Stone Age People: New Findings & Theories

[ramonmercado]

The stone Age Dutch lived alongside beavers,

For thousands of years, beavers had a big influence on the Dutch ecosystem and the people that lived there. This is the conclusion of research by archaeologist Nathalie Brusgaard. The rodents were used for food, clothing and tools, and created a landscape hospitable to many other species.

Beavers may seem like a recent arrival to the Netherlands, with their growing presence in recent years. The species became extinct there in the 19th century and was reintroduced in 1988. But before that beavers were widespread for thousands of years. "It really is a native species," says Brusgaard. "In our research we wanted to look at how people dealt with the beaver's presence in the past. There was no good picture of that until now."

Together with fellow archaeologist Shumon Hussain (Aarhus University), Brusgaard analyzed previous excavations in the Netherlands, southern Scandinavia, the Baltic region and Russia. These showed that beavers were a much larger part of the human diet and landscape of northern Europe than had previously been thought.

Hunter-gatherers hunted beavers in the Middle and Late Stone Age for their meat, fur and castoreum, and used their bones and teeth to make tools. Beavers were one of the most common mammals at some archaeological sites in the Netherlands according to research recently published in The Holocene.

According to Brusgaard, the beavers created a diverse ecosystem. They change the water level in their habitat so the entrance to their lodge is flooded but they can sleep in the dry. To achieve this, they need the water at a certain level, which they control by building dams.

Other organisms, such as fish, waterfowl and certain plants, benefit from the resulting landscape. "Beavers create a lot of dynamism in a forest, which is good for biodiversity. At archaeological sites where there were many beaver traces, there were also many traces of otters, wild boar, pike, perch and carp. These species thrive in the ecosystem that beavers create."

The research suggests that people liked to live in these "beaver landscapes" because of the presence of food and resources. "We suspect that hunter-gatherers benefited from the rich biodiversity that beavers created."

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-beavers-big-people-stone-age.html

 

[ramonmercado]

Now it looks like the Yamnaya were riding horses 5,000 years ago.

About 5300 years ago, people from the steppes of modern-day Russia and Ukraine expanded rapidly across Eurasia. Within a few centuries these “Yamnaya” left a lasting genetic mark on populations from central Europe to the Caspian Sea. Today, archaeologists call them “eastern cowboys” for their livestock herding and highly mobile lifestyle.

But one part of the classic cowboy picture was missing: horseback riding. Although cattle bones and sturdy wagons have been found in Yamnaya sites, horse bones are scarce, and most archaeologists assumed people did not start to ride horses until at least 1000 years later.

In a new study, presented today at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science) in Washington, D.C., and published in Science Advances, researchers say they’ve found the earliest evidence of horseback riding not in the bones of ancient horses, but in their Yamnaya riders. “Everyone has focused on horse remains to get an idea of early horse riding,” says co-author and University of Helsinki archaeologist Volker Heyd. “Our approach was to look at humans.”

Genetic and other evidence suggests horses were domesticated as early as 3500 B.C.E. Yet the earliest mentions of riding in historical sources or pictorial evidence date from more than 2000 years later, long after the Yamnaya spread across the steppes. The eastern cowboys, many archaeologists thought, were content to walk alongside their herds of cattle. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/earliest-evidence-horseback-riding-found-eastern-cowboys

The Yamnaya have a lot to answer for,

Ancient herders, who rode horses and drove ox-drawn carts west out of their grassy homelands in southwest Asia, erased a DNA divide between far-flung farmers and hunter-gatherers-fishers around 5,000 years ago.

The molecular legacy of these ancient herders, known as the Yamnaya people, reshaped Eurasians’ genetic profile, impacting everything from their descendants’ height to their susceptibility to some diseases (SN: 3/3/23). For instance, it left people today with predominantly northern European ancestry especially prone to developing multiple sclerosis. An international team of researchers describes these results, based on analyses of DNA from more than 1,600 ancient individuals, as well as new hints about the origins of the Yamnaya in four papers published January 10 in Nature.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/yamnaya-herders-dna-europeans-genetic-multiple-sclerosis

 

[ramonmercado]

Not just surviving but living in the Ice Age, flaunting your bling.

Your jewelry may be sending all kinds of messages: You’re married or a Super Bowl champion. You worship Jesus or belong to the pearls and suits set—or perhaps the piercings and purple hair crowd.

For ice age hunters in Europe some 30,000 years ago, styles of ornaments including amber pendants, ivory bangles, and fox tooth beads may have also signaled membership in a particular culture, researchers report today in Nature Human Behaviour. The study, which compared thousands of handcrafted beads and adornments from dozens of widespread sites, suggests at least nine distinct cultures existed across Europe at this time.

“It’s a landmark paper,” says archaeologist Peter Jordan, a professor at Lund University and Hokkaido University who was not involved with the study. For centuries, archaeologists have tried to distinguish ancient peoples based on similarities in their artifacts. In recent years, however, sorting populations by ancient genetic group has at times overshadowed the archaeology. Here, “The archaeology strikes back,” Jordan says. “[It’s] showing that we can generate new narratives that also use a very rigorous, quantitative approach to the study of material traditions.”

The earliest known ornamental beads—seashells punched for stringing—come from early Homo sapiens sites dated to between 150,000 to 70,000 years ago in Africa and the eastern Mediterranean coast. Unlike knives or awls, ornaments offer no obvious survival functions. Instead, anthropologists think they likely communicated one’s traits and achievements, such as reaching adulthood, hunts completed, or family lines. “It’s a kind of common language or common discourse with other individuals in that group,” Jordan says. Many scholars think the invention of beads indicates that our ancestors had also evolved the capacity for symbolism and language.

Between 34,000 and 24,000 years ago, foragers in Europe fashioned beads from a diverse array of materials including ivory, bone, human and animal teeth, and flashy stones. These communities also painted caves and crafted so-called Venus figurines resembling voluptuous women, while coping with the glaciers and frigid temperatures of the last ice age. Despite the “horrendous” conditions, their artistic expressions suggest these people “weren’t just surviving—they were thriving,” says University of Bordeaux archaeologist and doctoral student Jack Baker.

https://www.science.org/content/article/landmark-paper-shows-why-ice-age-europeans-wore-jewelry

 

[hunck]

Stone age wall found at bottom of Baltic Sea ‘may be Europe’s oldest megastructure’​

Structure stretches for almost a kilometre off coast of Germany and may have once stood by a lake

Closer inspection of the structure, named the Blinkerwall, revealed about 1,400 smaller stones that appear to have been positioned to connect nearly 300 larger boulders, many of which were too heavy for groups of humans to have moved.

The submerged wall, described as a “thrilling discovery”, is covered by 21 metres of water, but researchers believe it was constructed by hunter-gatherers on land next to a lake or marsh more than 10,000 years ago.

While the purpose of the wall is hard to prove, scientists suspect it served as a driving lane for hunters in pursuit of herds of reindeer.

If the wall was an ancient hunting lane, it was probably built more than 10,000 years ago and submerged with rising sea levels about 8,500 years ago.

“This puts the Blinkerwall into range of the oldest known examples of hunting architecture in the world and potentially makes it the oldest man-made megastructure in Europe the researchers said.

Geersen is now keen to revisit the site to reconstruct the ancient landscape and search for animal bones and human artefacts, such as projectiles used in hunting, which may be buried in sediments around the wall.

 

[maximus otter]

Archaeologists Just Uncovered The Oldest Evidence of Humans in Europe

Stone tools found buried deep in the sediment of the Korolevo quarry in Ukraine are rewriting the history of human migration.

The seemingly unassuming chunks of rock are tools once used by Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of ours, and new dating reveals they represent the earliest evidence of hominid habitation on the European continent.

"Previously it was thought that our earliest ancestors could not survive in colder, more northerly latitudes without the use of fire or complex stone tool technology," says archaeologist Andy Herries of La Trobe University in Australia. "Yet here we have evidence of Homo erectus living further north than ever previously documented at this early time period."

The [dating] technique they used is called cosmogenic nuclide burial dating, which makes use of the fact material exposed on the surface is bombarded with cosmic rays. By comparing the decays of specific atomic nuclei, it's possible to measure the amount of time that's passed since the object last saw the sky.

The team's new map of the migration history of Homo erectus. (Garba et al., Nature, 2024)

The dating of the artifacts has allowed the researchers to fill in some of the gaps in the history of human migration. Their research shows that Homo erectus was in Europe by 1.4 million years ago, having migrated through Asia 1.8 million years ago.

https://www.sciencealert.com/archaeologists-just-uncovered-the-oldest-evidence-of-humans-in-europe

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[maximus otter]

Rare wooden artifacts showcase the smarts of early Neanderthals​

About 300,000 years ago, bands of early hominins visited the shores of an ancient lake to hunt, sometimes dropping tools and weapons in the shallow water and mud.

Fast forward to 1995, when workers at an open-face coal mine in northern Germany discovered 2-meter-long spruce spears and other wooden artifacts embedded in the former lakeshore. By showing that these ancient hominins—likely early Neanderthals—could hunt big game, not just scavenge meat from the kills of other predators, the find helped shift views of our long-underestimated cousins.

Schöningen spears as presented at an exhibition of the Forschungsmuseum Schöningen. Only two confirmed older wooden tools have been found.
Image Credit: Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege (NLD)

Today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers present another set of surprises from the site, called Schöningen 13: a wealth of other painstakingly carved wood remains, including throwing sticks and other hunting implements and dozens of nonhunting tools.

Excavations at Schöningen 13 ended in 2008, although research continues nearby. While the spears drew most of the attention, the rest of the wood collected spent decades awaiting analysis, soaking in refrigerated tubs of distilled water to replicate the cold, water-logged soil that preserved it for 300,000 years.

The team eventually identified 187 pieces of wood that showed signs of carving or splitting. Of those, more than 50 were identifiably tools. Twenty were related to hunting, including more spears but also finely balanced throwing sticks for downing small game or birds.

Another 35 pieces were domestic tools: digging sticks, pointed tools for piercing or working hides, and shafts that likely served as handles for axes or stone blades. Together, the wooden artifacts reveal a domestic side of Neanderthal life that stone tools rarely capture.

https://www.science.org/content/article/rare-wooden-artifacts-showcase-smarts-early-neanderthals

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