Neolithic Finds

Bavarian Burgermeister Buried With Halved Boat's Tooth.

About 6,800 years ago, a "mayor" was buried with a wealth of food and riches, including a halved boar's tooth, according to archaeologists who found the rare burial in southern Germany.

The mayor's Middle Neolithic remains were found near the Bavarian town of Eichendorf, close to Munich and Germany's southeastern borders with Austria and the Czech Republic. According to the local government of Bavaria's Dingolfing-Landau district, the discovery was made last week by district archaeologists excavating at the village of Exing, about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) to the west.

The person in the grave was buried with food and drink for the afterlife; dyes for body painting; a stone ax and a stone adze; and a boar's tooth split in two.

The rich grave goods indicate that the person buried there was of high status, possibly an elder or a chieftain — and archaeologists have dubbed them "The Mayor."

The investigation hasn't yet determined how old the person was when they died, or whether they were male or female. ...

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/6800-year-old-burial-of-neolithic-mayor-unearthed-in-bavaria
 
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Not a cat lady but she seems to have liked animals.

Archaeologists think they have hit upon the ancient burial site of a female 'shaman' in southeast Türkiye.

In life, as in death, scientists suspect the early Neolithic woman was 'one with' the animals that used to roam the banks of the Tigris River. In 2019, her remains were unearthed at a roughly 12,000-year-old settlement, called Çemka Höyük.

Her grave is a veritable menagerie of local fauna. Buried under the limestone slab of what was once an ancient roundhouse, the woman's bones were found carefully sealed away with those of a partridge, a weasel-like mammal, a sheep or goat, a dog-like carnivore, and an extinct species of cattle, known as an aurochs.

Woman Shaman Burial


The grave of the female 'shaman', buried curled up on her right side. (Kodaş et al., L'Anthropologie , 2024)

Aurochs are thought to be the wild ancestors of today's cows, but scientists do not think they were domesticated in this region for another few thousand years. All the animals included in the grave are considered wild. ...

https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-woman-buried-with-wild-animals-was-a-shaman-study-says
 
ramonmercado said:
Now they'll match it to some neolithic crime scene.

A fingerprint left on a clay vessel made by a potter 5,000 years ago has been found in Orkney.

The print was discovered on a surviving fragment of the object at the Ness of Brodgar archaeological site. Archaeologists have been excavating at the complex of ancient buildings in the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site since 2006. Imaging technology was used to reveal the fingerprint left after the potter pressed a finger into wet clay.
Ness of Brodgar is the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) Archaeology Institute's flagship excavation site. The potter's fingerprint was noted by ceramics specialist Roy Towers, who was examining a sherd - a fragment - of pottery from a huge assemblage of clay pieces recovered from the site - the largest collection of late Neolithic Grooved Ware pottery in the UK.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-56858268
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The Ness at Brodgar is being covered over.

It sounds like the cruellest of tasks. Spend twenty years digging in the dirt of a narrow, wind-battered strip of land between two lochs.

Then go and fill it all in again.

But this is exactly what's happening at the Ness of Brodgar, one of the most important Neolithic sites in the British Isles. After two decades of patient, diligent, excavation and study, the people who have been uncovering the site's mysteries are having to cover it all up in the name of conservation. The only way to save what they call "the Ness" is to hide it from view.

Getty Images The Ring of Brodgar, a neolithic stone circle, on a sunny day
Getty Images
The Ness is south-east of the Neolithic stone circle, the Ring of Brodgar

The Ness lies just south-east of the Ring of Brodgar, the neolithic stone circle which can be seen as Orkney's version of Stonehenge. Since 2004, excavations at the three hectare site have so far uncovered 40 structures, a cluster of buildings which suggests this was an important settlement in prehistoric Orkney. They were built in waves between roughly 3500 and 2400BC.

The website of the Ness of Brodgar Trust says it's "without parallel in Atlantic Europe".

It's described as one of the most important archaeological excavations in the world, a find that changed what we understand about the culture and beliefs of Neolithic Orkney, one "shining a new light on the prehistory of northern Europe".

About 70 people work there throughout the summer digs. They're a mix of local and international volunteers, archaeology students and established professional researchers.

Archaeologist Nick Card, chair of the Trust and director of the Ness of Brodgar excavation, has been there since the beginning. He says the end of the dig is a very difficult time.

"It has been a very emotional year for many reasons, not least because the archaelogy has become part of my life and so many others' lives," he says. "It will take us years to follow up and write up what we have found but it's emotional because the Ness team we built up every summer for the past 10 to15 years has become an extended family."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy5ppxgg5wo
 
ramonmercado said:
The Ness at Brodgar is being covered over.

It sounds like the cruellest of tasks. Spend twenty years digging in the dirt of a narrow, wind-battered strip of land between two lochs.

Then go and fill it all in again.

But this is exactly what's happening at the Ness of Brodgar, one of the most important Neolithic sites in the British Isles. After two decades of patient, diligent, excavation and study, the people who have been uncovering the site's mysteries are having to cover it all up in the name of conservation. The only way to save what they call "the Ness" is to hide it from view.

Getty Images The Ring of Brodgar, a neolithic stone circle, on a sunny day
Getty Images
The Ness is south-east of the Neolithic stone circle, the Ring of Brodgar

The Ness lies just south-east of the Ring of Brodgar, the neolithic stone circle which can be seen as Orkney's version of Stonehenge. Since 2004, excavations at the three hectare site have so far uncovered 40 structures, a cluster of buildings which suggests this was an important settlement in prehistoric Orkney. They were built in waves between roughly 3500 and 2400BC.

The website of the Ness of Brodgar Trust says it's "without parallel in Atlantic Europe".

It's described as one of the most important archaeological excavations in the world, a find that changed what we understand about the culture and beliefs of Neolithic Orkney, one "shining a new light on the prehistory of northern Europe".

About 70 people work there throughout the summer digs. They're a mix of local and international volunteers, archaeology students and established professional researchers.

Archaeologist Nick Card, chair of the Trust and director of the Ness of Brodgar excavation, has been there since the beginning. He says the end of the dig is a very difficult time.

"It has been a very emotional year for many reasons, not least because the archaelogy has become part of my life and so many others' lives," he says. "It will take us years to follow up and write up what we have found but it's emotional because the Ness team we built up every summer for the past 10 to15 years has become an extended family."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy5ppxgg5wo
Click to expand...
Personally, I think that reburying the Ness of Brodgar is the appropriate action to take.

As Nick Card pointed out, the information gathered from the dig will take years to write up, and meanwhile, reburying is an act of conservation for when we are ready to have another go...When we are better at it.

Opinions will vary though.
 
I went to the Ness of Brodgar about a month ago, to see it before it was covered.

Interesting aspects; an elaborate drainage system, finely finished stones in some buildings, but a certain amount of distortion from inadequate foundations- the couple of dozen stone huts that I saw looked nice, but they would have started sinking into the ground almost immediately. I understand that Skara Brae had much better foundations.

The strangest thing was the evidence of huge feasts - whenever a hut was abandoned, it was filled with cattle bones from the huge aurochs-like cattle they had back then. Of course, all the large animals - cattle, sheep, even red deer - had to be ferried there in boats across the Pentland Firth. They even brought the Orkney Vole, which appears to have come from Belgium.
 
Surely covering over a site that has been investigated as thoroughly as time, finances and current technology will allow is the ONLY sensible thing to do? It will preserve the site (and the weather on Orkney will do its best to prevent this at all turns) and keep everything in situ for any future excacations. What would the alternative be - to make it a site like Skara Brae, open for tourism? This might work but Skara Brae was 'investigated' much earlier in an era where a lot of destruction was done by unqualified people (the visitors to Skaill House were allowed to go and dig up and keep anything they fancied when the site was first uncovered), so I would argue that most of the damage was already done there. Besides, that site has been well investigated. Covering the Ness is cost-effective and really the only thing they can do.
 
A bridge under untroubled waters.

A new study led by the University of South Florida has shed light on the human colonization of the western Mediterranean, revealing that humans settled there much earlier than previously believed.

This research, detailed in a recent issue of the journal, Communications Earth & Environment, challenges long-held assumptions and narrows the gap between the settlement timelines of islands throughout the Mediterranean region.

Reconstructing early human colonization on Mediterranean islands is challenging due to limited archaeological evidence. By studying a 25-foot submerged bridge, an interdisciplinary research team—led by USF geology Professor Bogdan Onac—was able to provide compelling evidence of earlier human activity inside Genovesa Cave, located in the Spanish island of Mallorca.

"The presence of this submerged bridge and other artifacts indicates a sophisticated level of activity, implying that early settlers recognized the cave's water resources and strategically built infrastructure to navigate it," Onac said.

The cave, located near Mallorca's coast, has passages now flooded due to rising sea levels, with distinct calcite encrustations forming during periods of high sea level. These formations, along with a light-colored band on the submerged bridge, serve as proxies for precisely tracking historical sea-level changes and dating the bridge's construction.

Mallorca, despite being the sixth largest island in the Mediterranean, was among the last to be colonized. Previous research suggested human presence as far back as 9,000 years, but inconsistencies and poor preservation of the radiocarbon dated material, such as nearby bones and pottery, led to doubts about these findings. ...

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-submerged-ancient-bridge-spanish-cave.html
 
Submerged bridge constructed at least 5600 years ago indicates early human arrival in Mallorca, Spain. Abstract:
Reconstructing early human colonization of the Balearic Islands in the western Mediterranean is challenging due to limited archaeological evidence. Current understanding places human arrival ~4400 years ago. Here, U-series data from phreatic overgrowth on speleothems are combined with the discovery of a submerged bridge in Genovesa Cave that exhibits a distinctive coloration band near its top.

The band is at the same depth as the phreatic overgrowth on speleothems (−1.1 meters), both of which indicate a sea-level stillstand between ~6000 and ~5400 years ago. Integrating the bridge depth with a high-resolution Holocene sea-level curve for Mallorca and the dated phreatic overgrowth on speleothems level constrains the construction of the bridge between ~6000 and ~5600 years ago.

Subsequent sea-level rise flooded the archeological structure, ruling out later construction dates. This provides evidence for early human presence on the island dating at least 5600 and possibly beyond ~6000 years ago.

1725130979944.png


Source: Onac, B.P., Polyak, V.J., Mitrovica, J.X. et al. Submerged bridge constructed at least 5600 years ago indicates early human arrival in Mallorca, Spain. Commun Earth Environ 5, 457 (2024).​
 

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Neolithic Vikings?

Recent research by Dr. Mikael Fauvelle and his colleagues, published in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology, proposes that the neolithic Pitted Ware Culture (PWC) may have used skin boats to conduct trade, travel, fishing, and hunting activities.

The PWC was a neolithic culture that had migrated from the East during the Early and Middle Neolithic. They settled in what is modern-day Scandinavia around 3500–2300 BCE. This hunter-gatherer culture was named after the pottery they produced, which was characteristically decorated with deep pits along its circumference.

The Pitted Ware Culture (PWC) was unusual among European marine-specialized hunter-gatherer groups. While other such groups gradually incorporated more agricultural products as farming spread, the PWC continued to focus on seal hunting and fishing, even though farming had been practiced in Europe for over five centuries.

The PWC not only continued to hunt seals and fish but also engaged in long-distance voyages across the Baltic Sea and the Kattegat and Skagerrak strait. Evidence for these movements of people and goods can be seen in the lithic tools, animals, and some clay sourced from Sweden, Denmark, and Finland.

To reach these different places, the PWC would have needed seaworthy boats. However, evidence of such boats is rare.

Across the world, many Neolithic cultures used dugout canoes or logboats, usually made from hollowed-out tree logs. Some such dugouts have been recovered from PWC sites. However, the size of the canoes is directly proportional to their function. Not only were these dugouts usually found in inland lakes and bogs, but their small size, only a few meters in length, made them unsuitable for the open sea, where they would likely capsize.

Dr. Fauvelle and his colleagues propose that the PWC may have been better suited to certain tasks, while the dugout canoes were better suited to other activities at inland lakes and river estuaries.

"Compared to logboats, we argue in the paper that skin boats would have been better for long distance and open ocean transport," clarifies Dr. Fauvelle. ...

https://phys.org/news/2024-09-archaeologists-neolithic-scandinavians-skin-boats.html
 
Stone paved cellars were avant-garde in the Neolithic.

Railroad construction through a farm on the Danish island of Falster has revealed a 5,000-year-old Neolithic site hiding an advanced technology—a stone paved root cellar.

Archaeology researchers from the Museum Lolland-Falster, along with Aarhus University, Denmark, have analyzed the site in a paper, "Stone-Paved Cellars in the Stone Age? Archaeological Evidence for a Neolithic Subterranean Construction from Nygårdsvej 3, Falster, Denmark," published online in the journal Radiocarbon.

The emergence of the Funnel Beaker Culture around 6,000 years ago brought the Scandinavian region's first switch to agriculture and domesticated animals (sheep, goats, cattle), leading to a more sedentary lifestyle. With the new way of life came the region's first construction of houses, megalithic tombs (dolmens), and landscape-altering structures, a huge shift away from the highly mobile hunter–gatherer strategy of the Late Mesolithic.

https://phys.org/news/2024-10-advanced-technology-neolithic-denmark.html
 
Panoría puzzle.

Archaeologists in southern Spain have discovered a cemetery dating to 5,000 years ago that has about twice as many females as males, a new study finds.

The burial ground, known as Panoría cemetery, has a series of rock chamber tombs, including the remains of at least 19 dolmens, which are stone pillar "roofs" on upright megaliths that function as "walls." The site was excavated between 2015 and 2019 and contains collective burials that in total have about 55,000 human skeletal remains, according to a statement from the University of Granada, whose researchers did the research jointly with scientists from the University of Tübingenin in Germany.

The team found that the remains belong to at least 91 individuals. Scientists were able to determine the sex of 44 of them, finding that 27 were females and 17 were males, the scientists wrote in a paper published Sept. 23 in the journal Scientific Reports. ...

https://www.livescience.com/archaeo...as-many-females-as-males-and-nobody-knows-why
 
Archaeologist Discovers Two Neolithic Stone Circles in England, Supporting a 'Sacred Arc' Theory

The “sacred arc” theory might sound like a plot point straight out of a fantasy novel, but it really describes an archaeologist’s suspicion that Stone Age people in southwestern England built a ring—not an arc, as the name suggests—of Stonehenge-like circles of rocks in the Devon uplands. With the help of volunteers excavating at Dartmoor National Park, the researcher has just announced new findings that further support this idea.

“I can finally reveal some major discoveries that I have made during the course of my PhD fieldwork in the area of Taw Marsh, near Belstone, including two stone circles, a possible long cairn and a dolmen,” Alan Endacott, an independent archaeologist studying for a doctorate in archaeology at the University of Exeter, says.

standing_on_rocks.jpg


The team stands around one of the stone circles. Alan Endacott

Endacott has been searching for stone circles on Dartmoor since the 1970s. His “sacred arc” theory led him to a discovery termed the Sittaford stone circle in 2007. Building on this idea, he looked for other related Stone Age locations.

“I first identified the ‘new’ sites in 2011, while following my theory that a ring of stone circles encircled the central high ground, continuing the arc of circles to the north and east,” Endacott explains.

man_with_rock.jpg


Alan Endacott next to some of the recently discovered stones / Alan Endacott

He ended up uncovering two stone circles estimated to be about 5,000 years old, making them contemporaries of the central part of Stonehenge. Like Stonehenge, archaeologists believe the structures were further modified during the Bronze Age.

One of the newly found structures, which Endacott called Metheral after a nearby hill, is oval-shaped and spans 130 feet by 108 feet, he explains in another post on Facebook. It’s composed of 20 stones, though most have toppled over, with each up to 40 inches in height. They also found hints to the past presence of more stones.

Significantly, the Metheral circle seems to align with seven other stone monuments in the shape of a half-circle, supporting the sacred arc theory. It sits on the opposite end of the arc from the Sittaford site.

The team found the second stone circle, which Endacott called Irishman’s Wall after a nearby historical feature of the same name, about a mile north of the Metheral circle, and they uncovered six intact stones, per Live Science. The Irishman’s Wall position doesn’t align with the arc, though Endacott speculates that “maybe it was an entrance point [to the arc] from the north,” he [says].

“This ‘arc’ of circles, measuring more than eight kilometers [five miles] across, is rather extraordinary and suggests the upland area of northern Dartmoor it encloses was particularly special to prehistoric people,” [said] Susan Greaney, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...support-englands-sacred-arc-theory-180985526/

maximus otter
 
Ewe will be surprised by these findings.

Archaeological study uncovers world's oldest evidence of livestock horn manipulation​

Archaeological study uncovers world's oldest evidence of livestock horn manipulation
Left: Sheep skull T54–1 shown from (a) front and (b) left front side. Key Features: (1) raised area between horns, (2) depression with perforation. Right: Sheep skull T54–2 shown from (a) front and (b) left front side, with close-up of the frontal bone area between horn core bases. Key features: (1) smooth area lacking suture, (2) frontal bone depression, (3) narrowing of horn cores. Credit: Journal of Archaeological Science (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2024.106104

Archaeologists Dr. Wim van Neer, Dr. Bea De Cupere, and Dr. Renée Friedman have published a study on the earliest evidence of horn modification in livestock in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The researchers found the oldest physical evidence of livestock horn modification and the first evidence of such for sheep. Discovered at the elite burial complex in Hierakonpolis, Upper Egypt (ca. 3700 BC), six sheep showed evidence of deformation, adding to the history of horn modification in Africa, which has been primarily restricted to cattle.

"This is the earliest physical evidence for horn modification in livestock. The practice also existed in cattle but is, for that early period, only attested by depictions in rock art," says Dr. van Neer.

Sheep were first introduced to Egypt from the Levant around the 6th millennium BC, becoming one of Egypt's most important livestock resources by the 5th millennium BC. They were depicted on jars, carved reliefs and ritual vessels. It is from these depictions that it is known the earliest sheep in Egypt were of the corkscrew-horn variant.

These corkscrew-horned sheep were later adopted into hieroglyphics and became part of religious iconography in the form of ram deities with corkscrew horns. However, by the Middle Kingdom, the ammon sheep began appearing in Egypt. These sheep were characterized by crescent-shaped backward-pointing horns. Eventually, these ammon sheep completely replaced the corkscrew-horned variant.

At the site of Hierakonpolis, around 100km from modern Luxor, an elite burial complex was being excavated. Here, the city's elite were buried in elaborate tombs together with wild and sometimes exotic animals, including cattle, goats, crocodiles, ostriches, leopards, baboons, wild cats, elephants, hartebeests, hippos, and aurochs. ...

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-archaeological-uncovers-world-oldest-evidence.html
 
No animals or vegetables were harmed in these sacrifices however minerals were.

Volcanic eruptions linked to Neolithic 'sun stone' sacrifices in Denmark​

Volcanic eruptions caused neolithic people in Denmark to sacrifice unique 'sun stones'
Credit: Antiquity. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.217

About 4,900 years ago, a Neolithic people on the Danish island Bornholm sacrificed hundreds of stones engraved with sun and field motifs. Archaeologists and climate scientists from the University of Copenhagen can now show that these ritual sacrifices coincided with a large volcanic eruption that made the sun disappear throughout Northern Europe.

Throughout history, volcanic eruptions have had serious consequences for human societies, including cold weather, lack of sun, and low crop yields. In 43 BC, when a volcano in Alaska spewed large quantities of sulfur into the stratosphere, harvests failed the following years in the countries around the Mediterranean, causing famine and disease. This is well-documented in written sources from ancient Greece and Rome.

We do not have written sources from the Neolithic, but climate scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen analyzed ice core drillings and can now document that a similar volcanic eruption took place about 2,900 BC. An eruption that must have had equally devastating consequences for the Neolithic peoples who lived in Northern Europe at the time and who were deeply dependent on agriculture.

This new insight into a climate episode in the Neolithic period has led archaeologists from the University of Copenhagen, the National Museum of Denmark and the Museum of Bornholm to view their findings of so-called "sun stones" from the Neolithic Vasagård site on Bornholm in a new light. Their findings on the phenomenon are published in the journal Antiquity. ...

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-volcanic-eruptions-linked-neolithic-sun.html
 
Whereas to me they look like an attempt to portray crops. That is also likely what they were wishing for.
 
What is the origin of that image? Even if the Devil is harvesting, why would he do it in a circle? This might be someone's attempt to explain crop circles in a time before people considered aliens.
 
Xanatic* said:
What is the origin of that image? Even if the Devil is harvesting, why would he do it in a circle? This might be someone's attempt to explain crop circles in a time before people considered aliens.
Click to expand...
Except that isn't a circle.
I believe the correct term for an elongated shape with parallel sides and semi-circular ends is a "stadium".
Crop stadia doesn't quite have the same "ring" to it though!
 
Xanatic* said:
What is the origin of that image? Even if the Devil is harvesting, why would he do it in a circle? This might be someone's attempt to explain crop circles in a time before people considered aliens.
Click to expand...
This was from a pamphlet published in 1678. It does not really represent a crop circle - the accompanying text makes clear that the field was observed as if it was on fire, and the next day it was found neatly mowed. The image represents the field in flames and the Devil mowing it. The constraints of the media used meant the woodcut came out showing the field looking like a crop circle, and that is how it has been interpreted by some Forteans, although I think that ignores the content of the text.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Except that isn't a circle.
I believe the correct term for an elongated shape with parallel sides and semi-circular ends is a "stadium".
Crop stadia doesn't quite have the same "ring" to it though!
Click to expand...

I'm going to offer cursus.

And don't think I didn't notice your last line, coming in here with your fancy word play and everything :bhave:
 
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