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Mammoth Skull Find Raises New Evolutionary Questions

Wooly Mammoth(1)

The Mammoth Site who worked with the national park team, called the fossil “spectacular-looking”. He added that it was one of the best mammoth skulls he had ever seen himself – and that he had seen many good mammoth skulls during his professional career. The fossil was first discovered by national park biologist Peter Larramendy in 2014. The sharp-eyed scientist spotted one of the skull’s tusks jutting out from a canyon wall, prompting an investigation and excavation. Based on radiocarbon dating of nearby charcoal samples conducted by the US Geological Survey, the fossil is thought to be about 13,000 years old. This timeline puts the mammoth living concurrently with Arlington Man: a set of remains discovered on Santa Rosa Island in 1959 which potentially represent the oldest known human skeleton yet to be found in North America. However, now that the mammoth skull has been fully excavated for analysis, the mystery has deepened instead of becoming clearer. Wilkins says the species the mammoth belongs to is uncertain, as it does not fit the profile of the pygmy mammoth, a species of mammoth that lived on the Channel Islands and grew to about six feet tall. The pygmy mammoth was an evolutionary offshoot of the larger, 14-foot-tall Columbian mammoth, which was common across the North American continent at the time. The solution to this mystery may be revealed through a study of the skull’s fossilized teeth. Doing so could help scientists determine the age of the creature before it died. It also has the potential to reveal the genetic makeup of the mammoth, placing it more decisively in either the Columbian or the pygmy bloodline. There is the possibility of a third result, as the mammoth skull could represent a transitional species between Columbian and pygmy mammoths – evidence of the evolutionary adaptation to a smaller habitat as it was selected as an advantageous trait. The likelihood of this being the case seems low, however. The next stop for the fossilized skull will be the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Once it arrives, it will be properly preserved and studied before being put on display and made available to the general public. The second-largest island of the Channel Islands, Santa Rosa is approximately 26 miles from the city of Santa Barbara. During the last Ice Age, Santa Rosa and the surrounding islands were one solid landmass only five miles off the coast, making it relatively easy for large animals such as the Columbia mammoth to migrate to the island. Later, the island would come to be inhabited by a maritime Paleocostal population of early humans that are thought to have been the progenitors of the native Chumash people who resided on the island until being displaced by white settlers. ]]>

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Documents Belonging to “Scotland’s Schindler” Discovered

Jane Haining Memorial Dunmore (4)

Huffington Post. Haining was born in 1897 and moved to Budapest to take a position as matron of the Jewish Mission School, where 315 pupils, 48 of them boarders and a number of them orphans, were educated. As the Nazis moved across Europe, her situation became increasingly dangerous, resulting in her superiors ordering her to return to Scotland on three separate occasions. Haining, however, refused to leave “her” girls behind. Rev. Ian Alexander, the Secretary of the Church of Scotland World Mission Council, explained to the Huffington Post: “Scottish missionaries were advised to return home from Europe during the dark days of the Second World War but Jane declined and wrote ‘if these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness’.” For four years Haining was able to keep the children in her care safe, despite constant Nazi surveillance. She was ultimately betrayed by the son-in-law of the school’s cook, after she caught him eating the scarce amount of food intended for the girls. Charged with the following eight offenses: working alongside the Jews, weeping at the sight of the girls wearing yellow stars in class, firing her housekeeper, listening to BBC news broadcasts, receiving a large number of British visitors, being politically active, visiting British war prisoners, and sending war parcels to British prisoners; Haining was imprisoned and ultimately sent to Auschwitz, along with several of her wards, where she later died. Her will, which was dated July, 1942, includes instructions pertaining to the distribution of her belongings and money, and many of the photographs feature her young wards. She is believed to be one of ten Scottish people to have been killed in the Nazi death camps. Haining was named in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. The items will be housed at the Church of Scotland, in Edinburgh. ]]>

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New Tech Used to Literally Throw New Light On Tongan Ruins

Tonga

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Remarkable Statues of Goddess Aphrodite Found at Petra

Aphrodite Statue

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HMS Terror Found 168 Years After Sinking

HMS Terror

The Guardian, the Arctic Research Foundation sent a small, remote-controlled submersible watercraft through one of the wreck’s open hatches, sending back remarkable images of the exterior and interior of the ship. Foundation operations director Adrian Schimnowski, corresponding from the research vessel Martin Bergmann, informed the newspaper that the researchers positively identified the ship’s mess hall, several of the cabins, and the food storage compartment – complete with plates still on the shelves. Other finds include a pair of wine bottles, several tables, and even a desk with its drawers still open. The newly-found wreck is almost certainly HMS Terror, but estimates of where the Royal Navy explorer vessel was thought to have succumbed to the sea ice say the wreck should have been located around 60 miles further north of its current location. If this wreck, located in Terror Bay: an uncharted body of water off the shore of King William Island, is indeed the HMS Terror the accepted narrative of polar exploration may need to be rewritten, researchers say. From the wreck’s discovery on September 3rd to the most recent series of images gathered by the researchers’ remote-operated vehicle, the team has been hard at work comparing the gathered data to the builder’s plans for HMS Terror. Many correlations have been made, helped by the fact that the condition of the wreck is excellent, with the metal-sheathed hull largely intact. Sheathing was added to the Terror prior to its expedition to help it withstand sea ice during its exploration. Sitting 80 feet below the surface, HMS Terror was found level on the seafloor, something that indicates the ship sank gently to the bottom, Schimnowski remarked. Study of the vessel suggests that before the wreck sank beneath the waves the ship’s crew may have deployed an anchor line, based on a long, heavy rope spotted protruding through a hole in the deck of the ship. The implications of the new find could be groundbreaking – researchers suggest that after it was initially abandoned, HMS Terror might have been re-manned by British explorers seeking an escape route from the all-encompassing ice. This may explain why the ship, which was originally abandoned at the top of Victoria Strait, was found 60 miles south of where it was expected to be. ]]>

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Neolithic Cochno Stone to be Digitally Resurrected

Graffiti (2)

here Featured image, showing pre-1965 graffiti on the Cochno Stone, is courtesy of University of Glasgow]]>

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World's Oldest Snowshoe Disovered in Northern Italy

Aerial Photograph of the Dolomites (2)

The Telegraph. The 5,800-year-old snowshoe is the oldest discovered so far, scientists say, and was stumbled upon nearly by accident on the Gugrler Eisjoch glacier at an elevation of 10,280 feet (3,134 meters). Researchers say that because of the frigid environment of the glacier, the conditions were “ideal” to preserve the organic materials from which the snowshoe was constructed. The twine-wrapped oval frame was discovered by cartographer Simone Bartolini as part of a project to map the Italian-Austrian border at the behest of the Military Geographical Institute of Italy in 2003. For more than a decade, Bartolini says he kept the snowshoe in his Florentine office as a strange memento of his work on the glacier, simply assuming that it was lost by a farmer or cattle-driver sometime in the last century. However, in 2015 he began to suspect that the find might have much more significance, prompting him to have it studied by archaeologists who confirmed the age of the snowshoe. The announcement was made this week in the South Tyrol city of Bolanzo, the capital of the autonomous province. Meanwhile, this is not the only rare archaeological find to have emerged from the Dolomite range. A quarter of a century ago, a pair of German hikers discovered the frozen remains of a Neolithic hunter nearby; nicknamed “Oetzi” for a local range of mountains, the mummified remains have been a near-constant source of archaeological data regarding how local Neolithic humans lived. Oetzi has provided information on how humans traveled, how they hunted, what they ate, and what they wore. Oetzi’s death is one of the oldest clearly recorded cases of homicide, as well. The remains, which have been dated to around 5,300 years ago, show clear evidence of Oetzi being first struck by an arrow and then possibly finished off with some sort of blunt instrument. The snowshoe, however, predates Oetzi by up to 500 years. According to Dr. Catrin Marzoli, who also spoke at the press conference, the shoe is proof positive that individuals residing in the region during the Neolithic had adapted themselves to the environment by equipping themselves appropriately. The director of the cultural heritage department for the province, Dr. Marzoli added that there are no clear indications as to why individuals might have been attempting to traverse such treacherous terrain, suggesting that the snowshoe could have been lost during a hunt, a visit to a pagan site of worship, or even during a panicked flight from enemies. Meanwhile, one of the reasons the snowshoe was discovered in the first place may have negative implications for modern humans. With climate change causing glaciers to recede, many new archaeological finds have come to light as a result – though increased climate change could spell disaster through coastal flooding caused by rising sea levels. Images of the find can be found here]]>

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Ancient Statue of Goddess Kybele Unearthed in Turkey

Cybele, a Phrygian earth goddess

Hurriyet Daily News, Mayor Enver Yilmaz said that the decision was made to support the dig after 2015’s initial one million Lira provision to begin excavations of Kurul Castle. Hopes are high that the restored, excavated castle will bolster tourism in the area, providing opportunities for visitors to observe archaeological artifacts such as the sculpture in an open-air museum. Researchers working on site say that the new statue is one of the most significant finds discovered within Turkey so far in 2016. Besides its historical significance, the Kybele sculpture is the first of its kind to have been discovered in situ – an extremely rare event. This is made even more noteworthy because of the state of Kurul Castle, as the main gate’s walls collapsed during an early occupation by Roman forces. Thought to be constructed during the reign of Mithridates the Sixth, king of Pontus and Armenia Minor from circa 120 BCE to 63 BCE, Kurul Castle may not have been the original home of the Kybele statue. The sculpture likely belonged to the Hellenistic Pontus Kingdom, and could have been transported to Kurul from a more western province, most likely that of Afyon. Located on a mountain ridge outside the village of Bayadi, a close suburb of the city of Ordu, Kurul Castle stands at an elevation of some 1800 feet (571 meters). The site once consisted of an open-air temple, surrounded by a pair of curtain walls. The interior of the castle also held a gallery, a water cistern, and at least four living spaces unearthed by recent excavations. Archaeologists plan to leave the statue in place for now until it can be secured for transport and conservation to a suitable museum in Ordu. Images of the statue can be found here ]]>

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DNA Confirms the Bacteria Responsible for the Great Plague

Death cart in a street in London during the great plague

Yersinia pestis, was present in the victims, a year after the discovery of a suspected mass burial pit during excavation work associated with the Crossrail project at Liverpool Street, in East London. The identity of which microbes were responsible for the Great Plague has long been debated. The search for the bacterium was conducted by the osteology department of the Museum of London Archeology (MOLA), where the finds from Liverpool Street are stored. Michael Henderson led the examination of a number of skeletons from the site. He told BBC News, “They’re carefully boxed, individual elements, legs separately, arms separately, the skulls and the torsos. We excavated in the region of three and a half thousand skeletons, one of the largest archaeologically excavated to this date. A vast data set that can give us really meaningful information.” Teeth from the London remains were extracted and sent for DNA analysis at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in Germany. “The best thing to sample for DNA is the teeth; they’re like an isolated time capsule,” Henderson explained in the BBC News interview. Once in Germany, Kirsten Bos, a molecular palaeopathologist with the institute, led the painstaking effort to drill out the tooth pulp used in the search for the seventeenth-century bacteria, resulting in positive results from five of the individuals tested. “We could clearly find preserved DNA signatures in the DNA extract we made from the pulp chamber and from that we were able to determine that Yersinia pestis was circulating in that individual at the time of death. We don’t know why the Great Plague of London was the last major outbreak of plague in the UK and whether there were genetic differences in the past, those strains that were circulating in Europe to those circulating today; these are all things we’re trying to address by assembling more genetic information from ancient organisms.” Bos told BBC News. The horrific fate of the infected Londoners was described in the eighteenth-century account of the event: A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe. “The plague, as I suppose all distempers do, operated in a different manner on differing constitutions; some were immediately overwhelmed with it, and it came to violent fevers, vomitings, insufferable headaches, pains in the back, and so up to ravings and ragings with those pains,” Defoe wrote. “Others with swellings and tumours in the neck or groin, or armpits, which till they could be broke put them into insufferable agonies and torment; while others, as I have observed, were silently infected.” Alison Telfer, from MOLA, told the BBC’s Today program, “We’ve found about three-and-a-half thousand burials on this site. We’ve been working here for the last five-and-half-years on and off and we’re hoping we’ll be able to get positive identification of the plague on a number of the individuals.” Bos’s team will continue sequencing the full DNA genome in order to completely understand the spread and evolution of the disease. ]]>

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First-Ever Hittite Human Remains Discovered in Turkey

Alcahoyuk Sphinxtor