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Uncovering the secrets of an ancient Mayan city

New discovery further reveals the connections between the Mesoamerican cities of Teotihuacan and Tikal.

A recent lidar analysis revealed that an area once assumed to be natural hills (centre) near Tikal's Lost World complex (right) is actually an 1,800-year-old ruined citadel. Credit: Thomas Garrison/PACUNAM

 

Archaeologists and researchers decoding the secrets of one of the most magnificent ruins of the Mayan empire – the ancient city of Tikal – have made a ground-breaking discovery that potentially rewrites our understanding of interactions in the ancient Americas.

Tikal, in the north of modern-day Guatemala, has been extensively studied since at least the 1950s. The sprawling city – which itself covers 400 hectares – is the crowning jewel of 570 square-kilometre Tikal National Park, a lush region of tropical forests and wetlands that sequesters potentially thousands of archaeological ruins within its borders.

A major political and cultural centre for the ancient Maya, Tikal is one of the best understood and most deeply studied archaeological sites in the world. So it came as a surprise when researchers engaged in the Pacunam Lidar Initiaive, a research consortium using light detection and ranging software (lidar) to image the surface of the Earth, made a startling new discovery about the city.

Just a short walk from the centre of Tikal, in an area previously thought to be natural hills, the team discovered a neighbourhood of ruined buildings built in the style of Teotihuacan, the largest and most powerful city in the ancient Americas, more than 1000km away in modern-day Mexico.

Stephen Houston, co-author of the new study published today in the journal Antiquity, says the lidar analysis, coupled with a subsequent excavation by a team of Guatemalan archaeologists led by Edwin Román Ramírez, raises big questions about Teotihuacan’s influence on the Maya civilisation.

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More reading: Mayan ‘total war’ earlier than thought

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“What we had taken to be natural hills actually were shown to be modified and conformed to the shape of the citadel — the area that was possibly the imperial palace — at Teotihuacan,” Houston says. “Regardless of who built this smaller-scale replica and why, it shows without a doubt that there was a different level of interaction between Tikal and Teotihuacan than previously believed.”

Houston says that Tikal and Teotihuacan were radically different cities. Tikal, a Maya city, was densely populated but small: “you could have walked from one end of the kingdom to the other in a day, maybe two.”

Teotihuacan, on the other hand, was a vast empire. Unlike Tikal, little is known about the civilisation that founded and governed Teotihuacan, but their influence reverberates across the continent.

Archaeologists have known for a long time that the two population hubs traded goods before the people of Teotihuacan conquered Tikal in around 378 AD. There’s also some evidence that people from the Mayan empire may have lived in Teotihuacan and brought the great city’s cultural influence home with them, including funerary rites, architectural styles and green obsidian. But Houston says these latest lidar findings suggest a more intimate connection between the two cities.

“The architectural complex we found very much appears to have been built for people from Teotihuacan or those under their control,” Houston says. “Perhaps it was something like an embassy complex, but when we combine previous research with our latest findings, it suggests something more heavy-handed, like occupation or surveillance. At the very least, it shows an attempt to implant part of a foreign city plan on Tikal.”

The archaeological excavations of the site found that some buildings were built of mud plaster rather than the traditional Maya limestone, and were designed to be replicas of the buildings that make up Teotihuacan’s citadel – accurate down to the intricate cornices and the 15.5-degree east-of-north orientation.

“It almost suggests that local builders were told to use an entirely non-local building technology while constructing this sprawling new building complex,” Houston says. “We’ve rarely seen evidence of anything but two-way interaction between the two civilizations, but here, we seem to be looking at foreigners who are moving aggressively into the area.”

At a nearby set of residential buildings, archaeologists also found projectile points made of flint (a material used by the Maya) and green obsidian (used at Teotihuacan), a find they interpreted as evidence of a conflict. And nearby to the replica citadel, the archaeologists found a burial surrounded by vessels, ceramics, bones and projectiles, surrounded by the remains of a fire. Houston says this is unlike other burials and sacrifices at Tikal, but characteristic of warrior burials at Teotihuacan.

“Excavations in the middle of the citadel at Teotihuacan have found the burials of many individuals dressed as warriors, and they appear to have been sacrificed and placed in mass graves,” Houston says. “We have possibly found a vestige of one of those burials at Tikal itself.”

Houston says the intricacies of sites like Tikal and Teotihuacan may yet help us understand more about the machinations and impacts of waves of colonial expansion and interaction.

“At this time, people are quite interested in the process of colonisation and its aftermath, and in how our views of the world are informed or distorted by the expansion of economic and political systems around the globe,” he says.

“Before European colonisation of the Americas, there were empires and kingdoms of disproportionate influence and strength interacting with smaller civilisations in a way that left a large impact. Exploring Teotihuacan’s influence on Mesoamerica could be a way to explore the beginnings of colonialism and its oppressions and local collusions.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/civilisations/uncovering-the-secrets-of-an-ancient-mayan-city/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Decoding the secrets of a forgotten human history during the Pleistocene

Dogged archaeologists continue to make discoveries that extend knowledge of early human history in this part of the world.

An international team of researchers has discovered the first fossilised bone from a Pleistocene-era human in Wallacea, the cluster of Indonesian islands, including Lombok, Sulaewsi, Timor and Sumba, that were the likely seafaring gateway for the first humans to populate Australia.

The new find, published today in the journal PLOS one, offers a tantalising glimpse of a forgotten people, but one of the archaeologists behind the research says that the information we currently don’t know about these people vastly outweighs the fascinating crumbs they’ve left behind.

FULL REPORT

 

[Azeem]

The word Pakistan was first coined by a student group in their pamphlet for political autonomy, an acronym made from the names of contiguous geographical units which constitute modern day Pakistan.

[CaaC (John)+]

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Human evolution: a last archaic hominin stronghold in India

New research reveals some of the last practitioners of an archaic human culture.

Human history can be characterised perhaps by one skill above all else: the ability to make tools that vastly expand our technological abilities. In fact, for scientists tracing the fascinating, branching tree of human evolution, non-perishable stone tools provide a priceless window into the past.

The Acheulean is the name given to the longest-lasting tool-making tradition in history; Acheulean hand-axes and cleavers emerged around 1.5 million years ago in Africa, and persisted in Eurasia until just a few hundred thousand years ago, made by our ancestral and cousin species, like Homo erectus and, later, Neanderthals.

Scientists have been able to trace the evolution and migration of ancient hominins by mapping the occurrence of these crafted hand-axes around the world; now, new evidence suggests one of the Acheulean culture’s final strongholds was at the edges of the monsoonal region of modern-day India.

The new study, led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany, re-examined ancient stone tools unearthed at a site called Singi Talav, in Rajasthan, and found that they were used by some of the last creators of Acheulean stone tools in the world, dating to around 177,000 years ago – just before the earliest expansions of Homo sapiens across Asia.

Singi Talav is a set on a lakeside close to the modern town of Didwana, on the edge of the Thar Desert. It was first excavated in the early 1980s, and was long assumed one of the oldest Acheulean sites in India. But, armed with modern dating techniques, the researchers used luminescence to determine the age of the sediments in which the tools were found, disproving earlier theories.

“The lakeside setting has ideal preservation conditions for an archaeological site, enabling us to return 30 years after the first excavation and readily re-identify the main occupation horizons again,” says Jimbob Blinkhorn of the Max Planck Institute, lead author of the study.

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More reading: Skulls and skills varied in archaic Homo erectus

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“We’ve applied a range of modern methods to re-examine this critical site, including new approaches to directly date the occupation horizons and to reveal the vegetation in the landscape that Acheulean populations inhabited.”

“Ours is the first study to directly date the occupation horizons at Singi Talav, enabling us to understand both when ancient humans lived here and created the stone tool assemblages, and how these occupations compare with other sites across the region,” adds co-author Julie Durcan, of the University of Oxford.

   

On the margins of the monsoon

The Thar Desert, where these last Acheulean toolmakers held out, is at the western edge of India’s summer monsoon system; it’s a fluctuating landscape of wild extremes, and its habitability will have varied across time.

In order to piece together the landscape these early hominins would have known, the researchers examined plant microfossils, also known as phytoliths, and features of the soil’s geochemistry.

“The results from the two methods we applied complement each other to reveal a landscape rich in the types of grasses that flourish during periods with enhanced summer monsoons,” says Hema Achyuthan, of Anna University, Chennai. These conditions would have helped the population flourish.

“This is the first time the ecology of an Acheulean site in India has been studied using these methods, revealing the broader character of the landscape that these populations inhabited,” Achyuthan adds.

When hominins meet

The researchers say that these remnant Acheulean populations are some of the last strongholds of their material culture in the world.

“This supports evidence from across the region indicating that India hosted the youngest populations using Acheulean toolkits across the world,” says Blinkhorn.

“Critically, the late persistence of the Acheulean at Singi Talav and elsewhere in India directly precedes evidence for the appearance of our own species, Homo sapiens, as they expanded across Asia.”

It suggests that, just maybe, these rich monsoonal grasslands could have hosted a chance encounter between two cousin species, one that had clung on for hundreds of thousands of years, and another whose expansive journey was just beginning.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/archaic-hominin-india/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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New species of ancient tardigrade found preserved in amber

Miocene age Dominican amber yields 16-million-year-old fossil.

A brand-new species of ancient tardigrade has been discovered in 16-million-year-old Dominican amber.

The newly found fossil, described in Proceedings of the Royal Society, dates back to the Miocene epoch, looks like a modern-day tardigrade, and represents a whole new genus and species: Paradoryphoribius chronocaribbeus (aka beusty boi).

This is only the third tardigrade amber fossil to be described and named to date. The other two fossils are Milnesium swolenskyi (aka swole boi) and Beorn leggi (aka leggi boi), which are older than the new fossil – both date back to the Cretaceous age. This means that Paradoryphoribius fills a gap in the evolutionary history of modern-day tardigrades.

“Scientists know where tardigrades broadly fit in the tree of life, that they are related to arthropods, and that they have a deep origin during the Cambrian Explosion,” says senior author Ortega-Hernández, of Harvard University, US.

FULL REPORT & more photos

 

[Azeem]

In reference to the multiple Mongol raids repelled by the Delhi Sultanate of India. It's actually a very underrated achievement of the dynasty. 

India would've suffered the same feat as of Middle East at the hands of Mongol. 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Stone Age humans hatched and raised cassowary chicks in New Guinea

Thousands of years before the domestication of the chicken, humans were collecting cassowary eggs just before they hatched.

Up to 18,000 years ago, humans in New Guinea were hatching cassowary chicks and may have raised them to adulthood, a new study has found. This suggests that chickens may not in fact have been the first domesticated birds.

Cassowaries are big, flightless birds native to Australia, Aru Islands and New Guinea. The species make up three of the top 10 largest birds in the world. “This is not some small fowl, it is a huge, ornery, flightless bird that can eviscerate you,” said Kristina Douglass, assistant professor of anthropology and African studies, Penn State. “Most likely the dwarf variety that weighs 20kg.”

The chicks are still traded as a commodity in New Guinea today, and will easily imprint on humans. If the first thing a chick sees is a human, it will follow them around as though they were its mother

The researchers studied eggshells from between 18,000 and 6,000 years ago to determine how old the embryos inside were when they were cracked. Since chicks get calcium from their eggshells, the team could study how pits developed on the inside to establish how developed they were.

“What we found was that a large majority of the eggshells were harvested during late stages,” said Douglass. “The eggshells look very late; the pattern is not random.”

While it’s possible they were eating baluts – an Asian street food that involves boiling a nearly-developed chick in its shell – many of the samples didn’t show any evidence of burn marks, suggesting that they were hatched. This is particularly remarkable, given that the domestication of chickens happened thousands of years afterwards.

“The implications of this are enormous!” said Dr Hanneke Meijer, a palaeontologist who was not involved with the research. “It is generally considered that chickens were the first domesticated birds (although the date and place of domestication, whether it was one event or several, remains highly contested), but this research shows that this might not be the case.”

The team can’t say for sure what the birds were used for. The archaeologists who originally studied the site found no evidence that the cassowaries were kept in a pen. However, the only cassowary bones found at the site were from the leg and thigh, suggesting that these birds had been hunted and only the meatiest parts were taken home.

“There is evidence that cassowaries were transposed to other nearby islands and this is easiest to do with chicks because adult cassowaries can be vicious. So they were likely seen as a source of food,” said Meijer. “But human-bird relationships are often multifaceted and the birds might have been kept for their feathers, or even played a role in symbolism and rituals, as is the case today.

“Finally, I can also imagine that if we were to go back in time to New Guinea in the early Holocene, we might also have seen children chasing around and playing with little cassowary chicks.”

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/humans-hatched-cassowary-chicks/

 

Edited October 9, 2021 by CaaC (John)
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[Azeem]

This is not completely wrong. Not atom bomb but some kind of atomic level energy cataclysm destroyed it. It has been found in the ruins. A German guy is the pioneer in this field. 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Cretaceous crab revolution in exquisite detail

The world’s most complete crab fossil preserved in amber shows gills, may have climbed trees..

Picture the scene: you’re a crab minding your own business, scuttling along the shoreline on a balmy day when, out of nowhere, a blob of sticky tree sap encases you, freezing you in time for 100 million years. It was a moment of bad luck for this unfortunate crustacean, but a big win for science, with a new study in the journal Science Advances describing in pristine detail the anatomy of one of the earliest preserved crabs from the Cretaceous era.

The international team of researchers, led by Lida Xing of the China University of Geosciences, Beijing, used micro CT scanning to examine and describe the amber-entombed specimen, known as Cretapsara athanata. They say it’s the oldest modern-looking crab yet discovered, as well as the most complete crab fossil ever found.

The scans created a 3D reconstruction of the ill-fated creature, allowing the team to identify its anatomy in exquisite detail, down to the antennae and the fine hairs on its mouthparts. In a surprising turn of events, the team found the creature had gills.

“The more we studied the fossil, the more we realised that this animal was very special in many ways,” says co-author Javier Luque of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

The specimen is rivalled in its completeness only by the mysterious Callichimaera perplexa, a distant relative from the Cretaceous known as the platypus of the crab world for its bizarre anatomy.

Both species of crabs lived during the Cretaceous Crab Revolution, which was not a time when crabs took up arms against their brutal leaders, but an evolutionary bloom in crab diversity that spawned many of the crab species we know and love today.

The missing link to land crabs?

Cretapsara was remarkably modern-looking, unlike most of its Cretaceous counterparts, but the presence of gills shows that it was a transitional creature, living life at the fringes of the sea and the land.

Prior to Cretapsara, the only crabs found in amber were tropical, tree-dwelling species evolved for life on the land, so the researchers wondered how a 100-million-year-old aquatic animal managed to get itself trapped on land.

The authors note that crabs have conquered land, brackish water and freshwater at least 12 times since the age of the dinosaurs, with gills evolving to develop lung-like tissue, making them adaptable to both environs. Cretapsara, however, lacked such gill tissue.

“Now we were dealing with an animal that is likely not marine, but also not fully terrestrial,” says Luque. “In the fossil record, nonmarine crabs evolved 50 million years ago, but this animal is twice that age.”

Previous phylogenetic studies have shown that the evolution of modern crab-type forms occurred in the most recent common ancestor shared by modern crabs, some 100 million years ago. Cretapsara, therefore, bridges the gap in the fossil record, confirming that crabs were able to acclimatise to land and freshwater way back in the time of the dinosaurs, not during the mammal era as previously thought.

What was Cretapsara?

The team chose the name Cretapsara athanata, meaning ‘the immortal Cretaceous spirit of the clouds and waters’, in reference to its Cretaecous origins, as well as to Aspara, a spirit of the clouds and waters in Southeast Asian mythology. Athanata refers to ‘athanatos’, a Greek word meaning immortal, a nod to the crab’s eternal preservation.

The researchers hypothesise that Cretapsara, measuring five millimetres in leg-span, was a juvenile specimen of a freshwater to amphibious species, or that the animal was perhaps a semi-terrestrial juvenile crab migrating onto land from the water (as the iconic Christmas Island red crabs do) before it was unfortunately stymied in its terrestrial journey to adulthood.

Luque suggests that Cretapsara may have been a tree climber, like crabs found in amber from the Miocene.

“These Miocene crabs are truly modern-looking crabs and, as their extant relatives, they live in trees in little ponds of water,” says Luque. “These arboreal crabs can get trapped in tree resin today, but would it explain why Cretapsara is preserved in amber?”

Luque’s research is dedicated to understanding the evolution of crabs, and this new discovery helps push back the origin story of the remarkably diverse and adaptable crustaceans.

“This study is pushing the timing of origin of many of these groups back in time,” he says. “Every fossil we discover challenges our preconceptions about the time and place of origin of several organisms, often making us look further back in time.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/dawn-of-the-cretaceous-crab/

 

[Tommy]

 

[Azeem]

My possible theories who might have had the really first contact with any parts of Americas.

• Indigenous people of Oceania with tips of South America
• Ancient African kingdoms with Brazil
• Vikings with North America
• East Asians with North America
• Ancient Egypt with Peru 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Oldest known dinosaur herds found in Patagonia

Evidence of the earliest “gregarious” behaviour springs from the nest.

Fossils from a 190-million-year-old nesting ground have revealed that its dinosaurs likely lived in herds. The species – Mussaurus patagonicus – are now the oldest known herding dinosaurs, according to a paper in Scientific Reports.

“We’ve now observed and documented this earliest social behaviour in dinosaurs,” says Jahandar Ramezani, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, and co-author on the paper.

“This raises the question now of whether living in a herd may have had a major role in dinosaurs’ early evolutionary success. This gives us some clues to how dinosaurs evolved.”

The researchers gathered this evidence by examining Mussaurus eggs and skeletons from the fossil site, which is in the Laguna Colorada Formation, in southern Argentina.

“Such a preserved site was bound to provide us with a lot of information about how early dinosaurs lived,” says Diego Pol, a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET), who discovered the site and is lead author on the paper.

The site contains at least 80 Mussaurus skeletons and 100 eggs. The researchers scanned 30 of the eggs with a synchrotron, finding some had embryos inside them.

“We use high-energy X-rays to penetrate the sample without destroying it and get a full view inside it,” says co-author Vincent Fernandez, who did the scanning at the European Synchrotron in France.

“We spent four days scanning the eggs around the clock. It was tiring, but the exciting results were morale-boosting.”

All the embryos were the same species of Mussaurus, indicating that they came from a communal breeding site.

The researchers also examined the age of the dinosaur skeletons at the site.

“The bones of these dinosaurs grew in annual cycles, like tree rings, so by counting the growth cycles we could infer the age of the dinosaur,” says Pol.

Skeletons were also grouped by age, with one-year-old skeletons found in clusters together. Older adults and sub-adults were found in pairs or alone, but all within the same small area (a square kilometre in size).

“This may mean that the young were not following their parents in a small family structure,” says Ramezani. “There’s a larger community structure, where adults shared and took part in raising the whole community.”

The researchers calculated the site’s age at 193 million years using radiometric dating (specifically, uranium-lead dating). This is 40 million years prior to the current oldest evidence of “gregarious” (social) behaviour in dinosaurs.

“These are not the oldest dinosaurs, but they are the oldest dinosaurs for which a herd behaviour has been proposed,” says Pol.

 

The researchers suggest that their evidence throws the evolution of herding back even further. “Palaeontological understanding says if you find social behaviour in this type of dinosaur at this time, it must have originated earlier,” says Ramezani.

The researchers propose that herding may have started between 227 and 208 million years ago, at the same time as dinosaur bodies increased in size.

“Mussaurus belongs to the first successful family of herbivorous dinosaurs, so we postulate that being social and protecting their young together as a herd may have been part of the reason these long-necked dinosaurs were so common in all continents,” says Pol.

researchers suggest that their evidence throws the evolution of herding back even further. “Palaeontological understanding says if you find social behaviour in this type of dinosaur at this time, it must have originated earlier,” says Ramezani.

The researchers propose that herding may have started between 227 and 208 million years ago, at the same time as dinosaur bodies increased in size.

“Mussaurus belongs to the first successful family of herbivorous dinosaurs, so we postulate that being social and protecting their young together as a herd may have been part of the reason these long-necked dinosaurs were so common in all continents,” says Pol.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/dinosaur-herds-190-million-years-ago/

 

[Waylander]

I was reading Marc Morris's book about the Normans which I found interesting as it gave a lot of history around 1066 that is not necessarily public knowledge.

Like the Norwegian invasion of 220+ boats. After the battle just 20 were allowed to return with promises not to invade again.

Harold returned to London to learn of the Norman invasion and against the advice of his family decided to march straight against William even though he would need to raise a new army as most of his first army was still marching back from York. 

Part of his motivation was his home county had been invaded and Williams forces were ravaging the land and torturing his men on the South Coast. William was goading him.

Now although Harold was itching to fight he was wise to the tactics of the Normans which included their cavalry and so chose the battle site carefully.

Now this is where it gets interesting (not Morris here) an independent group has gone back to the source documents of the tapestry and Bishop Odo's account and claim to have found the battle site, several miles from battle at a place called Crowhurst. They claim the walls, yew tree and other features match up with the first hand accounts. Furthermore the small chapel there from the early Norman period ties up with William's promise to build a church immediately following the victory to commemorate the site. The building at Battle was built over a century later in the later Norman style.

The group paid for magnetic imaging and found what looks like a mass of buried bodies. 

English Heritage did not want to comment and the local council were itching to build a by-pass - 2017.

As for the battle a 9 hour slug-fest with Norman cavalry unable to flank the Anglo Saxons due to Harold's choice of site with ditches and woods and so had to do a direct attack. William lost three horses in trying to break the Anglo-Saxon shield wall. At one point the Normans panicked thinking William was dead, he even had to remove his helmet to reassure his man.

The decisive moment came when the shield wall decide to charge, now it seems Harold was in this charge yet not all the wall followed him.

This is when fighting then became mixed with bands of Anglo-Saxons fighting Norman Knights with their huge axes.

Now the Bayeaux tapestry knitted by English seamstresses shows two deaths one by arrow and another by being hacked to death. The one with the arrow shows signs of a repair. Morris says William could have been excommunicated if it was believed he sent a specific team out to hunt and kill Harold on the battlefield as in those times you were not meant to murder a king. Yet darkness was descending.

The battle went on into the early evening as Normans hunted the retreating Anglo-Saxons yet losing more cavalry in the ditches.

The Normans went straight to London only to find Harold's men holding the bridges. They had to go 40 miles West to cross at Reading.

Morris says Harold's Mum later offered gold for the weight of her son's body. This was refused. 

She came back with a force to take Exeter in 1068. Yet unlike Alfred the Great was unable to raise the country. It is believed her force went to Dublin and interestingly later the Normans went to Ireland.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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The dinosaur in the coal mine

Rethinking fossil footprints from an Australian mine.

Fossil dinosaur footprints found 50 years ago in a Queensland coal mine – and long thought to belong to a massive Triassic carnivore – have been reanalysed, and found to belong to a large, docile herbivore, according to a new study out today in Historical Biology.

The researchers, from the University of Queensland (UQ), were able to study the prints in unprecedented detail after gaining access to the original fossil, whereas earlier research had been based on old drawings and photographs with limited detail.

“Unfortunately, most earlier researchers could not directly access the footprint specimen for their study,” says Anthony Romilio, UQ palaeontologist and lead author of the study.

“For years it’s been believed that these tracks were made by a massive theropod predator that was part of the dinosaur family Eubrontes, with legs over two metres tall.

“But in any other place around the world, meat-eating dinosaurs only achieved such a big size from the Jurassic period, so this was quite an anomaly.”

The reanalysis has revealed the tracks were actually made by a dinosaur known as a prosauropod, a vegetarian dinosaur with legs about 1.4 metres tall and a body around six metres long.

A chance encounter in a Queensland coal mine

The fossil dinosaur footprints were first uncovered 50 years ago, 200 metres underground at a coal mine near Ipswich, west of Brisbane.

“It must have been quite a sight for the first miners in the 1960s,” says Romilio. “You have these hard-working miners going about their day-to-day, and then standing back and finding this weird thing jutting down from the ceiling.”

According to study co-author Hendrik Klein, a fossil expert from Saurierwelt Paläontologisches Museum, Germany, the prints would have been hanging above the miners’ heads because they were laid down on water-sodden layers of plant debris, which would later have been filled in by silt and sand.

“This explains why today they occur in an upside-down position, right above our heads,” says Klein. “After millions of years, the plant material turned into coal, which was extracted by the miners to reveal a ceiling of siltstone and sandstone, complete with the natural casts of dinosaur footprints.”

The mine has long since closed, but in 1964, geologists from the Queensland Museum mapped the tracks and made plaster casts.

“We made a virtual 3D model of the dinosaur footprint that was emailed to team members across the world to study,” says Klein.

“The more we looked at the footprint and toe impression shapes and proportions, the less they resembled tracks made by predatory dinosaurs. This monster dinosaur was definitely a much friendlier plant-eater.

“This is still a significant discovery even if it isn’t a scary Triassic carnivore. This is the earliest evidence we have for this type of dinosaur in Australia, marking a 50-million-year gap before the first quadrupedal sauropod fossils known.”

Romilio says the footprints are a rare insight in what is a vacuum of information about dinosaurs in Australia in the Triassic, with only two dinosaurs known from the area from that period.

“Australia doesn’t have the same geological activity that lifts up and exposes these much older rocks,” says Romilio. “If you’re in the US, you’ve got older material that’s been forced up in mountains. You’ve also got areas where there were glaciers during the Ice Age that ploughed the landscape and exposed these older rocks.

“But here in Australia, we don’t have such a dramatic alteration of our landscape, so we don’t have that older material coming to the surface.”

If you’re a Queensland resident and want to meet our prosauropod, the cast footprint is on display at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/fossil-dinosaur-footprints-in-australian-coal-mine/

 

Edited October 24, 2021 by CaaC (John)
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[CaaC (John)+]

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Ancient driftwood tracks 500 years of sea ice change

The beaches of Svalbard in the Arctic are littered with driftwood, originating from boreal forests that have surrounded the Arctic Ocean, where they were borne by rivers to the ocean and frozen in sea ice. Now, scientists have traced the path of these ancient trees back over the past 500 years.

The new study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, allowed the researchers to reconstruct sea ice over time – as well as the currents that propelled the frozen trees across the ocean. They found that new driftwood arrivals have steeply decreased in the past 30 years, reflecting a drop in sea ice coverage as the Arctic warms.

“This is the first time driftwood has been used to look at large-scale changes in Arctic sea ice dynamics and circulation patterns,” says geoscientist Georgia Hole at the University of Oxford, UK, lead author of the research.

Hole and team came to their results by analysing tree ring patterns of the driftwood. This told them the age and type of each tree, allowing them to trace the tree back to its country – and even a specific area – of origin.

Paired with both historical and modern sea ice observations, the data shows a slow, steady northward migration of sea ice; as the world warmed and the ice melted, less driftwood washed up on the Arctic’s shores.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021JC017563

 

Edited October 25, 2021 by CaaC (John)
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[CaaC (John)+]

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Hunt for ancient Mesoamerican civilisations yields 478 new sites

Huge remote-sensing project creates a map of Olmec and Mayan structures.

Lidar – light detection and ranging, a light-based method of remote sensing – has become a valuable tool in archaeology, exposing details about ancient sites that had previously gone unseen in excavations.

A team of US and Mexican researchers have used lidar data from over 80,000 square kilometres of southern Mexico to reveal the architecture of nearly 500 ancient Mesoamerican centres.

Published in Nature Human Behaviour, the research reveals new information about the buildings of the Olmec, and then the Mayan, civilisations which dominated the region between 1400 BCE and 1000 CE.

The researchers analysed lidar data taken from surveys carried out by the Mexican government and the US National Centre for Airborne Laser Mapping. In total, the surveys covered 84,516 km² of land, and the researchers used the data to identify 478 different complexes.

“Lidar is now being used to document entire ancient states, consisting of dozens of political centres spread over hundreds of kilometres,” writes Professor Robert Roswenswig, an archaeologist at the University of Albany, US, in an accompanying editorial.

“The technology is not new, but requires a huge amount of computer processing power as millions of measurements need to be analysed, and those that measure vegetation and modern construction need to be edited out to create a ‘bare earth model’ of the ground surface and ancient architecture.”

Rosenswig adds that this paper’s lidar analysis is “an order of magnitude larger than anything previously attempted”.

The researchers were able to recognise five distinct types of architecture across the region, which they suggest could correspond to different time periods.

They also found architectural features at San Lorenzo (the oldest known Olmec city, built in approximately 1200 BCE) that appear to be based on the ancient Mesoamerican calendar. Later sites in the area copied these features, indicating the long influence of San Lorenzo.

The researchers are now seeking to confirm these findings by visiting the sites and examining them in person.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/civilisations/mesoamerican-civilisations-lidar-olmecs-mayans/

 

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Origins of the mysterious Tarim Basin mummies revealed

Ancient DNA data has traced where the Bronze Age peoples of the Tarim Basin came from.

The dry Tarim Basin, in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of north-western China, is home to hundreds of naturally mummified human remains, all between 4,000 and 1,800 years old. Little is known about the people who became the “Tarim Basin mummies”, although their burial sites have provided clues about their society and economy.

Until now it’s been unclear where these people had come from, with theories proposing Bronze Age migrations from places as far afield as Russia and Iran.

A new study has examined the genomes of the mummies, and found something surprising: they didn’t come to the region at all, but rather were direct descendants of a population that had been there since the end of the last ice age.

The study, which is described in a paper in Nature, examined genome-wide data from 13 Tarim Basin mummies, dated from between 2,100 and 1,700 BCE, and five mummies from the neighbouring Dzungarian Basin, dating between 3,000 and 2,800 BCE.

The international team of researchers found that the Tarim Basin mummies belonged to a human population called the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), which was widespread during the Pleistocene era but has since dwindled.

“Archaeogeneticists have long searched for Holocene ANE populations in order to better understand the genetic history of Inner Eurasia,” says study co-author Choongwon Jeong, a professor of biological sciences at Seoul National University, South Korea. “We have found one in the most unexpected place.”

In contrast, the older Dzungarian mummies carried a mix of ANE DNA, and genes from Western steppe herders, a group which had strong links to the migratory Bronze Age Yamnaya society.

“These findings add to our understanding of the eastward dispersal of Yamnaya ancestry and the scenarios under which admixture occurred when they first met the populations of Inner Asia,” says co-author Chao Ning, professor at the School of Archaeology and Museology at Peking University, China

Dzungarians aside, the genetic consistency of the Tarim Basin mummies is curious: previous archaeological evidence has shown that they traded extensively and mixed culturally with other populations.

“Despite being genetically isolated, the Bronze Age peoples of the Tarim Basin were remarkably culturally cosmopolitan – they built their cuisine around wheat and dairy from the West Asia, millet from East Asia, and medicinal plants like Ephedra from Central Asia,” says co-author Christina Warinner, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, US, and a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany.

Yinqiu Cui, a professor in the school of life sciences at Jilin University, China, says the results have “had a transformative effect on our understanding of the region”.

“We will continue the study of ancient human genomes in other eras to gain a deeper understanding of the human migration history in the Eurasian steppes,” says Cui.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/origins-of-the-tarim-basin-mummies/

 

Edited October 28, 2021 by CaaC (John)
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A child of darkness

Piecing together a skull and the history of our ancient Homo naledi relatives.

Bathed in darkness, a pre-human child lies in the sunless abyss of a South African cave, never to see light again.

Nearly 250,000 years later, the child’s skull was discovered by researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University), South Africa, in the Rising Star Cave System in Johannesburg, representing the first partial skull of an adolescent ancient human relative, Homo naledi.

“Homo naledi remains one of the most enigmatic ancient human relatives ever discovered,” says Professor Lee Berger of Wits University, South Africa, project leader and Explorer at Large for the National Geographic Society.

“It is clearly a primitive species, existing at a time when previously we thought only modern humans were in Africa. Its very presence at that time and in this place complexifies our understanding of who did what first concerning the invention of complex stone-tool cultures and even ritual practices.”

The skulls discovery and analysis were published in Paleoantrpology.

 

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A Perfectly Preserved 900-Year-Old Crusader Knight’s Sword Was Discovered by a Scuba Diver Off the Israeli Coast

The weapon, encrusted with shells, was found with several other objects after underwater currents shifted the sands on the ocean floor

A scuba diver made an amazing discovery of a 900-year-old iron sword, which archaeologists believe belonged to a crusader knight, while diving near his local beach off Israel’s Carmel coast.

Shlomi Katzin discovered a range of treasures from the era of the crusades (1095-1291) including stone and metal anchors, fragments of pottery and the shellfish-encrusted sword which he brought ashore and turned in to the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA). It is thought that underwater currents shifted the sands around the 1,000-square-foot area where the objects were found.

“The discovery of ancient finds by swimmers and leisure divers is a growing phenomenon in recent years, with the increasing popularity of such sports,” said Yaakov Sharvit of the IAA.

 

The sword itself, 1 meter in length with a 30-centimeter hilt, was discovered caked in centuries of sand, shells and underwater detritus which meant it was uniquely well preserved.

“The sword, which was kept in perfect condition, is a beautiful and rare find, and it seems to belong to a crusader knight,” said Nir Distalfeld, supervisor of the IAA robbery prevention unit, in a statement issued by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “It was found covered in a marine bracelet, but it seems to be made of iron. It’s exciting to encounter such a personal object, that takes you in your imagination 900 years back in time, to another period, of knights, armors and swords.”

From the 11th to the 13th century, militant European missionaries travelled to the Middle East in an effort to forcibly convert Muslim countries to Christianity. The series of wars fought over control of the Holy Land is known as the crusades.

The discovery has excited archaeologists as this area of the Carmel coast near the city of Haifa is well sheltered and has provided safe anchorage for many ships over the centuries, from the crusades up to the present day.

“Every ancient artifact that is found helps us piece together the historical puzzle of the Land of Israel. Once the sword has been cleaned and researched in the Israel Antiquities Authority’s laboratories, we will ensure it is displayed to the public,” said Eli Escosido of the IAA.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/crusades-sword-discovered-israel-2023057?utm_content=buffer9de86&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=news&fbclid=IwAR0jebHMYYFlEjFsWI0xIB0l_fjF0CM5_QeeWKrREHRZpbhqrB9qZMdO2Gk

 

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New dinosaur species uncovered in frozen Greenland

Masters student identifies the country’s oldest-known plant-eating dinosaur.

A living reconstruction of Issi saaneq. Image credit: Victor Beccari

Some 25 years after its bones were first uncovered in the frosty wilds of east Greenland, a new species of dinosaur, Issi saaneq, has been described by palaeontologists, who have revealed it to be the region’s oldest-known plant-eating dinosaur.

The creature, closely related to the Plateosaurus commonly found in Germany, is named after the local Inuit words for “cold bone”, and it lived some 214 million years ago in the Late Triassic, at a time when Earth was undergoing massive change.

Issi saaneq skulls (holotype on the top, paratype on the bottom). Picture and 3D models after the CT-scan by Victor Beccari

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Mohammad Shah Rangila, Mughal Emperor during the times of Persian invasions of Nadir Shah. 

When his council would show concerns of advancement of Persian troops he would reply ' Delhi dour ast ', Delhi is still far away. Nadir Shah defeated him in three hours & sacked Delhi to the extent no taxes were paid in Persia according to legend. 

His phrase Delhi is still far away is now an idiom in Urdu for procrastination in face of adversity.

[MUFC]

 

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Where’s Cambrian Willy? Inside a borrowed shell, it seems.

Looks like hermit crabs were beaten to the shell-borrowing game by phallic-shaped worms living 500 million years ago.

Artists impression of Eximipriapulus. Credit: Prof Zhang Xiguang, Yunnan University

Hermit crabs are often the face of borrowed-shell real estate, but they might have gotten the idea from some other unexpected creatures – ancient penis worms.

Don’t worry: the images with this story are (mostly) safe for work.

Researchers from Durham University, UK, and Yunnan University, China, analysed vivid, 500-million-year-old fossils and found that the penis worm (Priapulida) may have invented the “hermit” lifestyle during the Cambrian period, millions of years before crabs showed up on the scene.

The researchers studied collections of the Guanshan fossil deposits – famous for incredible preservation of soft tissue, such as worm bodies – along with traditional shelly materials that make up other parts of the fossil record.

They found that four specimens of the penis worm Eximipriapulus were preserved hidden inside the conical shells of long-extinct hypoliths.

“The worms are always sitting snugly within these same types of shells, in the same position and orientation”, explains Dr Martin Smith, co-author of the study, published in Current Biology.

Penis worms live in shell-ters

The abundant and aggressive predators that dominated the Cambrian era likely threatened penis worms immensely, but it seems that where there’s a will[y] there’s a way, because these shy guys adapted by sheathing their sword-like selves and moving into a new housing market. Presumably, the prime real-estate afforded armoured protection for their soft boneless bodies.

“The only explanation that made sense was that these shells were their homes – something that came as a real surprise,” says Smith.

“Not long before these organisms existed, there was nothing alive more complex than seaweeds or jellyfish: so it’s mind-boggling that we start to see the complex and dangerous ecologies usually associated with much younger geological periods so soon after the first complex animals arrive on the scene.”

This type of living arrangement has never before been documented in any living or fossilised penis worm specimen. Nor has it been observed in any other organism living before the Mesozoic Marine Revolution in the age of dinosaurs, when predators learned how to crush shells.

With this in mind, the fact that such a trait evolved independently during the Cambrian explosion of predation – which established the rise of modern animal parts – marks the astounding speed and flexibility of penis worm evolution.

Or maybe “houses” – with all the knobs and handles – were just a little cheaper and more available back then.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/wheres-cambrian-willy-inside-a-borrowed-shell-it-seems/

Edited November 10, 2021 by CaaC (John)
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New iguanodon relative revealed

Hefty herbivore from Isle of Wight suggests more diverse dinosaur biota existed in present-day UK.

A new species of iguanodontian dinosaur has been discovered on the Isle of Wight.

Researchers from the Natural History Museum and University of Portsmouth, UK, described the new genus as part of the iguanodontian group, which includes iguanodon and Mantellisaurus – but this is the first of this genus described on the 390 square kilometre island off England’s south coast.

The dinosaur was named Brighstoneus simmondsi – after the village of Brighstone, near the excavation site, and Keith Simmonds who found the fossil in 1978. The fossil had key differences from its iguanodontian cousins that made it stand out, leading to the realisation that it was actually a different species.

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Polly Porter rolls the stones

As a Victorian-era girl, Mary Winearls Porter was kept from education, making her later scientific work a particular triumph.

Polly Porter. The name sounds more like a character in a young-adult adventure story from the early 20th century than a serious scientist. The many books and papers she published – such as “Crystallographic descriptions of some pyridine and picoline derivatives”, in 1921, were under her birth name, Mary Winearls Porter, but to her family and friends she was Polly.

She was born in Norfolk, north of London, on 26 July 1886. Her father, Robert Percival Porter, was a foreign correspondent for The Times of London, who, according to accounts, believed “education was superfluous for women”; consequently his daughter was taught reading and writing at home but did not receive a formal education.

Nevertheless, she went on to become “the pioneering female crystallographer” and a mentor to Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, the 1964 Nobel laureate in chemistry, says the journal Chemistry World.

According to the Cambridge University department of biochemistry: “X-ray crystallography produces high-resolution models of proteins to allow an understanding of their structure and function at the atomic level.

“The process begins by growing a crystal of the protein of interest that contains millions of copies of that protein arranged in an ordered and regularly repeating fashion. When an X-ray beam is directed through these crystals, electrons within the ordered proteins diffract the X-rays in an interpretable manner. Through analysing the pattern of diffraction, the electron density within the protein of interest can be elucidated, which is then used to create a model of the protein’s structure. These structures give scientists essential insights into human health and disease.”

Porter’s path to science began in 1901 at age 15 in Rome, Italy, where her family was staying. Chemistry World explains that while exploring Roman ruins she was fascinated by the stone used in the buildings, both for construction and decoration, and she made a collection of various types of marble fragments. 

In 1902 the Porter family returned to Britain and settled in Oxford, where Polly was drawn to the University of Oxford Natural History Museum and the Corsi collection – 1000 different polished slabs of decorative stone, collected in the early 19th century by Roman lawyer Faustino Corsi, and which included ancient Roman samples along with Italian stones from medieval times to his own day, plus a selection of decorative rocks and minerals from England, Russia, and other countries.

Her repeated visits to the long-neglected collection attracted the attention of Royal Society member Henry Miers, a researcher and teacher in the fields of mineralogy and crystallography. He put Porter to work cleaning the specimens, updating their identifications and labelling, and translating the original catalogue from Italian to English.

The work with Miers in Oxford gave Porter the material with which to write and publish her 1907 monograph, “What Rome Was Built With: A Description of the Stones Employed in Ancient Times for its Building and Decoration”.

In 1910, Miers introduced Porter to Alfred Tutton, himself something of a prodigy, having left school at 14, winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Science in London, where in 1886 he graduated with honours in geology, physics, and chemistry, becoming a lecturer in chemical analysis, and maintaining a crystallographic laboratory.

Tutton offered Porter a job in his London laboratory, and she went to work “studying the synthesis of crystals of new ionic compounds containing two different cations (now called Tutton’s salts) and studying the effect of changes in the cation identities on the crystal form”, Chemistry World says.

Tutton published the results of the work, “Crystallographic constants and isomarphous relations of the double chromates of the alkalis and magnesium”, in 1912 in the Journal of the Mineralogical Society, with Porter as co-author.

Porter, meanwhile, had remained with her family when her father’s work took them to the United States, and she found employment cataloguing the mineral collection of the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. Two years later found the family in Germany, and Porter went to work on the Mineralogical State Collection in Munich.

In 1913 Porter was again in the US, where she made an important connection, studying at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania under renowned American geologist Florence Bascom, the first woman to receive a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, in 1893.

Bascom arranged for Porter to return to Germany as a research student at the University of Heidelberg under German mineralogist and crystallographer Victor Goldschmidt, called the “father of modern geochemistry” by the Geochemical Society.

Porter’s travels eventually landed her back in Britain, at Oxford University, starting crystallography studies with prolific researcher Thomas Vipond Barker, who agreed to be her supervisor in her quest to earn a Bachelor of Science degree; such degrees were available to students who had completed two years of research and had their thesis approved by a board of examiners.

In June 1918 she received a BSc certificate, but not a formal degree – these were unavailable to women until 1920.

She was given a research fellowship from Somerville College, Oxford, allowing her to continue her studies, which resulted in a series of publications and eventually a doctorate in 1932.

Chemistry World says Porter’s “work in later years, sadly, proved to be a backwater of crystallographic science. Nevertheless, her life-story is inspiring in the extreme and it is our contention that she was the first of the pioneering women in this field.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/chemistry/polly-porter-rolls-the-stones/