Abdur, Eritrea

 Coral Reef Foraging Off the Red Sea (125,000 years ago)

For today’s 100,000 year old site, we’re traveling to the coast of the Red Sea in what is today Eritrea.  The coast by the site of Abdur was lined with ancient coral reefs.  Towards the beginning of the Eemian Interglacial (a period in between glacial periods much like what we’re experiencing right now), 125,000 years ago, these reefs were abundant with large rock oysters.  These would almost be cemented to the coral reefs.  They made visible and tempting targets for humans, who were able to see them during low tide.  In order to harvest these oysters, they would take humanity’s most trusty heavy duty tool, the Acheulean Handaxe, and chip them off to separate them from the coral.  They then used smaller, more modern “Middle Stone Age” stone blades to get at the insides.  At least that’s what some scientists think might have happened, since they basically found these tools embedded in old coral reefs, which are easy to date.

One of the remarkable things about this event are that it was for a time, the oldest known instance of humans harvesting marine life.  It’s also one of the last known uses of the Acheulean hand axe, which was first used over a million and a half years ago.  Its position is also near a land bridge some scientists think used to exist during the low sea levels of the ice age that allowed humans to migrate from Africa to Asia towards the southern tip of the Red Sea, so scientists are interested in seeing if the tools found here are similar to those found in Asia at the time.  The site is also important because it gives us a glimpse into the last time the Earth was as warm as it is today (in between glacial periods), which scientists try to study to predict what might happen today.  

The Acheulean hand axe was first created at the time human hands had first evolved sufficient grasping strength to create them, by Homo Erectus 1.7 million years ago.  They were the first stone tool created with sculpted symmetry.  They were tear-drop or pear-shaped with a sharp point at one end.  They were molded to fit into the hand and were a real all purpose tool.  Often compared to the swiss army knife, they could slice through hides, cut through wood, or bash things good.  I like to think of them like the smart phone of the day.  I wonder if everyone had one and if they always carried them around with them?  Near the fossilised reefs at Abdur, volcanic rock that was laid down my an eruption 0.7 to 0.9 million years ago in what is called the Buri Sequence.  Here they found fossil remains of Homo Erectus, dating from that period and during the height of Acheulean Axe use.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they found hand axes with the skeletons.  By about 200,000 years ago, the hand axe had largely been replaced by more modern “Middle Stone Age” tools.  You could do neat stuff with the new tools, such as fasten them to wood to make spears.  The old handaxes still had some use however.  Maybe it just wasn’t as frail as the newer more sophisticated tools.  Good for wedging in betwen oysters and applying force to separate them from the surfaces they clinged to.  As the Eemian period moved on though, the oysters were gone, likely due to climate change.  They were replaced by smaller clams and other seafood could still be harvested, such as scallops, crabs, and sea snails, but with no need for a chipping tool.  Then there was maybe no need for the hand axe anymore.  It hasn’t been found in the geologic record since.  Thus the longest used tool in human history was forgotten, and they had a new tool for any other use an old hand axe would be needed for.

We don’t actually know if the people who harvest oysters there were modern day humans.  There we no human bones found.  As far as I know, the only modern humans who used Acheulean Hand Axes were a population in Ethiopia 160,000 years ago.  These were different enough from today’s humans to be considered by some to be a subspecies of modern humans.  I wonder if the people at these reefs were related to them?  We also don’t know for sure if they were harvesting the oysters, they could have just dropped their tools there, but it makes for a compelling theory.  They likely got most of their meat from land animals, such as hippos and bovids, and maybe crocodile, based on some bones they found near some other tools.  

At the time of its discovery in 2000, this was the oldest known good evidence of marine exploitation by early humans, 10,000 years earlier than the previous older at the Klaises River delta on South Africa’s coast.  While these were found to be from a time of warmer weather, the discoverers speculated though that the adaptation to utilize marine resources was developed thousands of years earlier as a way to cope with the desert conditions that existed in the interior of Africa during the ice ages. Sure enough, scientists later found evidence of marine exploitation far earlier during the previous ice age 165,000 years ago near Pinnacle Point on South Africa’s coast.  I’m going use my imagination a bit and imagine that the people at Pinnacle Point spread out from the southern tip of africa and spread along the whole eastern coast, spreading their new lifestyle of eating sea food all along the way, and within 40,000 years had reached the Red Sea, where they left tools in coral reefs.  Wonder if they’ll ever find anything that might support that theory?  It does seem likely that by 100,000 years ago though, that marine adapted lifestyles were found around the world.  They have even found Neanderthals in Portugal and Italy who were harvesting sea resources.  I wonder how this lifestyle compares to the spread of agriculture, with it being developed independantly in many places around the world, but also spread from culture to culture and via migrations.  Note that this predates fishing as we know it.  It was the shellfish around the world that could be found along the beaches that were human’s targets.  They also collected the shells for tools (such as containers, scrapers, and something to hold paint in) and ornamentation in the form of beeds.

Another thing about this site that interests scientists is that it’s close to where modern humans would have gone through during an early migration from Africa to the southern areas of Asia that happened between 130 and 100 thousand years ago.  We’ve known for a while by studying the dna of our own maternal and paternal lines that our ancestors left Africa into Asia about 60,000 years ago, but newer fossil finds and fossil dna analysis have shown that there was an earlier migration of modern humans 130 thousand years ago.  There are two basic routes into Asia scientists think humans may have taken.  The Northern Route is over the land at the northern reaches of the Red Sea on the Sinai Peninsula and through Israel, while the Southern Route is on the southern tip of the Red Sea across the narrow Straight of Bab-el-Mandeb, across which is Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula.  Stone tools found here and in the Asfet site across the Gulf of Zura, about a kilometer away, are similar to those found in eastern africa.  These are similar to those found on the Arabian Peninsula here.  Since it seems that humans were adapted to the coast, they could have gone south from Abdur and crossed the Bab-el-Mandeb into the Arabian Peninsula and then continued along the southern coast of Asia all the way to southern China.  Some scientists think that the whole “Out of Africa” thing is a bit bogus though, with humans evolving across all of Afro-Eurasia, crossing the continents relatively regularly, so that you can’t really say modern humans originated in Africa.  

Lastly, one of the other reasons scientists are trying to study this site is because coral reefs are indicators for past sea levels.  The world was in an the Penultimate Glacial Period from 195,000 ago to 135,000 years ago.  The Eemian Interglacial then began, and lasted for 15 thousand years, until the Last Glacial Glacial Period began.  We then entered the current Holocene Interglacial, about 12,000 years ago.  Well, we’d be in an interglacial if man made global warming doesn’t prevent the next glacial period from starting, which if the Eemian is any indicator, could be in 3000 years.  The Eemian was about 1-2C hotter than it is today.  Since some scientists are predicting that within a hundred years our temperatures will also be 1-2C hotter than it is now due to climate change, looking at the sea level that existed during the Eemian could give us a preview at what the sea level might reach when we get hot.  The sea levels were definitely higher in the Eemian than they are now.  The fact that the fossilised coral that they are now studying at this site is now on dry land is a testament to this fact.  Since certain types of coral are near the surface of the water, scientists use them to estimate the sea levels of the past.  Estimates using coral indicates the sea levels were about 6-9 meters above current level.  These give rather crude estimates though, since the coral can compress over time and you don’t know exactly how close the top was to the surface of the water.  More recent studies done by studying the remains of microorganism that live at the surface of water found along the walls of caves in Greece found that the highest the sea got was the lower estimate of 6 meters above today.  Basically, if you find a micro-organism that lives at a the surface of the water against a rock wall and are able to carbon date it, you can then look to see how high up the wall it was to estimate the sea level at that time.  Studies from Antarctica show that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed at the very beginning of the Eemian Interglacial, which caused the sea level to jump 6 meters above today’s value.  The sea level then gradually lowered to 2 meters above today’s value for most of the rest of the Eemian, after which it dropped again.  This kind of gives us an idea what might happen if the West Antartic Ice Sheet collapsed today.  Guess we gotta hope it doesn’t any time soon.  That’s a lot of beach side property lost. They’re still working out the kinks and cross checking all their results and doing new studies, so we’ll see what they ultimately conclude about how much, how fast, and when the seas rose and what that might mean for today.

Sources:

News Stories -

Earliest known sea food (May 2000)

https://www.esci.umn.edu/orgs/mil/Publications/49-Walter-Nature.pdf 

https://news.utexas.edu/2000/05/02/humanitys-first-oyster-bar-eritrean-stone-tools-push-back-dates-of-earliest-use-of-marine-resources/ 

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/05/000531070849.htm   

Eritrea Coast Results (Jan 2002) 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/4614330

Acheulean Hand Axes Found (Jan 2004) 

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Walter2/publication/222022767_Stratigraphy_palaeoenvironments_and_model_for_the_deposition_of_the_Abdur_Reef_Limestone_Context_for_an_important_archaeological_site_from_the_last_interglacial_on_the_Red_Sea_coast_of_Eritrea/links/5d23930c299bf1547ca4de5e/Stratigraphy-palaeoenvironments-and-model-for-the-deposition-of-the-Abdur-Reef-Limestone-Context-for-an-important-archaeological-site-from-the-last-interglacial-on-the-Red-Sea-coast-of-Eritrea.pdf     

Reconnaissance (Aug 2007) 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/530867 

Red Sea Basin (Nov 2007) 

http://people.rses.anu.edu.au/lambeck_k/pdf/264.pdf     

Geological Setting (Aug 2010) 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/23957814 

History of Marine Subsistence (Jan 2016) 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/43175686     

Human Dispersal (Mar 2017)  

http://www.madote.com/2017/03/middle-stone-age-sites-from-eritrean.html?m=1 

Sea Levels Not So High (Sep 2018)  

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180910111314.htm

West Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapse (Feb 2020)  

https://yubanet.com/scitech/2c-ocean-warming-has-been-enough-to-destabilize-antarctica-in-the-past/ 

Makgadikgadi–Okavango Palaeo-Wetland, Botswana

Leaving Our Greatest Grandma’s Home (125 thousand years ago)

New species, subspecies, and races can form when a population become isolated from the rest of its species.  They can also form when closely related species, subspecies, and races mix.  The Ice Age cycles proved to be an species generator for humans.  Populations would become isolated in north due to giant glaciers cutting off populations.  In Africa, during ice ages, much of the continent became dry and barren.  Since these deserts were difficult to cross, they also served to cut off populations from one another.  While these conditions persisted, the populations “trapped” by deserts, glaciers, and coasts can mix over centuries and form new kinds of humans with different dominant traits.  What we know as modern humans likely came into being after previously isolated populations in Africa, each holding one key modern human characteristic, came into contact with each other after an ice age ended as the deserts separating them disappeared, and mixed.  The oldest Anatomically Modern Human that we know about lived 300 thousand years ago in Morocco.  Modern humans were likely found throughout Africa at this time, although evidence is scarce.  But then came another Ice Age age (the Penultimate Ice Age, the one right before the most recent one we’ve had, about 194 thousand years ago), and humans became separated from one another again, and new races of modern humans were created.  

One enclave of humanity that existed was centered on the remains of the largest lake Africa ever knew, in the south central part of it, in modern day Botswana.  Lake Makgadikgadi was a behemoth in its heyday, but then it started to drain slowly.  The area it once covered became a network of interconnected small lakes and basically one huge wetland area.  While much of Africa was a desert, the modern humans who were living here prospered.  They could not leave this area though, because there was little vegetation beyond it.  Of particular note, Mitochondrial Eve is thought to have been born in this area 200,000 years ago.  She is basically all of our mother’s mother’s mother’s etc. mother.  Everyone who is alive today can trace their maternal ancestry to her.  Her mother had no other daughter whose maternal line survives to this day.  There were many other women who lived at the same time as she did, but none of their maternal lines have survived to this day either.  They may very well have descendants alive today, but only through at least one male descendant.  The mitochondrial dna of every person alive today (which is only passed on from mother to child) is a copy (with possible mutations) of the mitochondrial dna of Mitochondrial Eve’s.  It appears that the DNA of Mitochondrial Eve and the rest of the people living in this wetland enclave is similar to the San people.  You may have seen the movie “The Gods Must be Crazy”?  The hunter gatherers in that mockumentary are the San, and that movie happened to take place in about the same area that Mitochondrial Eve lived.  So, it appears that we all are descended maternally from San people from 200,000 years ago.  

Around 130,000 years ago, the Penultimum Ice Age came to a close, and the world entered the Eemian Interglacial, a time where the climate was much like it is today.  Precipitation patterns started to change, and Africa began to become interconnected again.  A “green corridor” of vegetation was formed to the northwest of the enclave.  This allowed the people there to explore new lands in southern Africa.  The Eemian ended and a new ice age began about 115 thousand years ago, but 5 thousand years later, a second green corridor opened up to the South West and the people of the wetlands headed to the coast of South Africa, where they likely encountered other modern humans who had survived the previous ice age desert conditions by exploiting marine resources. They then proceeded to survive much of the new ice age the same way.  They also left footprints along the beaches and developed some advanced stone tool making techniques.

The people from the wetlands pretty much kept to Southern Africa until 70,000 years ago.  During that period, other modern humans spread along the southern Indian Ocean coasts of Asia.  Neandethals dominated in Europe, Denisovans in parts of Asia and the descendants of Homo Erectus in south east asia.  At 70,000 years ago, a group of the people of the wetlands entered East Africa.  From there, some left Africa 60,000 years ago and went into Europe, Asia, and Australia.  Everywhere they went they encountered other modern humans and closely related human species.  They mixed with the people they found and displaced them.  The mitochondrial dna eventually replaced all the human mitochondrial dna found anywhere else in the world.  This is a natural process that can happen when a larger population mixes with a smaller population over many generations.  Some of these other populations still have descendants today, and we got some parts of our dna from them, but their mitochondrial dna has gone extinct.  It’s quite a fascinating puzzle how one people came to dominate the whole Earth in this way though.  Was there a biological advantage?  A technological one?  A cultural one?  A lifestyle one?  Were “we” just opportunistic and the other populations were in decline for some reason, such as the Mount Toba eruption, disease, or climate change?  I guess the archaeologists will have to try to figure out that one.

Sources:

News stories -

Mitochondrial Eve 200ka (Sep 2010)  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100817122405.htm

Isolated African Populations Coming Together (Aug 2018) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534718301174 

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/scientists-discover-the-diverse-distribution-of-homo-sapiens-acr.html 

Homeland (Oct 2019)  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191028175138.htm 

https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/ancestral-homeland-0012784 

https://www.insidescience.org/news/experts-skeptical-new-study-pinpointing-birthplace-humanity  

Telidjan Depression, Algeria

Snail Eating Capsian Hunter Gatherers Adapting to Climate Change (8,000 years ago)

The area straddling Algeria and Tunisia is dotted with hundreds of ash colored mounds, the remains of seasonal camps of one of the last hunter gatherer cultures in North Africa, the Capsians, who lived there 10,000 years ago.  If you get closer to them, you’ll notice that one of the primary consituents of these mounds are thousands of snail shells.  These people were among the greatest consumers of snails known.  These mounds are actually middens, the built up refuse of human activity over hundreds of years, and contain other remains of human activity as well, such as stone tools or skeletons.  The Europeans and scientific world refers to them as escargotiers after their Snail shell contents, while the local people call them ramdadiya, meaning ash colored in Arabic.  The people were named the Capsians, after the nearest town to one of the first escargotiers excavated in 1903, which was known as Capsia in the days of the Roman Empire (modern day Gafsa in Tunisia).  Much of what we now know about Capsians has been determined by excavating 3 escargotiers in the Telidjene Basin in Algeria near the Tunisian border.

The Telidjane Basin is the area drained by a wadi, a river that only flows during parts of the year, called Wadi Telidjane, which runs in a southwest direction.  The Telidjan Depression is an area within this basin flanked by high hills and cliffs, with the wari running between them.  Another set of cliffs and hills is at the south, giving the depression an oval like shape.  The Wadi Cheria and its associated depression runs parallel and to the West of it.  The Telidjene Depression has dozens of escargotiers in it, marking the location of seasonal camps of the Capsian hunter gatherers in the area.  Of those, three have been studied intensely with modern techniques and have materials in them that date to both main phases of the Capsian Culture, the Typical Capsian period and the Superior Capsian.  Relilai is located in a rock shelter in the south of the depression just to the east of the wadi.  Kef Zoura D is in another rock shelter nearby on the other side of the wadi.  Ain Misteheyia is in an open air site in the north end of the depression, about 20km from the other twi, and was by a smaller Wadi (Wadi Hamaja) and had a spring nearby (Ain Misteheyia spring).  Relilai was the first of these to be excavated (in 1936), but it’s material sequences weren’t continuous, making it a little hazier to draw conclusions from.  Ain Misteheyia was studied in the 1970s in great detail.  Since it was an open air site and not protected by rock overhangs, its soil layers were compressed over time, again making it more difficult for archaeologists to date, but they were able to work with it.  Unfortunately it was destroyed in the late 1970s during a soil reclamation project, so it cannot be followed up on using more modern techniques.  Kef Zoura D had the nicest and most preserved continuous archaeological sequence and was studied last.  The three sites were able to be compared and contrasted with each other, in effect “checking the work” of the findings of the other, so archaeologists could be confident in their conclusions.  

The Capsian culture can be divided up into two or three phases, depending on how you want to look at it.  The early phase was called the Typical Capsium (10 to 8 ka, meaning 10 thousand years ago to 8 thousand years ago).  The game tended to be larger, as were the snails.  The stone tools were also larger and less sophisticated, and were normally created by striking a hammer rock against another.  The second phase was the Superior Capsium (8 to 7 ka).  The game was smaller, as were the snails.  The stone tool technology had advanced so that the pressure flaking technique started being used to creatw tools.  This technique involved apply pressure of a sharp blade to the edges of the tool being crafted.  This led to finer control of the output and smaller tools to be created with more details, which allowed smaller game to be hunted.  In Europe and West Asia, introduction of this technology was the hallmark of the transition from the Paleolothic (old stone age) to the Mesolithic (middle stone age).  It occured about 20,000 years ago in Western Asia, and had reached most of Europe by 11,500 years ago.  The third phase of the Capsian is usually considered a post-Capsian phase, but still a continuation of it, and is called the Neolithic of Capsian Tradition (7 to 5 ka).  It involves neolithic (New Stone Age) activities, such as the domestication of animals being added to the Capsian tradition.   

Archaeologists wanted to understand when the transition from the Typical to the Superior Capsian occured.  Since they had ground containing artifacts spanning these phases, they were able to look for these artifacts and date them and then they determined that the transition happened about 8,200 years ago.  This turns out to correspond with the time that the 8.2 Kiloyear Event took place, which was the worse global cooling event that occured since the end of the Ice Age 11,600 years ago, which pretty much affected the whole world.  Ironically, according to one of the most acceoted theories, it is thought to have happened because the world was warming.  Glaciers used to cover much of North America and Eurasia during the Ice Age, but they began to melt when the temperatures rose.  There was a lake larger than all if the Great Lakes put together (Lake Agassi) in North America that was being held in its basin on one side by a glacier (essentially an ice dam).  When the glacier on the north side of the lake weakened enough, the force of the water in the lake caused the ice dam to burst and most of the water in that lake to drain into the oceans.  This rose the sea levels dramatically overnight (possibly the source of many of the flood myths in the world).  This new fresh water being poured into the Atlantic Ocean caused the ocean currents to get disrupted and weather patterns to change across the world.  Much of the world became colder for a few hundred years, while northern Africa became dryer.  Humans around the world, some of who had started farming, had to endure the changes in climate and adapt, move, or die.  This marked the end of the Greenlandian Age, which started at the beginning of our current Holocene Epoch, which started when the last ice age ended, and marked the start of the Northgrippian Age.  

The types of plants that could be supported in the Teledjene Depression after the 8.2 kiloyear event changed to plants that could survive with less water.  This was determined by noting the types of Phytoliths (remnants of plant cellular processes) of grasses and similar plants that were present in the ash at Ain Misteheyia around the transition which helped confirmed that the climate did get dryer there.    It is thought that the Capsians ate wild grasses like the ones found there, which prevented the need to plant their own crops at a time other cultures were already doing so.  

Remains from larger animals such as Hartebeests (their main source of protein), Barbary Sheep, Aurochs, Gazelles, Zebras, and Jackals were prevalent in the lower earlier layers, while smaller animals like Rabbits and Hares were more prevalent in the upper later ones.  This suggests the change in animal kinds available for hunting prompted an update in stone tools to be smaller and more sophisticated in order to hunt the smaller prey.  The culture thus shifted from the Typical Capsian to Superior Capsian.  I wonder if they figured out the pressure technique for stone tool making themselves as they found themselves needing to hunt smaller prey, or if they got it from an outside group, which may have been using the technique for a while.  Maybe they knew about it all along, but just never needed to use it before?  

The types of snails found also got smaller, and they appeared to have relied on snails more than ever before.  There is a theory that say snails may have been one of the first domestic animals, which might explain why they often appear to be consumed in large numbers shortly before a culture starts domesticating plants and larger animals, though I don’t think this theory is particularly accepted at the moment.  

At any rate, with the expected climate change in our world due to global warming, our own civilization might have to make a technological leap and lifestyle change similar to the ones the Capsians had to make after their world started changing.

Sources:

Scientific Papers:

Diet (Mar 1976) 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/20182658

Adult Skeleton (Aug 1979) 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/30985921

Edible Meditterrainean Snails (Jan 2004) 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/2025278  

Telidjene Basin (Aug 2008) 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/13345335

Plant Subsistence (Feb 2013) 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/37662698

Book Review (Jan 2016) 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/25294131 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/40462209 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/37948280 

https://academia.edu/resource/work/26724215

 

Point Europa, Gibraltar

An Anatolian Woman in Gibraltar (7,500 years ago)

In 1996 they found a skull of a 7,500 year old woman in a cave by Point Europa in Gibraltar.  This makes her the oldest known modern human resident of Gibraltar, although she was buried near other caves where Neanderthals had been buried 100,000 years ago.  Gibraltar is a peninsula off the coast of Spain, but is in British possession today.  It is one of the closest parts of Europe to Africa and you can see Africa across the sea from there.  Point Europa is the southermost tip of Gibraltar and has a light house on it, and some nearby caves.  The woman was named Calpeia, from the ancient name for Gibraltar, Mons Calpe.

In 2019, they studied Calpeia’s facial features (even though her skull had been deformed) and her DNA.  They were able to tell some of what she looked like, as well as trace her ancestey.  It turns out that only 10% of her dna was from the local Mesolithic hunter gatherers of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain/Portugal), whereas the other 90% of her was from the Neolithic farmers of Anatolia (modern day Turkey), located on the opposite end of the Mediterranean Sea.  This suggests that her recent ancestors must have migrated from Anatolia.  Since it would have taken many generations for her to reach overland, and likely picking up other genetic signals along the way, they must have arrived by a coastal route.  By my reckoning, since if 10% of her DNA was local, then I could imagine that one of her great grandparents was from the Iberian Peninsula, who would have married someone with Anatolian DNA, and their child (her grandparent) would marry someone else with Anatolian DNA (her other grandparent), so that their child (her parent) was 1/4 Iberian and 3/4 Anatolian, while her other parent could have made the trip straight from Anatolia.  That’s pretty fast to cross that big sea.  Since the population of the island of Sardinia is largely Anatolian, it seems likely that they crossed the sea West on boats.  The people of Iberia were Western Hunter Gatherers, while the Anatolians were some of the first people to farm.  The Anatolians spread across Europe, introducing agriculture, and interacting with the local hunter gatherers in various ways, sometimes trading with them, other times pushing them to niche lands while they took the best farmland for themselves, sometimes assimilating them, and other times maybe even enslaving them or treating them as lower class.  The Anatolians were newcomers to this area at this time, but had already built some stone circles in Iberia (they would go on to build Stonehenge a couple thousand years later after they reached the British Isles).  The Anatolians living at Gibraltar didn’t appear to do any agriculture though, and seemed to have gotten most of their food from hunting and fishing.  Evidence of farming nearby (125 miles) is present though in the form of wheat seeds.  

They were able to find out enough about what she looked like to recreate her face, and displayed a model of it in a museum.  Like most Anatolians, she had light skin, dark hair, and dark eyes.  The native Iberians would have had darker skin and blue eyes, which she did not inherit.  Calpeia would essentially look like a modern Spanish woman today, as most of Spain’s ancestry is from the Anatolians, since later waves of migration into Iberia from the West didn’t leave much of a genetic imprint.

Sources:

News Stories -

Unveiling Recreation (Sep 2019)  

https://www.chronicle.gi/unveiling-calpeia-the-face-of-the-first-known-gibraltarian/ 

Facial Recreation (Jun 2020)  

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2020/05-06/face-7500-year-old-woman-reveals-gibraltar-earliest-humans/

Visiting (Jul 2020)  

https://www.chronicle.gi/a-visit-to-europa-point/

Videos:

Creating face - https://youtu.be/WeQyW4CObLo

Unveiling face - https://youtu.be/2241v3jqZC0

Monte Alto, Italy

 Oldest Lunar Calendar (10,000 years ago)

Today I’m taking a look at the oldest lunar calendar that archaeologists feel pretty confident about.  It takes the form of a pebble that some hunter gatherers were carving notches onto the side of about 10,000 years ago, presumably in order to count off the days until the next full moon (or new moon?).   The item was found left at the top of Monte Alto in the Alban Hills, just a little south of Rome, in 2007.  It wasn’t until 12 years later that someone noticed that the number of notches on the rock corresponded with the number of days in a lunar cycle.  The rock was somewhat shaped like a rectangular prism, with four long edges.  There were 7 notches along one long edge, 9 along another, and 11 on a third.  When you add them all up, you get the number of days in a lunar cycle, 27.  These notches (called tache) were made with different scraping rocks, making it appear as if they were added on different days, as if they were counting the days.  The pebble was pocket sized, but I find myself wondering if these hunter gatherers had pockets, or where they would keep them.  Maybe it was kept in a little pouch that they wore on their neck, waiste, or arm?  I wonder about all sorts of things.  Why was it important to have a portable calendar?  Maybe so you could tell what day it was when the Moon wasn’t visible?  Would one person be the date keeper?  Would everyone else go up to them and say “hey Larry, what day is it?”.  Or, “how many more days do we have before we all meet up by that one river for the party?”  Would the guy in charge of it be an astronomy nerd like me?  Maybe he just kept it to himself for his own amusement, ha.

I’m a little disappointed that the stone didn’t have 4 sides with 7 notches each (one for each “week”).  They could go from new moon to half moon along one side, then to full moon on another side, then to half, then back to new.  Was one of these phases deemed “more important” than the other in that it was given a seven day side?  Where the other notches just “the rest” of the month, divided onto the two sides randomly as they fit?  Did they really have three weeks in a month, with a seven day week, followed by a 9 day week, followed by a 11 day one?  Is it just easier to denote which day you’re on in rock art when they’re not the same length?

I also wonder if they were able to reuse the calendar, or would they start scratching up a new pebble once the lunar cycle is complete?  I’m imagining they could tie a string around the pebble and place it in between the grooves of the notches and  use that to mark what day it was, then reuse it as many times as they wanted.  The pebble was used for a long time before it was used as a calendar, so it’d be weird if they chucked it after 1 month.  It started out as a tool used chip at and touch up other stone tools, and was later used to bash and red ochre into paint.

I also wonder if the fact it was found on a high hill important.  Maybe, going up where it was high increased the chances that you could see the moon at a given time.  Maybe that’s just where they go for their astronomical stuff, a little observatory.

Of course, the stone only tells you what “day of the month” it is, but doesn’t tell you which month you were on.  Did they have some something else that kept track of the month?  How did they synch their lunar calendar with the seasons and solar cycle?  They found a site in Warren Field in Scotland from about the same time that might explain how they did that.  There, they found a series of twelve pits (one for each lunar month) and think that when the Sun was positioned in a particular way, they would reset their lunar calendars to align with the Sun.   It is thought that genetically, the people living in Italy and Scotland were both “Western Hunter Gatherers”.  If they had a similar culture in both places, maybe they had similar lunar/solar pit calendar up on that hill that was lost or we haven’t found yet?  

The Alban Hills are volcanic mountains which last erupted about 36000 years ago and is 5000 years overdue by for another eruption, likely within the next 1000 years, destroying nearby Rome.  They are situated in between two large lakes, which have supported human populations of various kinda for hundreds of thousands of years.  The calendar stone was created from rock outcrops several kilometers from where it was found, so the band would have been well traveled around this area.  During the Upper Pleistocene, the area was inhabited by Upper Paleolithic People (previously known as Cro-Magnon).  The people here were part of the Epigravetian stone tool culture, which encompassed Italy, the Balkans, and Ukraine.  From my reckoning, at some point there was a wave of hunter gatherers who entered Europe from the East, called the Eastern Hunter Gatherers, and they brought with them the advanced Mesolithic micro-blade stone tool technology.  They mixed with the Upper Paleolithic People they found there, and this mix became the Western Hunter Gatherer population, who occupied most of Europe west of Poland.  I’d like to have a better understanding of how old the calendar pebble really was and which group was using it.  I have been unable to read the full original paper on this lunar stone in Italy (without paying for it, ha), so I’m a little hazy on some of the details.  What made them think that it was 10,000 years old?  The news articles describe the artifact as being an Upper Pleistocene artifact, and some indicate that the Pleistocene ended at 10,000 years ago, so they said that the artifact was “at least” 10,000 years ago, and thus the oldest lunar calendar (the oldest other one being the one in Scotland).  Others just say it was dated at 10,000 years ago (how?).  As far as I know though, Italy was in the Mesolithic 10,000 years ago.  So maybe it’s actually a mesolithic artifact, or else it’s a Pleistocene artifact older than 10,000 years.    Unless this part of Italy was one of the last places to make the switch to the Mesolithic.  It’d be nice to know if it was truly contemporary to the one in Scotland.  

There are other artifacts suspected of being used as lunar calendars that are older than this one, but their use is considered controversial.  I guess if you start marking something with tallies each day, but didn’t get to the end of the month, there’s no way to tell if it was actually counting days of a lunar cycle, or just tallying any old thing.  It’s the fact that there’s 27 marks that make this one convincing.  There have been three controversial artifacts  found in France that could have been lunar calendars, including  a 28,000 year old baton found in Abri Blanchard, the 25,000 year old “Venus of Laussel”, and 17,000 year old paint marks among the cave paintings at Lascaux Caves.

Sources:

News Stories-

Lunar Stone (Jun 2019) https://www.academia.edu/40366419/A_new_notational_artifact_from_the_Upper_Paleolithic_Technological_and_traceological_analysis_of_a_pebble_decorated_with_notches_found_on_Monte_Alto_Velletri_Italy 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2019/07/25/10000-year-old-engraved-stone-could-be-worlds-oldest-lunar-calendar/amp/ 

https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/lunar-calendar-0012340 

https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2019/07/10000-year-old-engraved-pebble-found.html?m=1 

https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/38935-The-oldest-lunar-calendar-is-a-pebble-engraved-10-000-years-ago-found-near-Rome 

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9573269/stone-age-pebble-oldest-lunar-calendar/

Web Pages:

other lunar calendars: https://www.fundacionpryconsa.es/media/How-do-we-know-what-ancient-civilisation-knew-about-the-Moon.pdf

Marawah Island Settlement MR11, United Arab Emirates

 Early coastal trading village, oldest pearls (8,000 years ago)

Hey, it’s my first direct post on Blogger!  Recently, I’ve explored some potential settlements that were lost due to the rising sea level.  Today, I’m going to talk about a new settlement that was created thanks to the rising sea level.  During the height of the Ice Age, there was no Persian Gulf.  As the sea levels rose as the Earth warmed, the gulf began to fill in.  When humanity first domesticated livestock, the place that would become the Arabian Peninsula was not the desert we know now, but rather, it was a Savanna like land.  The people in the area started herding livestock, such as cattle, sheep, and goats.  They were nomadic pastoralists, moving their animals from pasture to pasture.  Then, around 8,000 years ago, the gulf coast reaches its roughly modern extent - even a little higher than today - and Marawah became an island off the coast of what is now the United Arab Emirates, about 100 km west of its capitol Abu Dabi.  The herders of the area decided to settle down on this island and take advantage of its sea resources and access to other parts of the gulf via boat.  We know of two such settlements at the west end of the island, MR11 (the better excavated one) and MR1 (mostly known just for some stone projectile points right now). Thus began a way of life that continues to the modern day.  

Archaeologists found houses in a settlement on the island that date back to 8000 years ago and remained in use for a couple hundred years.  Small single room houses were shaped like ovals or “pills”.  They had very thick walls of cobbled together stones.  It was originally thought that the stones would be placed in such a way so as to form a dome “igloo style”, although now they’re thinking they might have used something else to form a roof.  These little building units would be built adjacent to each other to form multi-room houses, sometimes with a door between them, other times without.  There appeared to be separate areas for livestock, so they continued to care for livestock even after settling down, though to a reduced capacity from their herding days.  Based on the content of vases found in the home, their main source of food was fish from the gulf though, which included requiem sharks, groupers, sea bream, and emperor fish.  They found stone sinkers near the water, indicating that they fished utilizing nets.  Shark teeth were punctured to make beads and likely used in necklaces.  They also ate marine mammals, such as Dugongs (sea cows).  Dugongs have been an important food source for the area until hunting them was banned in the 1970s.  Today, the island is a nature reserve with the second largest population of Dugongs after Australia.  Dolphins were also on the menu.  One dolphin jaw bone had grooves carved into it, perhaps as some kind of artistic display.  They also appeared to have hunted Gazelle.  It’s speculated that they might have introduced gazelles to the island so that there would be a supply available to hunt for when they wanted to eat them.  They had large stone spears that they would use to hunt these mammals, and stone knives for slicing them up.  

It seems that after some homes were no longer being used as residences for the living, that they would be reused as buriel places for the dead.  Two skeletons were found in the first house excavated in fetal positions, including “Marawah Man”. Unfortunately, they weren’t in good condition and scientists were unable to extract any dna from them due to difficulties in preservation due to the proximity of salt water.  

One thing that excites archaeologists is an indication of early trade with Mesopotamia.  They found a nearly complete vase from the Ubaid civilization there.  It is thought that such vases would be considered a luxury good.  They also found plaster vessels that appeared to be made locally and were painted in such a way as to mimic the Ubaid vase’s artistic patterns.  They later discovered the means by which they thought they may have “paid” for the vases.  They found the world’s oldest known pearl, dubbed the “Abu Dabi Pearl” in exhibitions, in one of the homes, which was about 7,700 years old.  They speculate that they must have boats that could have traversed the Persian Gulf and allowed the trade of pearls for vases and other goods.  Pearling has been a main source of income for the gulf coast into twentieth century, with records of it in the middle ages and a prime source for the pearls prized by Europeans in the 1600s.  It was the United Arab Emirates primary source of wealth before Japanese cultured pearls drove down their prices in the 1930s, forcing them to switch their economy to oil.  It’s neat to know that this industry has a history that stretches this far back.  International commerce along the gulf has had a history as long.  They also turned pearl oyster shells into buttons and made use of other shellfish for things like beads.

Unfortunately, this area started getting dryer and dryer, and the settlements were abandoned around 6,500 years ago.  By around 6,000 years ago, it was a desert.   

Sources:

News Stories - 

2004 Season (Aug 2004)  

https://studylib.net/doc/7613530/newsletter-adias-newsletter-may-2004  

First biosphere reserve (Aug 2007)  

https://gulfnews.com/uae/environment/marawah-is-uaes-first-biosphere-reserve-1.210810    

2004 Season Results (Aug 2008) 

https://www.academia.edu/2454404/Excavations_on_the_Neolithic_Settlement_of_MR11_on_Marawah_Island_Abu_Dhabi_United_Arab_Emirates_2004_season

Dugongs Hunted (Jun 2015)  https://www.thenational.ae/uae/environment/dugongs-were-once-on-the-menu-for-fishermen-in-abu-dhabi-1.106974

New Excavations  (Mar 2016)  https://gulfnews.com/entertainment/arts-culture/excavations-uncover-early-inhabitants-of-abu-dhabi-1.1698860    

2nd Skeleton Found (Aug 2016)  

https://www.thenational.ae/uae/ancient-house-for-the-dead-unearthed-on-uae-s-marawah-island-1.160716

3 Room House Detailed (Feb 2017)  https://www.thenational.ae/uae/abu-dhabi-archaeologists-unearth-rare-well-preserved-stone-age-house-1.74286

Rich past, boats (May 2017)  

https://gulfnews.com/entertainment/arts-culture/uaes-archeological-research-gives-insight-into-a-rich-past-1.2025618

Officials visit (Oct 2017)  

https://m.khaleejtimes.com/nation/abu-dhabi-archaeological-finds-shed-light-on-life-in-abu-dhabi-7000-years-ago

Settlement discovered (Jun 2018)  

https://www.thenational.ae/uae/heritage/earliest-village-discovered-on-abu-dhabi-island-is-evidence-of-an-8-000-year-old-gulf-superhighway-1.744398 

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/life-style/travel-and-tourism/2018/06/27/New-excavations-in-UAE-Island-uncover-8-000-year-old-village

Nice Life (Sep 2018)  

http://wam.ae/en/details/1395302752570

Vase expo (Jan 2019)  

https://m.khaleejtimes.com/nation/abu-dhabi/discover-arabian-tales-from-uaes-oldest-vase-at-louvre   

Earliest artwork (Apr 2019)  

https://gulfnews.com/uae/uaes-earliest-known-artwork-discovered-on-marawah-island-1.63071429 http://wam.ae/en/details/1395302752570 

https://www.thenational.ae/uae/heritage/priceless-discoveries-reveal-hidden-story-of-the-uae-and-humanity-1.844428  

Oldest perl (Oct 2019) 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/aae.12148 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.france24.com/en/20191020-world-s-oldest-pearl-found-in-abu-dhabi https://www.archaeology.org/news/8123-191021-abu-dhabi-pearl 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.emirates247.com/news/emirates/world-s-oldest-known-natural-pearl-discovered-on-marawah-island-2019-10-21-1.690274%3fot=ot.AMPPageLayout  

Fish Bones (Oct 2019)  

https://www.thenational.ae/uae/heritage/ancient-fish-bones-shed-new-light-on-life-in-uae-s-first-villages-1.929012

History of the Emirates Review (Nov 2019)  

https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/television/history-of-the-emirates-review-we-may-never-look-at-the-uae-in-the-same-way-again-1.941884  

Khambhat Underwater Site, India

 Submerged advanced coastal cities? (9,500 years old?)

(originally posted 8/8/2020 on Facebook)

Today’s 10,000 year old site is steeped in myth, pseudo-archaeology, history, alien conspiracy theories, religion, and mystery.  The world is full of ancient flood myths and also full of people who would love to find evidence of antedilluvian (pre-flood) civilizations.  If there is any truth to the myths, it is likely that they are a memory of a series of ancient sea level rises that occured at the end of the last ice age, as the glaciers melted.  That is what some people thought was found when the Indian government announced the apparent discovery of ancient large twin cities at the bottom of the Gulf of Khambhat in 2001.  They saw what appeared to be large building structures on the sea floor built near some old river channels.  They had dredged up artifacts from the sea bottom, such as pottery shards, human bones, and stone tools.  Wood found at the site was carbon dated and used to suggest its age was a whopping 9,500 years old. This is twice as old as the bronze age Indus Valley Civilization, which flourished nearby, the oldest known civilization in India and contempory to ancient egypt, crete, mycenea, and china.  There were small scale urban centers in Turkey and the Levant at the time, but nothing on the scale of this “Khambhat Civilization”.  This intrigued Graham Hancock, who added this to a list of underwater sites from around the world that seemed to argue that a global civilization had existed before the sea level rise, but which had sunk into the sea, like Atlantis.  

Some linked this site to a the mythological city Davaraka (Dwarka).  Ancient Hindu holy text tells the tale of a great city in India that fell into the sea thousands of years ago, founded by the hero or god figure Krishna, called Dwarka, who reclaimed land from the sea to build it.  There is a modern city named Dwarka off of the coast in its honor, located on the other side of the coast of the state of Gujarat to the west of the Khambhat cities.  The city has a temple dedicated to Krishna and the memory of the original Dwarka, which is one of the four main pilgrim sites in Hindu where the devout retrace the life of Lord Krishna.  The original city is generally thought to be 3-5 thousand years old, perhaps part of the Indus Valley Civilizations.  Could it be connected to the newly found cities, or even actually be one of these two cities?  The hindu holy texts described the city being assaulted by flying machines, which were shot down by advanced weaponry reminiscent of rockets.  Krishna successfully defended the city, but upon his untimely death, it collapsed into the sea.  Could ancient civilizations have advanced technology that was later lost, or perhaps were these texts describing ancient alien ufos?  A good number of ancient mystery and ufo conspiracy documentaries were created on the topic.  It makes for good entertainment.

Now for a reality check.  Most archaeologists dispute the meaning of the 9,500 year old wood piece that was found.  It wasn’t obtained by normal archaeological means, such as by going down there, poking around, and finding it within a certain layer of sediment within a specific context.  Instead, a big machine floating at the surface just took a big drill and scooped it up.  There’s no way to know if it can actually be associated with the underwater city.  All it means is that there was probably a forest around there 9,500 years ago, the city could have been built later.  The wood could have drifted in from anywhere.  It’d be kinda cool if there was maybe a smaller more reasonable sized settlement there 10,000 years ago, but I don’t think there’s even enough evidence to suggest that.  Most archaeologies dismiss the claims of buildings on the site altogether, and consider them to be naturally occuring geological stone structures which were later submerged.  They point out other places in the world where similar looking natural stone features exist on land.  These may bear a striking resemblance to giant cut stone blocks forming a larger structure, but are actually naturally forming fractured stone structures caused in the aftermath of earthquakes.  There’s been other artifacts found that suggest an old age, but nothing that convinces mainstream scientists.  These artifacts may have been washed up by a river from the the Indus Valley Civilization town of Lothol, which is located near the coast of the gulf, or perhaps from elsewhere.  Other artifacts they say are likely not manmade at all, and instead are naturally formed rocks.  The whole site may simply be an illusion.  The site is well known for its earthquakes, so archaeologists don’t think it would be possible to get good chronological data from the place because everything would be jumbled up instead of in dateable layers, and not worth studying more.

Of course, scientists claiming something that someone wants to believe is something is in fact nothing remarkable causes some people to then believe they are really covering it up, and thus their curiosity is peaked and they become determined to get to the bottom of the conspiracy.  If only the government would restart excavating the area.  What are they trying to hide?  I don’t think there is anything that the Indian government is trying to cover up.  I think they’re just embarraced about the whole thing.  It seems like they originally announced the findings with glee to the world with the hopes of bolstering Indian national pride and identity by saying that they were the home of the world’s oldest advanced civilization.  But scientists around the world weren’t impressed and so after a few more years of research, they just backed off, probably hoping not to hear about it again.  I do hope they allow curious divers to take a look though if they haven’t already though.  Unless the currents really are too dangerous to handle I suppose.  The site still has its believers though.  Maybe they’ll have the last laugh as the detractors are shown to be overskeptical when it is looked at more closely.  I kinda doubt it though.