Indigenous Christmas Origins

> Indigenous Christmas Origins
> Pagan and Sami Roots of Today's Santa Claus Myths

> (c) Tyson Yunkaporta


> Dec 11, 2007
> fly agaric, the original xmas gift, mwrop
> Flying reindeer, Santa coming down the chimney, elves with pointy hats, mistletoe - all
> these Christmas myths originate from Aboriginal cultures.
> European Pagan Origins of Xmas


> The pagan festival of the invisible sun at the winter solstice is a European tribal
> tradition celebrated for the last ten thousand years at the shortest day and longest night
> of the year. European native peoples since ancient times have held ceremonies for the
> recovery of the sun god at this time, a time which later became known as "Christmas".


> Indigenous traditions from many native peoples have been borrowed for modern Christmas
> celebrations, such as mistletoe from Celtic fertility rites and holly (originally to ward
> off evil) from the Druidic tradition. Originally Santa Claus was not red and white, but
> was first depicted like this due to a seasonal link to native spiritual traditions
> involving hallucinogenic red and white mushrooms known as fly agaric. Later the Coca Cola
> company would patent these colours and popularise the now universally accepted colours of
> Santa's costume.


> Sami Ceremony and Entheogenic Mushrooms


> The red and white fly agaric mushrooms also played a part in the aboriginal origins of the
> flying reindeer image that is now popularly associated with Christmas. These mushrooms, or
> plant teachers, have always been used in rituals involving the sacred reindeer by the
> shamans of the Sami tribal peoples, who are still practicing traditional lifestyles as
> nomadic reindeer herders in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia today. The Koryak shamans
> of Siberian tribes gained notoriety in the grand western narrative of discovery when their
> winter solstice rituals involving the fly agaric were observed and recorded by
> anthropologists/adventurers, giving rise to several modern Christmas myths.


> At this ceremonial time, the Koryak tribespeople would work ritually with the mushrooms in
> their family tents. Their shamans would also work with the mushrooms to reach a
> non-ordinary state of reality that allowed them to do spirit-walking. (Note - the western
> interpretation of this is that it was an hallucination, but written here from an
> Indigenous viewpoint it is framed differently. For Aboriginal peoples, supernatural
> abilities like spirit-walking are as much a part of concrete reality as Christmas trees
> and the presents under them. So in this article, the spirit walking is fact rather than
> belief.)
> Spirit Walkers Bringing Gifts


> Koryak spirit walkers would visit the tents of their fellow tribesmen on their flying
> reindeer, the reindeer being a sacred totemic being for Sami tribal peoples. Once there,
> they would enter the tent through the smoke hole in the roof and distribute more mushrooms
> as gifts. Then they would exit through the chimney hole and fly away on their reindeer
> beings once again. It has been suggested that the egg-nog Christmas tradition was even
> grounded in these rituals, based on the practice of tribesmen drinking the agaric-spiked
> urine of the shamans who had ingested the mushrooms, perhaps mixed with egg and spices to
> disguise the taste. (Makes you think twice about mulled wine, for that matter!)


> On a more sober note, traditional Sami reindeer herders wear red suits and long felt hats,
> which is where the modern Christmas myth of Santa's elf helpers comes from.


> Clearly, the origins of many western Christmas traditions such as Santa's elves, Santa
> coming down the chimney, gift-giving, Santa's colours, Santa's home base in the Arctic
> North, and mistletoe can all be linked to time-honoured indigenous tribal ceremonies and
> customary practices.
> Aboriginal Christmas Reflections


> Christmas is as good a time as any to acknowledge the contributions of indigenous peoples
> around the planet to the formation of global knowledge, culture and innovations since the
> "age of discovery". So much of the technology, food, textiles, traditions and even
> mathematics that formed the basis for modern western civilisation was borrowed, or
> synthesised, or developed in conjunction with native peoples. And that is one hell of a
> Christmas gift.


> So spare a thought for the planet's fourth-world (indigenous) peoples at Christmas time,
> most of whom are excluded from the bounty of first-world colonies built on stolen native
> lands, resources and knowledge. So many Aboriginal people are even excluded from basic
> rights like education. Bear in mind that in America every year people spend more money on
> Christmas presents for their pets than it would cost to educate every third-world and
> fourth-world person on earth who is currently denied schooling.


> Ho, ho, ho.


> http://european-indigenous-peoples.suite101.com/article.cfm/indigenou...


> --
> Said American [Indian] Chieftain Acuera in reply to
> the invader de Soto's demand for submission to
> the king and the church so as to 'enjoy the benefits
> of 'civilization' and service:


> "I have long since learned who you [European Christians] are,
> through others of you who came years ago to my land;
> and I already know very well what your customs and
> behavior are like. To me you are professional
> vagabonds who wander from place to place,
> gaining your livelihood by robbing, sacking and
> murdering people who have given you no offense.
> ... Accordingly, I and all of my people have vowed
> to die a hundred deaths to maintain the freedom
> of our land. This is our answer, both
> for the present and forevermore."
> -- "Florida of the Inca" (1591)
> by El Inca [aka Garcilaso de la Vega]
> - First American Author to be published.

Indigenous Christmas Origins

Cooking Up Bigger Brains

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=cooking-up-bigger-brains
Scientific American Magazine - January, 2008
Cooking Up Bigger Brains
Our hominid ancestors could never have eaten enough raw food to support our
large, calorie-hungry brains, Richard Wrangham claims. The secret to our
evolution, he says, is cooking


Richard Wrangham has tasted chimp food, and he doesn’t like it. "The typical
fruit is very unpleasant," the Harvard University biological anthropologist says
of the hard, strangely shaped fruits endemic to the chimp diet, some of which
look like cherries, others like cocktail sausages. "Fibrous, quite bitter. Not
a tremendous amount of sugar. Some make your stomach heave." After a few tastings
in western Uganda, where he works part of the year on his 20-year-old project
studying wild chimpanzees, Wrangham came to the conclusion that no human could
survive long on such a diet. Besides the unpalatable taste, our weak jaws, tiny
teeth and small guts would never be able to chomp and process enough calories from
the fruits to support our large bodies.


Then, one cool fall evening in 1997, while gazing into his fireplace in
Cambridge, Mass., and contemplating a completely different question — "What
stimulated human evolution?" — he remembered the chimp food. "I realized what a
ridiculously large difference cooking would make," Wrangham says. Cooking could
have made the fibrous fruits, along with the tubers and tough, raw meat that chimps
also eat, much more easily digestible, he thought—they could be consumed quickly
and digested with less energy. This innovation could have enabled our chimp­like
ancestors’ gut size to shrink over evolutionary time; the energy that would have
gone to support a larger gut might have instead sparked the evolution of our
bigger-brained, larger-bodied, humanlike forebears.
...
Wrangham, who first encountered chimps as a student of Jane Goodall’s in 1970,
began his career looking at the way ecological pressures, especially food
distribution, affect chimp society. He famously conducted research into chimp
violence, leading to his 1996 book Demonic Males. But ever since staring into
that fire 10 years ago, he has been plagued with thoughts of how humans evolved.
"I tend to think about human evolution through the lens of chimps," he remarks.
"What would it take to convert a chimpanzeelike ancestor into a human?" Fire to
cook food, he reasoned, which led to bigger bodies and brains.


And that is exactly what he found in Homo erectus, our ancestor that first appeared
1.6 million to 1.9 million years ago. H. erectus’s brain was 50 percent larger than
that of its predecessor, H. habilis, and it experienced the biggest drop in tooth
size in human evolution. "There’s no other time that satisfies expectations that we
would have for changes in the body that would be accompanied by cooking," Wrangham
says.
...
So Wrangham did more research. He examined groups of modern hunter-gatherers all over
the world and found that no human group currently eats all their food raw. Humans
seem
to be well adapted to eating cooked food: modern humans need a lot of high-quality
calories (brain tissue requires 22 times the energy of skeletal muscle); tough,
fibrous fruits and tubers cannot provide enough. Wrangham and his colleagues
calculated
that H. erectus (which was in H. sapiens’s size range) would have to eat roughly 12
pounds of raw plant food a day, or six pounds of raw plants plus raw meat, to get
enough calories to survive. Studies on modern women show that those on a raw
vegetarian
diet often miss their menstrual periods because of lack of energy. Adding high-energy
raw meat does not help much, either—Wrangham found data showing that even at chimps’
chewing rate, which can deliver them 400 food calories per hour, H. erectus would
have
needed to chew raw meat for 5.7 to 6.2 hours a day to fulfill its daily energy needs.
When it was not gathering food, it would literally be chewing that food for the rest
of the day.
...
Wrangham’s theory would fit together nicely if not for that pesky problem of
controlled
fire. Wrangham points to some data of early fires that may indicate that H. erectus
did
indeed tame fire. At Koobi Fora in Kenya, anthropologist Ralph Rowlett of the
University
of Missouri–Columbia has found evidence of scorched earth from 1.6 million years ago
that contains a mixture of burned wood types, indicating purposely made fire and no
signs of roots having burned underground (a tree struck by lightning would show only
one wood type and burned roots). The discoveries are consistent with human-controlled
fire. Rowlett plans next to study the starch granules found in the area to see if
food
could have been cooked there.

Cooking Up Bigger Brains

14000 year old Natufian Toolkit

December 27, 2007


ABOUT 14,000 years ago the owner of an
ancient tool kit plonked it down near the
wall inside a small hut in what is now
Jordan.
It contained everything that could come in
handy on a trip to gather food: a sickle to
cut wild wheat, spearheads to hunt gazelle,
and even bead-making materials to while away
a few hours waiting for more prey to appear.


But it lay there, forgotten, for thousands of
years, until now. The collection of 36
objects has been unearthed and studied by
Australian archaeologist Phillip Edwards,
providing a rare insight into life for
prehistoric hunter-gatherers.


Dr Edwards, of La Trobe University, said the
implements had probably been carried in a
shoulder bag made of animal hide or twined
fibres.


"The most plausible explanation is that it
served as a tool kit for use on foraging
excursions," he said. But it was not known
whether the owner was male or female.


The ancient people of this region were known
as Natufians and built their earthen-floored
huts near sources of water, gathering wild
barley to eat as well as wheat.


The sickle in the tool kit was made of two
pieces of animal horn and 10 small stone
blades, which had been placed in two rows
according to their colour. This showed the
hunter-gatherers were interested in
appearance, not just utility, said Dr
Edwards, whose research is published in the
latest issue of the journal Antiquity.


The more than 20 sharp pieces of flint in the
tool kit could have been used to make spears
or arrows to kill the many animals in this
lush area of the Jordan Valley. The large
number of spares in the tool kit might have
allowed a lone hunter to re-arm while
pursuing an animal.


Other possible weapons in the tool kit
included a clutch of smooth pebbles. "The
smaller stones may have been used as
slingshot projectiles," Dr Edwards said.


But there may also have been some time for
handicrafts. The kit also contained five toe
bones from gazelles, which the Natufians used
to turn into beads by drilling holes in them
and cutting them to the same shape.

14000 year old Natufian Toolkit

Natufian Toolkit Discovered

14,000 year old tool kit found in Jordan, unique sickle in two
carefully grooved horn pieces is a marvel of form and function.

"There was a sickle for harvesting wild wheat or barley, a cluster of
flint spearheads, a flint core for making more spearheads, some smooth
stones (maybe slingshots), a large stone (maybe for striking flint
pieces off the flint core), a cluster of gazelle toe bones which were
used to make beads, and part of a second bone tool," he said.


Ancient Toolkit Gives Glimpse of Prehistoric Life
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News


Dec. 13, 2007 -- Before the end of the last ice age, a hunter-gatherer
left a bag of tools near the wall of a roundhouse residence, where
archaeologists have now found the collection 14,000 years later.


The tool set -- one of the most complete and well preserved of its
kind -- provides an intriguing glimpse of the daily life of a
prehistoric hunter-gatherer.


The contents, as described to Discovery News by Phillip Edwards, a
senior lecturer in the Archaeology Program at Melbourne's La Trobe
University, show the owner of the bag was well equipped for obtaining
meat and edible plants in the wild.


"There was a sickle for harvesting wild wheat or barley, a cluster of
flint spearheads, a flint core for making more spearheads, some smooth
stones (maybe slingshots), a large stone (maybe for striking flint
pieces off the flint core), a cluster of gazelle toe bones which were
used to make beads, and part of a second bone tool," he said.


Edwards outlines the finds, attributed to the Natufian culture from a
site called Wadi Hammeh 27 in Jordan, in the latest issue of
Antiquity.


He believes the tools were enclosed in a hide or wickerwork bag with a
strap that would have been worn over the shoulder. Such bags rarely
had compartments, so the owner probably protected valuable items by
wrapping them in rolls of bark or leather before placing them at the
bottom of the bag.


The sickle, constructed out of two carefully grooved horn pieces, was
fitted with color-matched tan and grey bladelets. It would have been a
marvel of form and function for its day and is the only tool of its
kind ever linked to the Natufian people.


The rest of the items were designed to immobilize and then kill game
such as aurochs, red deer, hares, storks, partridges, owls, tortoises
and the major source of meat -- gazelles.


"A lone hunter or a group of hunters might wait for gazelles to cross
their path while waiting behind a low 'hide' made of twigs and brush,"
Edwards explained.


"They might have worked on making bone beads to wile away the time.
Then a hunter could get off a shot while the animals were off their
guard. A first shot might wound, but not kill, and then a hunter or a
group of them will track the wounded animal."


He added, "We don't know if Natufian hunters had the bow and arrow, or
just spears."


The mountain gazelles targeted by the Near Eastern hunters probably
weighed between 39 and 55 pounds, so a strong adult "could carry an
entire carcass over his shoulders without much trouble."


But the bag's owner wasn't necessarily a man; women are thought to
have been in charge of plant gathering. The tools, therefore, either
belonged to a woman hunter-gatherer, or work activities were more
gender-blind than thought during prehistoric times, Edwards theorized.


Francois Valla, director of the French Research Center in Jerusalem
and a noted archaeologist, told Discovery News that similar ancient
clusters of tools have been excavated, but this latest one is "the
most spectacular of them all."


"The clustering of these items is due to a decision made by some
Natufian individual," Valla said. "As such, it is a rare testimony of
the behavior of a person 14,000 years ago."


The toolkit's showpiece item, its double-bladed sickle, is now on
display in the museum of the Faculty of Archaeology & Anthropology at
Jordan's Yarmouk University.
Source Article

Natufian Toolkit Discovered

Jade Empire

Ancient jade study sheds light on sea trade
Mon Nov 19, 2007 10:07pm GMT


By Tan Ee Lyn


HONG KONG (Reuters) - Over 100 ancient jade artifacts in museums across southeast Asia have been traced back to Taiwan, shedding new light on sea trade patterns dating back 5,000 years, researchers said.


Using X-ray spectrometers, the international team of scientists analyzed 144 jade ornaments dating from 3,000 BC to 500 AD and found that at least 116 originated from Fengtian in eastern Taiwan.


"The chemical composition of jade reveals its origin and ... their analysis determined the relative amounts of iron, magnesium, and silicon in the jade," the scientists wrote in a paper published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


"Based on elemental composition, 116 artifacts were identified as originating in Fengtian. The source of the others remains unknown."


Fengtian jade has a distinctive translucent green hue and black spots.


The 144 artifacts were unearthed in archaeological excavations in Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand.


ANCIENT FACTORIES


Odds and ends of Fengtian jade were found at several sites in the Philippines, Thailand and southern Vietnam, which the lead researcher Hung Hsiao-chun said may have been workshops.


"Fengtian jade was shipped to these workshops in southeast Asia, which dated from 500 BC to 100 AD. They were very small and they churned out these ornaments that were then exported to other places," said Hung, of the Australian National University in Canberra.


"What's really interesting is their products (from different countries) were very similar," she told Reuters in a telephone interview.


Jade earrings, beads, bracelets and pendants, some depicting two- headed animals, were popular in southeast Asia during the early Iron Age between 500 BC and 500 AD.


Prior to this period, however, Taiwan's jade ornaments were likely to have been crafted back home in Fengtian.


"There was a very huge workshop in Fengtian, dating back to 3,000 BC," Hung said, adding that one of the earliest pieces of Fengtian jade found in the Philippines dates back to 2,000 BC.


"Before, researchers thought all the jade in the Philippines was from China or Vietnam. With our analysis ... we found that most of the ornamental jade in the Philippines was from Taiwan."


The findings of Hung and her team revealed one of the largest prehistoric trades in semiprecious stone.


"Their seafaring methods must have been very superior, even back then," Hung said.


"What we know now is the origin of the jade. We need to find out who these craftsmen were and what tools they used. We know very little about their manufacturing process."
Full Article Here

Jade Empire

Night of the Killer Comet

The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly. A horn juts sharply from its head. The creature looks as if it might be swimming through a sea of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt cliff? For Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient
petroglyph, scratched into a rock by a Native American shaman. “You can’t tell me that isn’t a comet,” he says.


In Masse’s interpretation, the petroglyph commemorates a comet that streaked across the sky just a few years before Europeans came to this area of New Mexico. But that event is a minor blip compared to what he is really after. Masse believes that he has uncovered evidence that a gigantic comet crashed into the Indian Ocean several thousand years ago and nearly wiped out all life on the planet. What’s more, he
thinks that clues about the catastrophe are hiding in plain sight, embedded in the creation stories of cultural groups around the world.
His hypothesis depends on a major reinterpretation of many different mythologies and raises questions about how frequently major asteroid impacts occur. What scientists know about such collisions is based mainly on a limited survey of craters around the world and on the moon. Only 185 craters on Earth have been identified, and almost all are on dry land, leaving largely unexamined the 70 percent of the planet covered by water. Even among those on dry land, many of the craters have been recognized only recently. It is possible that Earth has been a target of more meteors and comets than scientists have suspected.


Masse’s epiphany came while poring over Hawaiian oral histories regarding the goddess Pele and wondering what they might reveal about the lava flows that episodically destroy human settlements and create new tracts of land. He reasoned that even though the stories are often clouded by exaggerations and mystical explanations, many may refer to actual incidents. He tested his hypothesis by cross-checking carbon-14 ages for the lava flows against dates included in royal Hawaiian
genealogies. The result: Several flows matched up with the specific reigns associated with them in the oral histories. Other myths, Masse theorizes, hold similar clues.


Masse’s biggest idea is that some 5,000 years ago, a 3-mile-wide ball of rock and ice swung around the sun and smashed into the ocean off the coast of Madagascar. The ensuing cataclysm sent a series of 600-foot-high tsunamis crashing against the world’s coastlines and injected plumes of superheated water vapor and aerosol particulates into the atmosphere. Within hours, the infusion of heat and moisture
blasted its way into jet streams and spawned superhurricanes that pummeled the other side of the planet. For about a week, material ejected into the atmosphere plunged the world into darkness. All told, up to 80 percent of the world’s population may have perished, making it the single most lethal event in history.


Why, then, don’t we know about it? Masse contends that we do. Almost every culture has a legend about a great flood, and—with a little reading between the lines—many of them mention something like a comet on a collision course with Earth just before the disaster. The Bible describes a deluge for 40 days and 40 nights that created a flood so great that Noah was stuck in his ark for two weeks until the water
subsided. In the Gilgamesh Epic, the hero of Mesopotamia saw a pillar of black smoke on the horizon before the sky went dark for a week. Afterward, a cyclone pummeled the Fertile Crescent and caused a massive flood. Myths recounted in indigenous South American cultures also tell of a great flood.


“These stories are all exactly what you would expect from the survivors of acelestial impact,” Masse says, leafing through 2,000-year-old drawings by Chinese astronomers that show comets of all shapes and sizes. “When a comet rounds the sun, oftentimes its tail is still being blown forward by the solar winds so that it actually precedes it. That is why so many descriptions of comets in mythology
mention that they are wearing horns.” In India, he notes, a celestial fish described as “bright as a moonbeam,” with a horn on its head, warned of an epic flood that brought on a new age of man.


Among 175 flood myths, Masse found two of particular interest. A Hindu myth describes an alignment of the five bright planets that has happened only once in the last 5,000 years, according to computer simulations, and a Chinese story mentions that the great flood occurred at the end of the reign of Empress Nu Wa. Cross-checking historical records with astronomical data, Masse came up with a date
for his event: May 10, 2807 B.C.


On its own, the mythological evidence is weak, as even Masse recognizes. “Mythology can help us hypothesize about events that might have occurred,” he says, “but to prove the reality of them, we have to go beyond myths and search for physical evidence.”


In 2004, at a conference of geologists, astronomers, and archaeologists, Masse outlined his evidence for a world-ravaging impact in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Ted Bryant, a geomorphologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales,
Australia, was intrigued and enlisted the help of Dallas Abbott, an assistant professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. In 2005, they formed the Holocene Impact Working Group (referring to the geological period covering the last 11,000 years) to seek out the geological signatures of a megatsunami. If a 600-foot-high wave ravages a coastline, it should leave a lot of
debris behind. In the case of waves generated by asteroid impacts, the debris they leave in their wake is believed to form gigantic, wedge-shaped sandy structures—known as chevrons—that are sometimes packed with deep-oceanic microfossils dredged up by the tsunami.


When Abbott began searching satellite images on Google Earth, she saw dozens of chevrons along shorelines and inland in Africa and Asia. The shape and size of these chevrons suggest that they might have been formed by waves emanating from the impact of a comet slamming into the deep ocean off Madagascar. “The chevrons in Madagascar associated with the crater were filled with melted microfossils from the bottom of the ocean. There is no explanation for their presence other than a cosmic impact,” she says. “People are going to have to start taking this theory a lot more seriously.” The next step is to perform carbon-14 dating on the fossils to see if they are indeed 5,000 years old.


Meanwhile, Bryant contends that chevrons found (pdf) 4 miles inland from the shore of Madagascar were formed by a wave that traveled 25 miles along the coast, moving almost parallel to the shoreline. “Neither erosion nor any other terrestrial process could have caused these formations. The biggest marine landslide ever recorded happened 7,200 years ago off the coast of Norway, and there was a tsunami, but
it was a far cry from leaving deposits 200 meters above sea level,” Bryant says.


Not everyone is convinced, to say the least. “I don’t believe the evidence of a crater off Madagascar, and the impetus is on Abbott to prove it,” says Jay Melosh, an impact expert at the University of Arizona and an outspoken critic of the theory. To make a case for the impact, Melosh says, Abbott “should be finding layers of glassy droplets and fused rock in sea-core samples, the sorts of things we find at all other similar impact sites.”


On the other hand, a lot remains unknown about impacts. As recently as 60 years ago, some geologists believed that the Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona—now considered the prototypical impact scar—was caused by a volcanic explosion, and they regarded impacts as a minor if not inconsequential influence on Earth’s history. Just 25 years ago, Luis and Walter Alvarez raised eyebrows with their idea that an asteroid collision helped kill off the dinosaurs. So Abbott continues to hunt for evidence that will clinch the idea that Noah’s flood was yet another example of extraterrestrial meddling. “It is still up to us to prove it, but if we have unequivocal impact ejecta,” she says, Melosh “is going to have to eat his words.”
Check it out on Discover Magazine

Night of the Killer Comet

Stone Age Camp Found In Germany

Stone Age Camp Found In Germany
Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 120,000-year-old Stone Age hunting camp in a coal mine in Germany. It is a find of great European importance, researchers say.

Open-cast coal mines may get a bad press, but in Germany they're still big business -- the country is the world's largest producer of lignite, or brown coal. Now another advantage of open-cast mines has been discovered -- they can conceal a rich seam of archaeological sites.


DPA
Archaeologists have discovered over 600 stone tools at the 120,000-year-old site.
Archaeologists have found the remains of a 120,000-year-old Stone Age hunting camp in an open-cast lignite mine near Inden in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

"We'll never find such a camp ever again," archaeologist Jürgen Thissen from the Rhineland Commission for Historical Sites said in Bonn Monday. "There isn't another one in the whole of Germany."

He added that the find was the first of its kind in the region, and was of European importance.

Thissen and his assistants came across postholes of three shelters in the open-cast mine last August. Two fireplaces with traces of fires were also found, as were over 600 stone tools and the stone chips left over from their production. Among the stone tools found were a stone knife, serrated blades, and so-called "blanks" (pieces of stone ready to be shaped into tools).


A hand ax was discovered in the mine in December 2005, prompting a full excavation. The team of archaeologists used the mine's mechanical shovel to remove 30,000 tons of soil, laying bare 3,000 square meters of ground that had last been exposed during the Eemian or Sangamon interglacial era which lasted from 128,000 to 117,000 B.C.E. approximately.

According to Thissen, the camp would have been used temporarily by one or more groups of hunters and gatherers during a summer hunting expedition. The climate in northern Germany at the time would have been similar to the Mediterranean today.

News of the sensational new find comes just a week after the announcement that a prehistoric village had been found (more...) near Stonehenge in southern England. That village dates back only to 2,600 B.C.E., however -- practically newly built in comparison to the Stone Age camp.

Stone Age Camp Found In Germany

In Georgia, a missing link?

DMANISI, Georgia—The forested bluff that overlooks this sleepy Georgian hamlet seems an unlikely portal into the mysteries surrounding the dawn of man.

Think human evolution, and one conjures up the wind-swept savannas and badlands of East Africa's Great Rift Valley. Georgians may claim their ancestors made Georgia the cradle of wine 8,000 years ago, but the cradle of mankind lies 3,300 miles away, at Tanzania's famed Olduvai Gorge.

But it is here in the verdant uplands of southern Georgia that David Lordkipanidze, a paleoanthropologist, has been unearthing one of the largest and most significant troves of prehistoric human fossils ever found outside of the Great Rift Valley. In doing so, he has begun to change fundamental beliefs about human evolution, and about early man's migration out of Africa.Full Article

In Georgia, a missing link?

Police expert restores image of prehistoric man

Zhao Chengwen, a professor at the China Criminal Police Institute, at work in his office.

An expert in police forensics has successfully reproduced the head image of a prehistoric man that lived one million years ago in Yunxian, central China's Hubei province, a cradle of Chinese human ancestors. The "Yunxian Man" is believed to have lived earlier than the prehistoric "Peking Man".

Zhao Chengwen, senior professor at the China Criminal Police Institute, restored the ancient man's head image based on a fossil skull excavated in 1990 from Yunxian, a county in northwestern part of Hubei province.

The Yunxian Man fossil skull is believed by scientists to belong to homo erectus, a predecessor of homo sapiens that walked on their two legs with an upright body posture. The fossil skull is the only wholly preserved skull of a homo erectus in China.

Before this feat, Professor Zhao had successfully reproduced images of some 20 ancient people based on their remains, either a mummified body or a piece of skull.

The expert said that the restored Yunxian Man image could well provide concrete reference for research on the relationship between homo erectus and homo sapiens that lived in prehistoric northern and southern China.
Full Article

Police expert restores image of prehistoric man

Cacao beans were first used for alcohol, research finds

People who lived in present-day Honduras about 3,400 years ago fermented the pulp of the plant before they began using it to make cocoa, archaeologists say.
By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 13, 2007
Humans began exploiting cacao beans for alcohol before they started using them to make chocolate, according to new findings from a remote Honduran village that push the earliest known use of cacao back about 500 years.

Residue scraped from pottery vessels dating to 1400 BC to 1100 BC indicates that residents of the Ulua Valley fermented the sweet pulp of the chocolate plant to make an alcoholic drink well before they began grinding the bitter seeds and mixing them with honey and chiles to produce the equivalent of modern cocoa.

The consumption of fermented cacao is much more recent than the production of wine and beer, which date to about 5400 BC in Iran and 7000 BC in China.

The chocolate drinks, which had an alcohol content of about 5%, had a special role in feasting, entertaining and binding indigenous groups together, said archaeologist John S. Henderson of Cornell University, who led the team reporting the find Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Henderson and archaeologist Rosemary A. Joyce of UC Berkeley have been excavating at Puerto Escondido in the alluvial valley of the Ulua River for more than a decade. The site has been called the Cradle of Chocolate because of its fertile soil and perfect conditions for cacao beans.

The beans were used as currency by the Olmecs and other peoples in the region for hundreds of years. Money literally "grew on trees," Henderson said.

Puerto Escondido has been continuously occupied since about 2000 BC by a largely agrarian people that shared a loose-knit society with the peoples around them, he said. The identity of the people who lived there in the second millennium BC is not clear, but they may have been precursors of the Olmec, whose civilization began to emerge around 1100 BC.

Before the current study, the oldest known use of cacao was marked by the discovery of a bottle containing traces of the material excavated from a grave in Colha in northern Belize. The bottle dated to 600 BC.

Archaeologist Patrick E. McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, who was involved in dating early uses of fermented beverages around the world, heard about Henderson and Joyce's efforts to date cacao use at Puerto Escondido and volunteered his services.

McGovern was able to extract traces of theobromine, the characteristic marker of Central American cacao, from the porous surfaces of pottery shards they sent him. "The results were astounding," he said. "Every vessel that he had chosen and was tested gave a positive signal for theobromine."

Although no traces of alcohol remain in the vessels, the pottery was of a type that is still used for alcoholic drinks. Pottery characteristically used for nonalcoholic chocolate drinks did not appear until a few hundred years later, the team said.

Henderson speculates that the story is not over yet and that they may find evidence of cacao use even earlier than 1500 BC.

"We're being conservative," he said. "I think it goes back much farther than that."

thomas.maugh@latimes.com

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Cacao beans were first used for alcohol, research finds

Mammoth hunters' camp site found in Russia's Far East

KHABAROVSK, November 12 (RIA Novosti) - Archaeologists have found a 15,000 year-old hunters' camp site from the Paleolithic era near Lake Evoron in Russia's Far East, a source in the Khabarovsk archaeology museum said on Monday.


"The site dates back to the end of the Ice Age, a period which is poorly studied" Andrei Malyavin, chief of the museum's archaeology department said. "That is why any new site from this period is a discovery in itself."


The site, found during a 2007 archaeological expedition to Lake Evoron, is the largest of four Stone Age sites, discovered near the Amur River so far, and was most likely established by mammoth hunters.


"We came to this conclusion after studying flint pikes, arrowheads and a stone scraper," Malyavin said, adding that a comprehensive archaeological excavation could take a couple of years.


In 2006, archaeologists discovered an Iron Age burial mound around 2,500 years old containing a unique fragment from an iron dagger, which had been preserved in the Amur Region's acidic soil.




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Mammoth hunters' camp site found in Russia's Far East

Prehistoric women had passion for fashion

Prehistoric women had passion for fashion By Ljilja Cvekic
Sun Nov 11, 10:38 PM ET



PLOCNIK, Serbia (Reuters) - If the figurines found in an ancient European settlement are any guide, women have been dressing to impress for at least 7,500 years.

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Recent excavations at the site -- part of the Vinca culture which was Europe's biggest prehistoric civilization -- point to a metropolis with a great degree of sophistication and a taste for art and fashion, archaeologists say.

In the Neolithic settlement in a valley nestled between rivers, mountains and forests in what is now southern Serbia, men rushed around a smoking furnace melting metal for tools. An ox pulled a load of ore, passing by an art workshop and a group of young women in short skirts.

"According to the figurines we found, young women were beautifully dressed, like today's girls in short tops and mini skirts, and wore bracelets around their arms," said archaeologist Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic.

The unnamed tribe who lived between 5400 and 4700 BC in the 120-hectare site at what is now Plocnik knew about trade, handcrafts, art and metallurgy. Near the settlement, a thermal well might be evidence of Europe's oldest spa.

"They pursued beauty and produced 60 different forms of wonderful pottery and figurines, not only to represent deities, but also out of pure enjoyment," said Kuzmanovic.

The findings suggest an advanced division of labor and organization. Houses had stoves, there were special holes for trash, and the dead were buried in a tidy necropolis. People slept on woolen mats and fur, made clothes of wool, flax and leather and kept animals.

The community was especially fond of children. Artifacts include toys such as animals and rattles of clay, and small, clumsily crafted pots apparently made by children at playtime.

COPPER AGE

One of the most exciting finds for archaeologists was the discovery of a sophisticated metal workshop with a furnace and tools including a copper chisel and a two-headed hammer and axe.

"This might prove that the Copper Age started in Europe at least 500 years earlier than we thought," Kuzmanovic said.

The Copper Age marks the first stage of humans' use of metal, with copper tools used alongside older stone implements. It is thought to have started around the 4th millennium BC in south-east Europe, and earlier in the Middle East.

The Vinca culture flourished from 5500 to 4000 BC on the territories of what is now Bosnia, Serbia, Romania and Macedonia.

It got its name from the present-day village of Vinca, 10 km east of Belgrade on the Danube river, where early 20th-century excavations uncovered the remains of eight Neolithic villages.

The discovery of a mine -- Europe's oldest -- at the nearby Mlava river suggested at the time that Vinca could be Europe's first metal culture, a theory now backed up by the Plocnik site.

"These latest findings show that the Vinca culture was from the very beginning a metallurgical culture," said archaeologist Dusan Sljivar of Serbia's National Museum. "They knew how to find minerals, to transport them and melt them into tools."

The metal workshop in Plocnik was a room of some 25 square meters, with walls built out of wood coated with clay.

The furnace, built on the outside of the room, featured earthen pipe-like air vents with hundreds of tiny holes in them and a prototype chimney to ensure air goes into the furnace to feed the fire and smoke comes out safely.

"In Bulgaria and Cyprus, where such workshops have also been found, they didn't have chimneys but blew air on the fire with straws, exposing man to heat and carbon dioxide," Sljivar said.

COLOURFUL MINERALS

He said the early metal workers very likely experimented with colorful minerals that caught their eye -- blue azurite, bright green malachite and red cuprite, all containing copper -- as evidenced by malachite traces found on the inside of a pot.

The settlement was destroyed at some point, probably in the first part of the fifth millennium, by a huge fire.

The Plocnik site was first discovered in 1927 when the then Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was building a rail line from the southern city of Nis to the province of Kosovo.

Some findings were published at the time but war, lack of funds and objections from farmers meant it was investigated only sporadically until digging started in earnest in 1996.

"The saddest thing for us is always the moment when we finish our work and everything has to be covered up with earth again," Kuzmanovic said. "That's the easiest for the state, conservation is very expensive and the land owners want to work in their fields."

But there was some hope that the latest excavation would be preserved due to its importance, Kuzmanovic added.

"We dream of uncovering the entire town one day, and people will be able to see prehistoric life at its fullest," she said.

For a table on Europe's prehistory, click on

(Editing by Ellie Tzortzi and Sara Ledwith)
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Prehistoric women had passion for fashion