Dienekes speaks at length on the paper ‘Y-STR variation among Slavs: evidence for the Slavic homeland in the middle Dnieper basin’ by Krzysztof Rębała, Alexei I. Mikulich, Iosif S. Tsybovsky, Daniela Siváková, Zuzana Džupinková, Aneta Szczerkowska-Dobosz and Zofia Szczerkowska
Day: March 20, 2007
Nicholas Wade on the origins of morality…
…among primates, in his NYT column.
The good life
More news from Greece and around.
Archaeologists have discovered mashed grapes that could have been used to make wine 6,500 years old at a neolithic site in Dikili.
Meanwhile, archaeologists in Cyprus have stumbled upon the oldest perfume making factory in the world.
Not a family blog….
After all.
One of the objects on display at a sex-related exhibition at the Tyrolean County Museum in Austria is this re-usable condom made of pig’s intestines (like sausages??) from the 1640s, discovered in Lund in Sweden. The instructions, in Latin, tell the user to dip it in warm milk before use to avoid infection.
(Hat-tip to Archaeoblog)
Talking about sex-related stuff, here’s an interesting article on the history of pornography from the archives of Der Spiegel.
160,000-year-old jawbone redefines origins of the species
Modern humans were living in northern Africa far earlier than previously thought, according to scientists. A new analysis of a 160,000-year-old fossilised jawbone from Morocco shows that the homo sapiens in the area had started having long childhoods, one of the hallmarks of humans living today….
The latest find shows that the key time in the development of a complex human society came much earlier than previously thought. The longer people had to learn and develop their brains as children, the more sophisticated their society could become. The new study pushes the date that modern humans emerged back by more than 100,000 years.
Philistines no more
In recent years, excavations in Israel established that the Philistines had fine pottery, handsome architecture and cosmopolitan tastes. If anything, they were more refined than the shepherds and farmers in the nearby hills, the Israelites, who slandered them in biblical chapter and verse and rendered their name a synonym for boorish, uncultured people.
Archaeologists have now found that not only were Philistines cultured, they were also literate when they arrived, presumably from the region of the Aegean Sea, and settled the coast of ancient Palestine around 1200 B. C.
At the ruins of a Philistine seaport at Ashkelon in Israel, excavators examined 19 ceramic pieces and determined that their painted inscriptions represent a form of writing. Some of the pots and storage jars were inscribed elsewhere, probably in Cyprus and Crete, and taken to Ashkelon by early settlers. Of special importance, one of the jars was made from local clay, meaning Philistine scribes were presumably at work in their new home.
The discovery is reported in the current issue of The Israel Exploration Journal by two Harvard professors, Frank Moore Cross Jr. and Lawrence E. Stager.
Painted inscriptions on ceramics
And read Dienekes on The Script of the Philistines
Roman village found at Silbury Hill
The Romans did more than stop and stare in wonder at the most enigmatic prehistoric monument in Europe – they built a substantial village at the foot of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire…..
German finds
Lots of catching up to do as I was out of action for more than a week.
Two significant finds have been announced in Germany in the last two months. The first, near Inden in North Rhine-Westphalia, is of a stone age hunting camp said to be 120,000 years old.
“We’ll never find such a camp ever again,” archaeologist Jürgen Thissen from the Rhineland Commission for Historical Sites said in Bonn Monday. “There isn’t another one in the whole of Germany.”
He added that the find was the first of its kind in the region, and was of European importance.
Thissen and his assistants came across postholes of three shelters in the open-cast mine last August. Two fireplaces with traces of fires were also found, as were over 600 stone tools and the stone chips left over from their production. Among the stone tools found were a stone knife, serrated blades, and so-called “blanks” (pieces of stone ready to be shaped into tools).
Read the full story here at De Spiegel.
German archaeologists have also announced the discovery of a stone age dwelling mound, the first of its kind in Western Europe. Such mounds have been found before in the Middle East and the Balkans.
the discovery of a dwelling mound near Oberröblingen in Saxony-Anhalt has caused something of a stir in the German archaeological establishment. Thought to be 7,000 years old, the oval-shaped mound, which is roughly 100 meters long, 60 meters wide and 1.8 meters high, consists of the clay remains of centuries of previous structures.
“This is a unique find in Germany,” Robert Ganslmeier of the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle told the news agency DPA. “People have been living and building here since the early Stone Age.”
Read the story here at De Spiegel
Picture courtesy: De Spiegel
Chocolate Amer 