National Geographic News for June 4, 2008 reported on 4000 year-old skeletons found in Peru.
The apparently mutilated, partial skeletons (see photos) could overturn the peaceful reputation of the Pre-Ceramic period (3000 B.C. to 1800 B.C.) in the Andes mountains—a time generally seen as free of ritualized killing and warfare.
Sub-heading: Research suggests our ancestors traveled the oceans 70,000 years ago.
Discover for May 20, 2008 reported on the theory that early Americans island-hopped as they migrated to the Americas.
Until recently most researchers would have dismissed such talk of Ice Age mariners and coastal migrations. Nobody, after all, has ever unearthed an Ice Age boat or happened upon a single clear depiction of an Ice Age dugout or canoe. Nor have archaeologists found many coastal campsites dating back more than 15,000 years. So most scientists believed that Homo sapiens evolved as terrestrial hunters and gatherers and stubbornly remained so, trekking out of their African homeland by foot and spreading around the world by now-vanished land bridges. Only when the Ice Age ended 12,000 to 13,000 years ago and mammoths and other large prey vanished, archaeologists theorized, did humans systematically take up seashore living—eating shellfish, devising fishing gear, and venturing offshore in small boats.
New evidence from the Monte Verde archaeological site in southern Chile confirms its status as the earliest known human settlement in the Americas and provides additional support for the theory that one early migration route followed the Pacific Coast more than 14,000 years ago.
NewsDaily for May 8, 2008 reported on the age of chewed seaweed found in Chile.
Bits of chewed-up or burned seaweed discarded more than 14,000 years ago confirm that people were in Chile at least that long ago and shed light on what their culture was like, researchers reported on Thursday.
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Florida State University have confirmed evidence of domesticated sunflower in Mexico — 4,000 years before what had been previously believed.The National Geographic News article is here.
Some of the fabrics found within her tomb have thread counts of over 80 weft yarns per inch, said Margaret Ordonez, a textile expert at the University of Rhode Island who studied the cloth.The ScienceDaily article is here.
Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a 2,000-year-old pre-Colombian settlement near Bogota, a find that may reveal information about the area's mysterious ancient inhabitants.
The find represents the earliest known hints that Mixtecs used this burial practice, which was later reserved for Mixtec kings and Aztec emperors, according to researchers who excavated the site.
The Aztecs had more numbers than we do, or at least symbols denoting numerical concepts. When it came to measuring land—critical for levying the proper tax or tribute—these medieval Mesoamericans used arrows, hearts, hands and other units representing fractions, according to a new study in Science.Click the link for a paper written by Ajaz Siddiqui in 2004 on The Aztec number system.
The pigment, known commonly as Maya blue, was used to paint offerings, pottery, murals, and even the bodies of humans before ritual sacrifices. (Related: "Ancient Maya Used 'Glitter' Paint to Make Temple Gleam [February 7, 2008].)
More than a hundred reasons have been proposed for the downfall of the Maya, among them hurricanes, overpopulation, disease, warfare, and peasant revolt. (Read "Maya Rise and Fall" in National Geographic magazine (August 2007).
Peter R. Fuchs, a German archaeologist who worked at the site, told the Peruvian newspaper El Commercial that the excavation contained "construction from 5,500 years ago."
As reported in LiveScience for February 12, 2008, scientists are using parasites that inhabit humans as a way of gauging human migration patterns.
"We hope to be able to understand human migration patterns by investigating their parasites, since people have carried these parasites with them as they moved around the globe," Reed said. "By looking at things like tapeworms, pinworms, lice or bedbugs that [early and modern] humans have carried around for at least tens of thousands of years, and in some cases millions of years, we can learn much more about human evolutionary history."
A Purdue University archaeologist discovered an intact ancient iron ore mine in South America that shows how civilizations before the Inca Empire were mining this valuable ore.
According to an article in Discover for January 15, 2008
Archaeologists have long thought that people in the Old World were planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting for a good 5,000 years before anyone in the New World did such things. But fresh evidence, in the form of Peruvian squash seeds, indicates that farming in the New and Old Worlds was nearly concurrent. In a paper the journal Science published last June, Tom Dillehay, an anthropological archaeologist at Vanderbilt University, revealed that the squash seeds he found in the ruins of what may have been ancient storage bins on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old. “I don’t want to play the early button game,” he said, “but the temporal gap between the Old and New World, in terms of a first pulse toward civilization, is beginning to close.”
