of Mesi, 500 miles (800
kilometers) northeast of Athens. Archaeologists recovered it from a
depth of 3 1/2 yards.

Source: The Seattle Times (11 December 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/6kf9ef

Dig turns up 10,000 years old flint flakes in Texas

Many, many years ago, the area now known as Zilker Park (Austin, Texas
- USA) was a settlement for some of North America's early hunter-
gatherers. As many as 10,000 years ago, those people used stone tools
to cut meat, chop wood, scrape hides, and fashion spear points.
Artifacts of their lives have long been entombed under layers of mud
and sediment washed ashore by the flooding Colorado River.
    The Austin City Council could decide to pay as much as $700,000
for a three-month dig in Zilker Park to uncover troves of these stone
tools. The dig was prompted by a major sewer line upgrade that was
completed late last year that touched on an area of known
archaeological deposits. The dig, which is expected to begin in
February, would expand on a preliminary archaeological investigation
in Zilker Park in 2006 that uncovered 887 flint flakes associated with
the making of stone tools about 10,000 years ago.
    That preliminary investigation was prompted by a collision of
federal and state rules. The city was forced to improve its sewer
tunnel and lift station in Zilker Park. But the sewer pipe project ran
through a proven archeological site, so under the state antiquities
code, Austin had to do some archeological work to document cultural
resources in the area. In the end, the City of Austin negotiated with
the Texas Historical Commission to dig in a field south of Barton
Springs Road near the sewage pipe project.
    If an early hunter-gatherer "was making a projectile point, a tip
for a spear, he might be chipping off pieces of rock," said Jim
Bruseth, the director of the archaeology division at the Texas
Historical Commission. Putting those flakes and stone tools under a
microscope can help archaeologists learn about the hunter-gathering
civilization because wear left on the tool can illuminate how they cut
their meat or shaped wood, according to Michael Collins, a researcher
at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at the University of
Texas who has studied artifacts from Zilker since the early 1990s.
    "The location of that site, or that park, is absolutely an ideal
setting for hunter-gathering people to live," Collins said. "That's
right at the juncture of the Gulf Coastal Plain with the Edwards
Plateau. It's a great edge of contrasting environments, with different
plants, animals, and soils. For hunter-gatherers relying on natural
resources, situating yourself on an edge is an ideal point to be," he
said. The natural makeup of the area   flooding rivers that wash
sediment and mud ashore, which preserves artifacts   makes it well-
suited for archaeological work.

Source: American-Stateman (11 December 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/57p4jj

Neanderthals had a varied diet

Archaeology Professor Noreen Tuross sought to rehabilitate the image
of Neanderthals as meat-eating brutes last week, presenting evidence
that, though they almost certainly ate red meat, Neanderthal diets
also consisted of other foods   like escargot. Evidence from
Neanderthal bones collected from the Shanidar cave in Northern Iraq
decades ago and analyzed recently by Tuross indicate that at least
that particular Neanderthal was not a heavy carnivore. Neanderthals,
she suggested, had a varied diet that included meat, but that was not
solely or even largely made up of it. One possible alternative food
was found in abundance in the cave, she said: land snails. "This was
not a heavy meat-eater," Tuross said. "So what else can they be
eating? I think the answer is escargot."
    Tuross' attempt to show the Neanderthal's dietary diversity comes
on the heels of studies that examined the concentration of a type of
nitrogen atom that increases in animals as they feed up the food
chain. One study showed that Neanderthals living in Vindija Cave in
Croatia had higher concentrations of this atom than even top
predators, leading researchers to conclude that Neanderthals were
heavy meat eaters. Tuross questioned that conclusion, however, saying
that scientists don't know why that particular nitrogen isotope
concentrates in predators, making it possible that other mechanisms
are at work. In addition, she said, studies of Neanderthals on
Gibraltar showed they had a varied diet, as do modern humans, who are
among the most omnivorous animals on earth.
    Tuross was just one expert in disciplines ranging from
anthropology to history to genetics attending a symposium aimed to
bridge divides between traditional fields in order to shed more light
on the human past. The symposium agenda included presentations on the
Neanderthal Genome Project, the impact of sex-based evolutionary
forces on the human genome, humans and the extinction of the
megafauna, mathematical modeling of contact between linguistic groups,
and the origins of dairy farming.
    The evolutionary forces that split humans from Neanderthals
hundreds of thousands of years ago didn't go away after the break.
Mark Thomas, of University College, London, presented evidence about
one of the strongest forces that has driven human evolution in Europe
over the past 20,000 years: milk. Thomas' research showed that a gene
variant for "lactase persistence" (LP) that allows humans to digest
milk into adulthood   uncommon in most adult animals and in many human
societies   swept across Europe sometime in the last 20,000 years. To
spread so rapidly, Thomas said, the gene must have conveyed an
extraordinary survival advantage to those possessing it.
    Though science has not yet identified the specific advantages at
play in early Europe, there are several potential candidates. Among
them is that milk provides a ready source of calories, protein,
calcium, and fat, particularly during the winter or during crop boom-
and-bust cycles. It also provides an uncontaminated source of fluids,
perhaps lessening illness and parasitic infections; and obtaining it
may be a more economical use of lands than farming.  "In Europeans,
this is probably the most strongly selected part of the genome in the
last 20,000 years," Thomas said. Thomas found that the gene variant
coincided well with the rise of animal domestication, indicating that
humans became dairy farmers almost as soon as they began to keep
animals. "The spread of the LP variation was shaped by selection and
by an underlying demographic process, the spread of farming," Thomas
said.

Source: Harvard University Gazette (11 December 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/6s4pfy

Submerged Neolithic villages may have inspired the flood of Noah

A deluge that swept the Land of Israel more than 7,000 years ago,
submerging six Neolithic villages opposite the Carmel Mountains, may
be the origin of the biblical flood of Noah, a British marine
archeologist said. The new theory about the source of the great flood
detailed in the Book of Genesis comes amid continuing controversy
among scholars over whether the inundation of the Black Sea more than
seven millennia ago was the biblical flood.
    In the theory posited by British marine archeologist Dr. Sean
Kingsley and published in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israeli
Archaeological Society, the drowning of the Carmel Mountains villages
- which include houses, temples, graves, water wells, workshops and
stone tools - is by far 'the most compelling' archeological evidence
exposed to date for Noah's flood. "What's more convincing
scientifically, a flood in the Black Sea, so far away from Israel and
the fantasy of a supposed ark marooned on the slopes of Mount Ararat,
or six submerged Neolithic villages smack-bang in the middle of the
Bible Land?" Kingsley said.
    Kingsley added that the site, which has been excavated by Israeli
archeologist Dr. Ehud Galili over the last quarter-century, offers a
'pretty convincing cocktail of coincidences,' including submerged
layers of villages in a critical location, and one that was known for
its nautical revolution. But Galili rejected Kingsley's theory, saying
that it could not be true. "Based on our archeological finds, the
village was not abandoned due to a catastrophic event, but due to the
slow rise of sea levels which occurred all over the world," he said.
"The pace of the increase in the sea level was very slow, so that it
would not be significant enough for people to remember it in the
course of their lifetime."
    Galili noted that, following the major tsunami that hit Asia,
there was a scientific trend in the world to hunt for mega-disasters
that happened in the past. "We did not find any proofs which indicate
that a tsunami or other such catastrophe flooded the villages, even
though there are proofs that a tsunami did occur in the Mediterranean
Sea," he said.
    The alternate theory that the inundation of the Black Sea around
5,600 BCE was the source of the biblical flood is called into question
by the fact that no villages, houses, cemeteries or graves have ever
been found under its waves, Kingsley said. Scholars agree the Black
Sea flooded when rising world sea levels caused the Mediterranean to
burst over land, turning the freshwater lake into a saltwater sea. The
flood was so monstrous that it raised water levels by 155 meters and
submerged up to 150,000 square kilometers of land. But scholars are
divided on when the flood occurred, and how rapidly. Most believe it
took place about 9,000 years ago and was gradual.
    The date of the massive flooding on the Carmel Coast, which
Kingsley estimates to have taken place between the sixth and fifth
millennia BCE, is another unknown. "The precise timing of this
localized flooding is still being worked out, but there is no doubt
that the villages of the Carmel were lost not to earthquakes or
tectonic movements but to killer waves," Kingsley said. The lost
villages cluster opposite the Carmel Mountains in depths of 12 meters.
Atlit-Yam, 10 meters south of Haifa, is the largest submerged
Neolithic village in the Mediterranean Sea.
    "Whether or not one can make a direct link between the biblical
story and the submerged Neolithic sites is doubtful," said Prof.
Shimon Gibson, an archeologist with the University of North Carolina
at Charlotte. "But it does show that episodes of substantial flooding
did occur in these parts of the world. The bottom line, is that
overall evidence of [a] world submerged in flood does not exist."

Source: The Jerusalem Post (10 December 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/6bwp5w

Which came first, monumental building projects or farming?

Göbekli Tepe is a hill-top Neolithic site in southeastern Turkey whose
circles of huge decorated T-shaped stones are at least 5,000 years
older than any other monumental structure ever found. The German
archaeologist who has been excavating the site since 1994 sums up four
more months of digging. "In 14 years, we have uncovered barely five
percent of what is here. There are decades of work ahead, " Klaus
Schmidt says.
    Apart from a new transverse cut to the left of the main dig, and
the excavation of a small, late circle that probably dates from about
8,500 BCE, little appears to have changed since March. But there have
been striking discoveries: a U-shaped stone sculpted with leopards and
a boar that Schmidt compares to the Lion Gate at Mycenae; two almost
life-size sculptures of a boar and wild cat found embedded within the
rubble walls surrounding one early enclosure. Schmidt and his team
have also uncovered a hollowed-out stone, roughly four-foot square,
lying cracked in the middle of one of the circles. "We found similar
stones in other enclosures, and we assumed they are some sort of
door", Schmidt says. "The position of this one makes us wonder whether
the circles weren't vaulted," like the trulli of southern Italy, or
the famous bee-hive houses at Harran, just south of Göbekli Tepe.
    Potentially much more significant, although almost invisible to
the untrained eye, archaeologists have also uncovered evidence that
the builders of at least one of the oldest circles had dug roughly
five meters down through the mound before erecting the standing stones
on the bedrock. "For the time being this is just hypothesis, but this
leaves us wondering whether the site dates back to before [c. 9500
BCE], when the earliest circles were built," Schmidt says. "Piling up
a five-meter mound is not the work of one night."
    Whatever the carbon-dating eventually shows, Göbekli Tepe stands
at the cusp of what is arguably the biggest social revolution in human
history - the transformation of semi-nomadic hunters into settled
farmers. Archaeologists now know a great deal about the whens and
wheres of the birth of agriculture. DNA tests on wild wheat growing on
Karacadag, a mountain just east of Göbekli Tepe, suggest it may have
been the source of early cultivated strains. At Nevali Cori, a
Neolithic village 40 miles northwest of Schmidt's site, archaeologists
found seeds of domesticated einkorn wheat dating from 9000 BCE.
    But debate still rages about what it was that led Neolithic
groups to transfer almost all their energies into farming.For many
experts, climate change was behind the transformation. Global
temperatures had been warming gradually since the last Ice Age.
Between 10,800 and 9,500 BCE, they suddenly plummeted again. "The
region where grasses could be cultivated shrank to the very upper
edges of the Middle East, northern Syria and southeastern Turkey,"
says Ofer Bar-Yosef, MacCurdy Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at
Harvard and a doyen of paleolithic studies. "Even there, resources
were limited - people wanted to keep them for themselves."
    But the location, age and sheer size of Göbekli Tepe have led
some to posit a radically different explanation for the change. "The
intense cultivation of wild wheat may have first occurred to supply
sufficient food to the hunter-gatherers who quarried 7-ton blocks of
limestone with flint flakes," writes Stephen Mithen, Professor of
Archaeology at the University of Reading, in the UK. The move to
farming may "have been driven as much by ideology as by the need to
cope with environmental stress."
   "There is no doubt this was a place of huge feasts, and hunter-
gatherers would have had difficulty gathering together enough food to
feed large groups,"  Klaus Schmidt says. "Some American colleagues say
such feasts may have been the origin of domestication." His caution
stems from growing evidence uncovered over the last five years or so
that domestication was a much longer process than previously believed.
    Experts now think farmers probably sowed grain for at least a
thousand years before domesticated strains appeared. In 2004, French
archaeologists showed how Neolithic settlers had corralled wild cattle
in southern Turkey before transporting them to Cyprus. Professor Bar-
Yosef has had his doubts about the theory of ideological farmers since
the start. "First you need to get your economy working," he says.
"Then you build the monuments that justify the complex social
organization that requires." Complex, he adds, can sometimes mean
unjust. "You can't build places like Göbekli with kibbutzim," he says.
"I wouldn't be surprised if somebody somewhere in the Fertile Crescent
finds evidence of slave labour in the near future."

Source: Eurasianet.org (9 December 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/59fm5n

Archaeologists find piece of string dating back 8,000 years

The fibres were discovered in a flooded Stone Age settlement just off
the coast of the Isle of Wight (Great Britain). The four-and-a-half
inch long string was made from tough stems of honeysuckle, nettles or
wild clematis that were twisted together.
    Marine archaeologists discovered it when they found a prehistoric
camp 30 feet below the surface, 200 yards off the Isle of Wight. The
team, led by Gary Momber of the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime
Archaeology, cut small blocks of the sea floor out for analysis after
seeing the wooded remains of the settlement by chance. The string was
buried in one of them.
    The find is remarkable because the fibres, made of organic
matter, would usually decay quite quickly. Now the results have been
published in British Archaeology magazine. Editor Mike Pitts described
it as a 'fantastic find'. He said: "I don't think the average person
realises what an important piece of technology string has been over
the ages."
    Experts believe the settlement was flooded at the end of the last
ice age, when glacial sheets that covered most of Europe, including
Britain from the Midlands northwards, melted. Jan Gillespie, of
Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology, said: "The string
was found with wooden planks and stakes and some pits containing burnt
flint. We believe they may have been heated up to help work timber
into boats."

Source: Telegraph.co.uk (8 December 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/5w7o3g

Late Neanderthals and modern human contact in Spain

It is widely accepted that Upper Paleolithic early modern humans
spread westward across Europe about 42,000 years ago, variably
displacing and absorbing Neanderthal populations in the process.
However, Middle Paleolithic, presumably Neanderthal, assemblages
persisted for another 8,000 years in Iberia. It has been unclear
whether these late Middle Paleolithic Iberian assemblages were made by
Neanderthals, and what the nature of those humans might have been. New
research, is now shedding some light on what were probably the last
Neanderthals.
    The research is based on a study of human fossils found during
the past decade at the Sima de la Palomas, Murcia, Spain by Michael
Walker, professor at Universidad de Murcia, and colleagues, and
published by Michael Walker, Erik Trinkaus, professor of Anthropology
at Washington University in St. Louis, and colleagues. The human
fossils from the upper levels of the Sima de las Palomas are
anatomically clearly Neanderthals, and they are now securely dated to
40,000 years ago. They therefore establish the late persistence of
Neanderthals in this southwestern cul-de-sac of Europe. This
reinforces the conclusion that the Neanderthals were not merely swept
away by advancing modern humans. The behavioral differences between
these human groups must have been more subtle than the Middle-to-Upper
Paleolithic technological contrasts might imply.
    In addition, the Palomas Neanderthals variably exhibit a series
of modern human features rare or absent in earlier Neanderthals.
Either they were evolving on their own towards the modern human
pattern, or more likely, they had contact with early modern humans
around the Pyrenees. If the latter, it implies that the persistence of
the Middle Paleolithic in Iberia was a matter of choice, and not
cultural retardation.
    From the Sima de las Palomas, other late Neanderthal sites, and
recent discoveries of the earliest modern humans across Europe, a
complex picture is emerging of shifting contact between behaviorally
similar, if culturally and biologically different, human populations.

Source: Washington University in St.Louis (8 December 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/6juyl2

Future of British hillfort under the spotlight

The future of Shropshire's landmark hill (England), including
controversial plans for a huge opencast coal mine, will come under the
spotlight at a public meeting.
People will also have the chance to debate whether a new visitor
centre should be built at The Wrekin or whether it should be left as
it is. The open forum has been called by All Friends Round The Wrekin,
a group of people who want to protect the hill for future generations.
    An important issue was the huge archaeological and historic
importance of the Iron Age hill fort at the summit of The Wrekin.
Group chairman George Evans said: "There is a lot to discuss at the
moment and we expect a big crowd."

Source: Shropshire Star (8 December 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/6evcgx

Grave of Kurgan warrior discovered in Iran

Iranian archaeological teams working at the reservoir area of the
Khoda-Afarin Dam have recently discovered a burial site of a Kurgan
warrior during their rescue excavations. A bull statuette, a number of
ancient weapons, dishes, and bronze artefacts have also been found in
the warrior's grave, Archaeological Research Centre of Iran (ARCI)
Director Mohammad-Hassan Fazeli Nashli said. "According to the
archaeologists, the warrior enjoyed a special status among his
people," he added.
    The Kurgans were an Indo-European culture living in northern
Europe, from Russia across Germany during the fifth, fourth, and third
millennia BCE. A number of the people also immigrated to northwestern
Iran and lived there around 1500 to 2000 BCE, when the Bronze Age was
ending in Iran.
    So far, a total of 20 graves of Kurgans have been dug out at the
site, nine of which were discovered during the recent excavations,
Fazeli Nashli said. "Along with the bull, a number of grey pottery
dishes bearing geometrical shapes and weapons such as a dagger, sword,
and bayonet have been presented to the warrior in the grave," he
explained.
    The archaeologists had previously discovered Kurgan graves
containing skeletons of a horse, sheep and other animals during the
previous season of excavations last year. The warrior's grave, which
measures about 6 x 1.5 meters, has been constructed by mud and stones.
The stones are larger in lower part of the grave and become smaller in
upper part. "This is the first time the Kurgan people are being
studied in Iran, however we don't know much about their architecture
and residential areas in Iran," Fazeli Nashli noted.
    Five teams of experts are currently working at the reservoir area
of the Khoda-Afarin Dam, which is home to many archaeological sites.
The dam has been completed one year ago and its filling was postponed
following an ARCI's appeal for rescue excavations. However, it is not
clear how the team can continue working at the site, because the dam
was officially launched by the Islamic Republic's President, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, during his tour of East Azarbaijan Province last week.

Source: CAIS (8 December 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/69q9k9

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