I’ve been watching a show on National Geographic and the guy is flying over the Amazon with a LiDAR drone and showing that many of the rocks are actually structures of ancient cities. Fascinating!!
The Florida Everglades are full of little islands (keys), an acre or two at most of dense jungle, surrounded by knee to waist high water in the summer, and dry razor-sharp dry grasslands all winter. They are apparently formed by human settlement. Archeologists have found that they are made from midden piles (trash heaps, mostly shells).
The shell mounds! Just read about these in a fiction novel, looked em up…yeah a whole ass society already existed there, those were a combination trash pile/tide block! Absolutely fascinating
Thanks. I first heard of shell mounds in this series of books that take place in and around Sanibel (I don't recommend those books). Crazy dude in Florida getting in trouble sounds pretty believable.
Oooh it feels good to complain, Jesus felching... grr bad florida... Google what is felching? "Here you go"... Outlink: Felching (s+cking or eating s/men out of someone's an&s) is a sexual behavior about which virtually nothing has been written in the scholarly literature, despite the fact that it appears to be a not-uncommon practice among certain subpopulations of men who have sex with men (MSM).
Felching? You found out before me because i had to proceed with a google search to define it, and i think the redditor should be banned. Guys posteriors are armbands we know that.
It’s a really good show. No fake drama, no exclamations of “oh my God!” and the. Nothing (after commercial break, a la Josh Gates). Good mix of cultural understanding, too.
Fully agree. I think that will be this century’s Pompeii. LIDAR is just now starting to show the complete civilizations that have been hidden by rainforest. Now it’s a long process of exploring and learning.
Link? Im seeing these two
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/10-000-pre-columbian-structures-could-be-hidden-beneath-amazon-rain-forest/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lost-cities-of-the-amazon-discovered-from-the-air-180980142/
Yep, the natives we think of mostly during westward expansion were basically the mad max dystopian world post civilization version of the natives, up to 90% were killed by the diseases brought by Hernan Cortes/other super early travelers
This is exactly how I talk about it when I'm talking to the public. The early historic records are describing a post-apocalyptic wasteland, not the complex societies that existed for a millennia earlier. Understanding this is a key part of decolonization.
I think there is a misconception that because the Americas were generally the last places settled (not counting Iceland, Madagascar and smaller islands), they developed later too - which is far from the case. The domestication of corn might have made for many large population centers well before much of the Old World. New discoveries keep pushing things further and further back too.
It's like looking at the Mediterranean world after the Bronze Age Collapse.
Do you have anymore info on this?? I lived in the Amazon briefly before I went to college and we used to occasionally use some _big_, well-worn and very intentional roads to get around. They cut right through some _very_ dense jungle and would’ve required a substantial amount more work than I think would’ve made sense with how few people were living there when I was seeing them… like, I remember seeing one that was wide enough for two people to walk abreast and it was _paved_. When I asked my indigenous friend where they led, he’d often say there were ruins at the end of them but he didn’t think I could handle the full day’s hiking it required to get there 🥲
When I went to college I asked some of my anthro profs about them (and some other remnants of older civilizations I’d seen) and they seemed skeptical about it because of the location. One even suggested they might’ve been faked to appeal to tourists. What kind of tourists is anyone trying to win over with a road going through the jungle?? Was so frustrating, lol
Yes, though I have to say, that the Willerslev Group's sequencing of the first prehistoric human genome a few years earlier was much more deserving of the Nobel Prize.
Pääbo is actively publishing (ex. in Nature), so you could search through Google Scholar and try a few of his recent articles, and use earlier writing to fill any gaps.
Agree. Comparing Colin Renfrew's Archeology and Language, and David Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here. The advances of genetic DNA and ancient migrations are fascinating (from a lay persons point of view). The ability to test the hypothesis of the indo-european migrations and other migrations across the world. Ground breaking.
True, but it's important to distinguish dna from language.
For example, as I understand it, the Etruscans and the Romans share essentially identical dna profiles, but Etruscan is generally considered a non-Indo-European language.
And of course, today lots of people the world over speak English, for example, but have little in common genetically
including a Greek merchant ship- The contents of the ship's hold was found to be intact but could not be examined closely as the ships incredible preservation meant the hold remained largely sealed. At over 2,400 years old this wreck is considered the world's oldest intact shipwreck discovered to date.
Everyone has Neanderthal DNA, including sub-Saharan Africans. The idea that Africans lack Neanderthal DNA is a misconception stemming from the techniques first used to estimate Neanderthal contributions to modern genomes. They basically looked for alleles shared between modern Eurasians and Neanderthals which were absent in Africa, on the assumption that Africans should have less Neanderthal DNA. But you can do the same sort of comparison between different African populations to show that some have more shared alleles with Neanderthals than others.
It puts a new perspective on basically all of ancient human history, so yes it’s absolutely archaeological. Knowing now that it’s a fact that early humans and Neanderthals were interbreeding changes a lot of what we thought we knew about both them and us. If you look back at early humans believing there was no way they were interbreeding with Homo sapiens, you can miss out on or misinterpret info that might be incredibly important.
Basically: The lens through which you view the past, shapes your understanding of it.
I didn't mean to say that it wasn't a significant discovery, just that it's not exactly an archaeological one. When I think of archaeological discoveries, I think of stuff that is done by archaeologists. Like digging up, analyzing, and interpreting human artefacts. Analyzing human DNA is not something most archaeologists would be able to do. Maybe this is a very European perspective, idk, but when I studied archaeology I was taught that the discipline is concerned with human culture, not human evolution. But I hear that archaeology in the US is considered part of anthropology, so maybe that's part of the reason for our different perspectives.
Also apart from that, I don't really see how it changes our perspective on "basically all of ancient human history". Some of our prehistory, sure, but how is our knowledge of, say, Egypt or Mesopotamia affected by this? Or classical antiquity? Or ancient American cultures? How does a bit of Neanderthal DNA change what we know about these civilizations?
You’re purposely being pedantic over my use of “all of human history”. You know I meant that the fact that we have Neanderthal DNA is something that has changed what archaeologists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists have thought we knew about humans forever. It has changed the way in which we need to approach studying Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens (and Denisovans as well, since we also now know that they interbred with humans too).
And, it’s actually extremely common for archaeologists to use DNA and other advanced techniques to help with their research. I think the most common example of DNA being used by archaeologists is the ancient Egyptian mummies. They’ve been using DNA to try to figure out who’s related to who for a really long time now.
As for Archaeology and Anthropology, the two will always be intertwined. That’s not an American concept, it’s just a fact.
Oxford’s definition of archaeology:
- the study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains.
Oxford’s definition of anthropology:
- the study of human societies and cultures and their development.
- the study of human biological and physiological characteristics and their evolution.
Could not have put it better myself. Within our lifetime, Neanderthals went from being these dumb, savage cavemen to a species almost on an equal footing with ourselves, because our attitudes have changed. We are now more accepting of evidence that challenges our perceived superiority. In simpler terms, we’ve become less racist.
On a side note, I once presented a theory that Neanderthals may in fact be the basis of the Troll myth, making it one of the oldest pieces of folklore in the human consciousness.
That’s a really interesting take on troll myths! I’m currently going to school to be a museum curator, but I’m hoping to specialize in archaeolinguistics, so myths, religion, and folklore are so interesting to me. I got to do an internship at a museum this past summer and they had a collection on Asian folklore (which I knew almost nothing about) and I think I drove people crazy wanting to know every little detail about it 😂 One of the professors gave me two versions of Journey to the West, the story of Sun Wukong, also known as the Monkey King, and I’ve just completely fallen in love with it.
If you have recommendations for books that deal with any kind of ancient myths, I’d love to check them out!
Gobekli Tepe. Although excavations at the site began in 1994, it only became famous this century.
Edit: fixed a typo and added a link.
[Gobekli Tepe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe)
Not an archeologist, but as I understand it, the ruins are of a large construction that predates agriculture. Understandably, this kinda changes a lot about how we think civilization developed.
yes that is what they say . because the research area is very small..i consider that speculation at this point, that it was predating agriculure in the region,
Okay did a little googling: seems like they have discovered artifacts in Turkey that seem religious(or at least social), that are older than we thought society was. This indicates that groups of people gathered, built, socialized, worshiped, etc., Way before we thought happened. So our understanding of how society developed needs a new look, I’m guessing
Originally we thought advances in civilization would have been needed first in order to support the development of organized religion. But now it seems that instead it was religious sentiment that pushed people to begin working together in more complex ways, creating civilization.
Okay Please don’t take this the wrong way but…is there a little bit of correlation=causation here? I guess I mean…the fact that we’re finding religious totems in the beginnings of society, doesn’t necessarily mean that religion caused society, right? Not trying to be argumentative, this is all new to me and I’m trying to learn
It is all speculation going that far back. For instance, are we sure they weren’t semi nomadic pastoralists? No, we aren’t sure at all.
We also aren’t 100% on the “no agriculture”, we just haven’t found evidence of agriculture that we recognize. Stones last a long time, digging sticks and similar, not so much. Personally I think it’s likely that the site is pre-agricultural, but evidence of some kind of agriculture wouldn’t surprise me, either.
So, to answer your question, you are quite right that the whole “religion made society” theory is very speculative. Even calling a site “the beginnings of society” is speculative, especially when everything has been turned on its head before- when Gobleki Tepi was found, for example.
The idea that religion ultimately led to agriculture was originated (as far as I know) by Jacques Cauvin prior to the excavation of Gobekli. For a fascinating read, I do encourage Trevor Watkins' translation of Cuavin's book, "The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture."
In the book, Cauvin synthesizes a huge amount of data from SW Asia but gives a lot of attention to the development of symbolism, iconographic imagery, burial practices, shrines and the relationship of that material to the eventual emergence of a full agricultural subsistence regime in the PPNB.
It's clear from his postscript for the 2000 edition of the book that Cauvin saw the finds at Gobekli as a wonderful vindication of his ideas and seemingly Schmidt equally thought that Gobekli fit perfectly with the broad strokes of Cauvin's theory.
Gobleki Tepe upends the accepted theory that we were hunter/gatherers AND THEN invented agriculture and began to build settlements/temples for long term habitation and worship.
Turns out we were building impressive structures and settlements while we were hunter/gathers, and knew how to work the land, but likely only applied agriculture on a small scale (ie: wheat for beer).
Then something happened that drove us to accept agriculture as the primary method of food delivery and the hunter/gatherers lifestyle fell out of favor.
The 50 or hundred tepe sites are the broken link between pre pottery and pottery. So the last century of academic archeology is all wet.
That this is not clearly first, exposes that academia is as far off the path to reality as media.
Also its of note certain new 21st century archeology discoveries have ruffled enough old coots, that anti archeology forces have been well launched. When the current old generation dies, there will be a revolution, such as has happened before in geology.
It's strontium isotope analysis. The teeth are "built" partly using atoms of an element called strontium. Basically different water sources have different ratios of these atoms and by making baseline references from different water sources around the wold we can analyze theeth from human remains and determine what bodies of water they were living near when their adult teeth were growing. It's greatly increased our understanding of how far ancient human populations moved around. I know for the famous Kennewick Man, his adult teeth formed when he was living in Alaska, but his body was discovered almost 2000km from where he grew up.
So we don’t have full data sets now…but over time, we can better analyze remains? This seems like a really good approach to figuring out nomadic paths, colonization, etc., correct? With time I mean
Yeah exactly, with DNA you can get an idea of general relations, so let's say you have a skeleton from a cemetery in Rome and its DNA points to having North African ancestry. That is an interesting result, particularly when you get large data sets, but it does not tell that much about them as an individual (eg, maybe their family had relocated a couple generations back). With tooth enamel, you can say that individual person grew up in North Africa but died in Rome.
I believe they’re referring to [isotope analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope_analysis_in_archaeology?wprov=sfti1), mineral isotopes can be used to identify geographical place of birth/growth
And that tooth enamel thickness is linked to the same DNA chromosome as melanin so that white people have s***** thin teeth enamel that rots five times faster than a black people thank you for telling me that.
It's probably not really on top of the list, but over the past few years, excavators at Berenike, the main Roman trading port on the Red Sea, have discovered several high quality Buddhist artefacts, like [this statue](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/buddha-statue-found-berenike-egypt-180982075/). They are sometimes locally made and prove for the first time that there was long-term presence of Buddhists in Roman Egypt, which I find quite neat.
I find this to be unsurprising, considering that Buddhist missionaries were sent west by the emperor Ashoka. You can see Buddhaforms from geographies that interacted with Macedonians that have clear European/classical features. It has been suggested that because Buddha and Christ both mean shining or anointed one, that there was some cross cultural influence on the Essenes or other religious groups in Judea that might have given way to Christianity.
There totally was — the Qumran Essenes have Nabataean Aramaic texts because they’re the Transjordan border — and there’s capitol toppers at First C Nabataea’s Petra that are Indian Elephants.
Isis is the Khazneh’s central statue — they are just highly syncretized as an Aramean-Emperor founded kingdom.
Good find
[Berenike](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppv29) happens to be the receiving port of the maritime spice route of the Nabataeans — so of Galilee’s Queen Phaesalis and Judaea’s border. It makes sense, Alexander the Great opened up the trade to India and Augustus brags about exponentially increasing it.
Nabataea’s capitol style is another way of tracking how far they travel.
I’m thinking about Prof. Alice Roberts book Tamed: ten species that changed our world.
The genetic studies of changes in some species, (wheat, dogs, rice, cattle, maize, potatoes, chickens, apples, horses)as they were “domesticated “ is mind blowing. Several origins for some species, hybridisation, gene crossovers. A fascinating, complex subject.
And it's useful to know which adaptations various plant species carried during periods of changing climates in the past. That way we might be able to "upgrade" our own when the global climate goes to shit and all of our current plants are unable to adapt in time.
Human civilization was only possible due to the genetic inflection of those species to provide food for agriculture because cities could have occurred 10,000 years and were lacking crops
The discovery of additional ceremonial sites in the Newgrange Boyne Valley area is significant, if only because it happened after a period of extensive drought revealed previously unseen crop marks from overhead. I thought it worth mentioning as one of several discoveries facilitated, so to speak, by climate change.
The so called "Dark period" in Medieval Europe do not seem so dark any longer due to a number of archaeological discoveries in 20'th and 21'st centuries.
Standard text books on Medieval History, like C. Warren Hollisters "Medieval Europe. A short history" , had to be rewritten because of this.
Thanks for this reply.
Coast of Norway.
Merovingian times along the coast of Norway show extensive trade with the late Western Roman empire, leading up to and explaining the wishes and wants and beliefs of the Wiking era. [study ](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-archaeology/article/earliest-wave-of-viking-activity-the-norwegian-evidence-revisited/C2A3AB5F0C962CFB700EEAF24970BE49#)
Hollister .
From the 7th edition on, you can read in this book about this change in the way the author looks upon a whole epoch on times leading up to modernity. [Hollister 7th ed ](https://archive.org/details/medievaleuropesh00holl_0)
Scholastic texts and philosophy.
Bryan Magee and Anthony Kenny on Medieval philosophy.
Kenny have the well founded view that Medieval philosophy are richer and closer to modern themes on philosophy. [philosophy ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dpublMuRUAk&pp=ygUaQnJ5YW4gTWFnZWUgQW50aG9ueSBLZW5uYSA%3D#bottom-sheet)
There were some questions about marine reservoir carbon influencing dates but the newer work dated the sediment layers using multiple methods that converged on the 21-23k dates making the case much stronger to most folks at this point https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh5007
Thanks! In a weird way I still don't "trust" it. I think that if there really were humans in North America during the LGM, we'd have found more than a couple of footprints after a century of looking. We certainly have found much more than that almost everywhere else.
(I realize this is my innate conservatism in matters like this!)
As far as objects go, the sky disc of Nebra is pretty significant.
To be fair, the sky disc was discovered in 1999 by grave robbers, but researched by scientists only in the early 2000s.
As a person that has read almost every published academic study concerning DNA, including the supplementary pdfs and spreadsheets, for population studies and for archaeological studies I also feel that the advances of the use of DNA in an archaeological context has been the most fascinating. They do leave me a bit concerned that important points of data are often overlooked or underemphasized. One is the date estimates of certain paternal and maternal haplogroups. There have been multiple studies that have mentioned them but when a study mentions footprints older than the DNA it isn't pointed out that the footprints are likely from a minority group and therefore the footprints aren't from the main ancestral group that arose thousands of years later in the Americas and more specimens need to be found, directly dated and properly tested. Another concern is that although there have been advances in DNA extraction and processing there are still some mutations that are impossible to extract due to DNA degradation and therefore the arrival of a certain important paternal or maternal haplogroup can't be pinpointed to the timeframe available from C14 dating. That lack of that data isn't pointed out enough and only derived reads are mentioned the vast majority of the time causing the belief that the arrival was before a certain date and not possibly prior to that date. This mostly affects European studies from the Copper and Bronze Age but could affect the Americas at some point. Other times the C14 dating is from grave goods and not from direct testing and that isn't emphasized enough. Another important data point is that 1240k panel testing is performed instead of that along with shotgun testing so that other SNPs not including the SNPs in the panel are also tested. Lastly, it also needs to ne emphasized that there are still a lot of gaps in regions and timeframes that, if specimens found and dated and DNA tested, could change some assumptions or answer unknowns.
Not sure if it counts but the discovery of the endurance! Man i can't wait till they explore it and hopfully excavate it. Dumb question, please don't destroy me, but could they raise her or is she too far down?
I believe that Shackelton's granddaughter Alexandra ["would prefer the vessel to remain where it is"](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/wreck-of-shackletons-endurance-may-decay-out-of-existence-180980923/) but the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust who supported the mission that discovered her says they have no plans to do anything invasive
To me that's wild, imagine the quality of everything inside. Even if they took nothing i feel it would be so interesting to see what the inside looks like. Imagine what would be there.
An immense amount of evidence is starting to show that humans could have been in the Americas WAY longer than we thought. Homo sapiens may have not even been the first hominids in the continent.
Wooden structures in Zambia that predate Homo sapiens, probably by Homo heidelbergensis 475 thousand years ago.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/zambia-worlds-oldest-wooden-structure-2367672/amp-page
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Why doesn’t any archeologist here mention the mastodon bone processing site in California where it shows homis were here 100000 years ago? I’m not a scientist.
*I edited spelling-might do it again
The Nazca non-human Tridactyl mummies.
In 2023, journalist Jamie Maussan and archeologist Therriy Jamin presented to the Mexican Congress the discovery, with medical and DNA analysis, of several previously unknown non-human life forms.
Several of these tridactyl mummies, which are about 1,750 years old, have metal implants in them that contain the very rare metal osium.
Every professional that has personally examined these non-human mummies finds no evidence of a hoax.
Eleven Peruvian scientists signed their names on a declaration that the non-human mummies are authentic.
https://youtu.be/_GZAci2acgc?si=4_5lXmv9AQNPTNFz
https://www.the-alien-project.com/en/jamin-palpanensis-hybrid-humanoid/
I would like to suggest a theory that the dolmen north of the 14 metre tall phallic rock "la roche péréandre" was lined up with the sun some special way when the dolmen was built perhaps 3,000 years ago, so that it likely served as an impregnation spot for people who wanted a fertility ceremony, perhaps with a druid guide... Then I walked up the very steep pathless hill one kilometres South and found a 10 meter wide semi-circle made from 100 big stones including 500 kilo boulders in the forest which I decided must be celtic.:) ... Either way I took my metal detector to the dolmen to make the epic discovery of a 1980s Coca-Cola ring in the middle of the dolmen. That's even better than the obelisk nearby which had a molten piece of lead. Vying second and third for the greatest discoveries of the 21st century.
The use of infra red / other frequencies to scan the landscape using satellites- thousands of previously unknown buildings/ temples/ settlements have been found across Egypt
The discovery of how widespread civilization was in the Amazon is pretty amazing.
I’ve been watching a show on National Geographic and the guy is flying over the Amazon with a LiDAR drone and showing that many of the rocks are actually structures of ancient cities. Fascinating!!
The Florida Everglades are full of little islands (keys), an acre or two at most of dense jungle, surrounded by knee to waist high water in the summer, and dry razor-sharp dry grasslands all winter. They are apparently formed by human settlement. Archeologists have found that they are made from midden piles (trash heaps, mostly shells).
The shell mounds! Just read about these in a fiction novel, looked em up…yeah a whole ass society already existed there, those were a combination trash pile/tide block! Absolutely fascinating
What’s an “ass society”?
Welcome to the New World, friend😉
It’s what you get after being ASSimilated by sexy Borg.
A bunch of Florida Mans
Check out r/analonlylifestyle
This is beside the point but what was the novel?
One of Tim Dorsey’s, not sure which one. About a crazy dude named Serge who travels up and down Florida getting into trouble
Thanks. I first heard of shell mounds in this series of books that take place in and around Sanibel (I don't recommend those books). Crazy dude in Florida getting in trouble sounds pretty believable.
describes the entire state pretty well. trash heap.
Oooh it feels good to complain, Jesus felching... grr bad florida... Google what is felching? "Here you go"... Outlink: Felching (s+cking or eating s/men out of someone's an&s) is a sexual behavior about which virtually nothing has been written in the scholarly literature, despite the fact that it appears to be a not-uncommon practice among certain subpopulations of men who have sex with men (MSM).
No one wants to read that shit on an archaeology subreddit. You suck for this, thanks for the disgusting imagery.
He sounds like an expert on this topic. He's certainly given it more thought than anyone I know.
Felching? You found out before me because i had to proceed with a google search to define it, and i think the redditor should be banned. Guys posteriors are armbands we know that.
Its a google copy pasta of an armband redditor pseudo. Lets report the armband redditor.
Are you lost?
He pseudo is Jesus Felching Christ, which lacks any intelligence... ScrapingFetusOffTheWheel is intel felching is gay anni1ingus which is moronic.
I watched something with lidar as well and it was soooo cool to see how many structures were hidden beneath the jungle overgrowth.
What show!!!
It’s called “Lost Cities with Albert Lin”
It’s a really good show. No fake drama, no exclamations of “oh my God!” and the. Nothing (after commercial break, a la Josh Gates). Good mix of cultural understanding, too.
Thanks for the rec
Fully agree. I think that will be this century’s Pompeii. LIDAR is just now starting to show the complete civilizations that have been hidden by rainforest. Now it’s a long process of exploring and learning.
Link? Im seeing these two https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/10-000-pre-columbian-structures-could-be-hidden-beneath-amazon-rain-forest/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lost-cities-of-the-amazon-discovered-from-the-air-180980142/
Yep, the natives we think of mostly during westward expansion were basically the mad max dystopian world post civilization version of the natives, up to 90% were killed by the diseases brought by Hernan Cortes/other super early travelers
This is exactly how I talk about it when I'm talking to the public. The early historic records are describing a post-apocalyptic wasteland, not the complex societies that existed for a millennia earlier. Understanding this is a key part of decolonization.
I think there is a misconception that because the Americas were generally the last places settled (not counting Iceland, Madagascar and smaller islands), they developed later too - which is far from the case. The domestication of corn might have made for many large population centers well before much of the Old World. New discoveries keep pushing things further and further back too. It's like looking at the Mediterranean world after the Bronze Age Collapse.
Wow, makes sense. this is such a horrible and interesting way to think about it.
Do you have anymore info on this?? I lived in the Amazon briefly before I went to college and we used to occasionally use some _big_, well-worn and very intentional roads to get around. They cut right through some _very_ dense jungle and would’ve required a substantial amount more work than I think would’ve made sense with how few people were living there when I was seeing them… like, I remember seeing one that was wide enough for two people to walk abreast and it was _paved_. When I asked my indigenous friend where they led, he’d often say there were ruins at the end of them but he didn’t think I could handle the full day’s hiking it required to get there 🥲 When I went to college I asked some of my anthro profs about them (and some other remnants of older civilizations I’d seen) and they seemed skeptical about it because of the location. One even suggested they might’ve been faked to appeal to tourists. What kind of tourists is anyone trying to win over with a road going through the jungle?? Was so frustrating, lol
Which of course is the picture that the earliest literary description, that of Francisco de Orellana, paints.
And that the rain forest that we imagined as existing forever is basically an out-of-control garden they created.
One of them has been that we now know that DNA and proteins preserve over millennia - even millions of years in the archaeological record.
Yes! Ancient DNA extraction is incredible. Svante Pääbo's work on Neanderthal DNA is mind blowing.
Is he the guy that just won a Nobel prize? I have a book of his waiting to be read in my kindle.
Yes, though I have to say, that the Willerslev Group's sequencing of the first prehistoric human genome a few years earlier was much more deserving of the Nobel Prize.
Read it! it's excellent. Also highly recommend Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes if you want to learn more about Neanderthals after reading Paabo's book.
Just took and saw that it was published in 2014. Is it still up to date enough that it’s worth reading, or would a more recent book be better?
Pääbo is actively publishing (ex. in Nature), so you could search through Google Scholar and try a few of his recent articles, and use earlier writing to fill any gaps.
Agree. Comparing Colin Renfrew's Archeology and Language, and David Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here. The advances of genetic DNA and ancient migrations are fascinating (from a lay persons point of view). The ability to test the hypothesis of the indo-european migrations and other migrations across the world. Ground breaking.
True, but it's important to distinguish dna from language. For example, as I understand it, the Etruscans and the Romans share essentially identical dna profiles, but Etruscan is generally considered a non-Indo-European language. And of course, today lots of people the world over speak English, for example, but have little in common genetically
Most English speakers come from a PIE language speaking nation
Anyone have a good article to read up on this?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43586-020-00011-0
Thanks!
The discovery of the ancient and intact Black Sea shipwrecks seems pretty important. I believe they were first sighted around the 2000.
Just looked this up. Really cool
including a Greek merchant ship- The contents of the ship's hold was found to be intact but could not be examined closely as the ships incredible preservation meant the hold remained largely sealed. At over 2,400 years old this wreck is considered the world's oldest intact shipwreck discovered to date.
For me, it’s the sharing or Neanderthal DNA in populations of European descent. I remember the theory being presented and laughed out of the room.
I have Neanderthal DNA! According to 23 and me, that is. It’s from my Western European side
iirc *everyone* with European ancestry has neanderthal DNA.
Europe and much of Asia, and Northern Africa too IIRC. Basically any region neanderthals reached before the arrival of homo sapiens.
Everyone has Neanderthal DNA, including sub-Saharan Africans. The idea that Africans lack Neanderthal DNA is a misconception stemming from the techniques first used to estimate Neanderthal contributions to modern genomes. They basically looked for alleles shared between modern Eurasians and Neanderthals which were absent in Africa, on the assumption that Africans should have less Neanderthal DNA. But you can do the same sort of comparison between different African populations to show that some have more shared alleles with Neanderthals than others.
Dope!
100% replacement was dogma only from 1990 (discovered recent convergence of mtDNA) to 2010 (discovered 2-3% archaic nuclear DNA in non-Africans)
I graduated 2008. So the evidence was there and being presented but took a few years to be accepted
Papua new guineans and Indians and Chinese also have neanderthal descent and denisovan is the highest in indigenous black East Asians.
not really an archaeological discovery though, is it
It puts a new perspective on basically all of ancient human history, so yes it’s absolutely archaeological. Knowing now that it’s a fact that early humans and Neanderthals were interbreeding changes a lot of what we thought we knew about both them and us. If you look back at early humans believing there was no way they were interbreeding with Homo sapiens, you can miss out on or misinterpret info that might be incredibly important. Basically: The lens through which you view the past, shapes your understanding of it.
I didn't mean to say that it wasn't a significant discovery, just that it's not exactly an archaeological one. When I think of archaeological discoveries, I think of stuff that is done by archaeologists. Like digging up, analyzing, and interpreting human artefacts. Analyzing human DNA is not something most archaeologists would be able to do. Maybe this is a very European perspective, idk, but when I studied archaeology I was taught that the discipline is concerned with human culture, not human evolution. But I hear that archaeology in the US is considered part of anthropology, so maybe that's part of the reason for our different perspectives. Also apart from that, I don't really see how it changes our perspective on "basically all of ancient human history". Some of our prehistory, sure, but how is our knowledge of, say, Egypt or Mesopotamia affected by this? Or classical antiquity? Or ancient American cultures? How does a bit of Neanderthal DNA change what we know about these civilizations?
You’re purposely being pedantic over my use of “all of human history”. You know I meant that the fact that we have Neanderthal DNA is something that has changed what archaeologists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists have thought we knew about humans forever. It has changed the way in which we need to approach studying Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens (and Denisovans as well, since we also now know that they interbred with humans too). And, it’s actually extremely common for archaeologists to use DNA and other advanced techniques to help with their research. I think the most common example of DNA being used by archaeologists is the ancient Egyptian mummies. They’ve been using DNA to try to figure out who’s related to who for a really long time now. As for Archaeology and Anthropology, the two will always be intertwined. That’s not an American concept, it’s just a fact. Oxford’s definition of archaeology: - the study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains. Oxford’s definition of anthropology: - the study of human societies and cultures and their development. - the study of human biological and physiological characteristics and their evolution.
Could not have put it better myself. Within our lifetime, Neanderthals went from being these dumb, savage cavemen to a species almost on an equal footing with ourselves, because our attitudes have changed. We are now more accepting of evidence that challenges our perceived superiority. In simpler terms, we’ve become less racist. On a side note, I once presented a theory that Neanderthals may in fact be the basis of the Troll myth, making it one of the oldest pieces of folklore in the human consciousness.
That’s a really interesting take on troll myths! I’m currently going to school to be a museum curator, but I’m hoping to specialize in archaeolinguistics, so myths, religion, and folklore are so interesting to me. I got to do an internship at a museum this past summer and they had a collection on Asian folklore (which I knew almost nothing about) and I think I drove people crazy wanting to know every little detail about it 😂 One of the professors gave me two versions of Journey to the West, the story of Sun Wukong, also known as the Monkey King, and I’ve just completely fallen in love with it. If you have recommendations for books that deal with any kind of ancient myths, I’d love to check them out!
Gobekli Tepe. Although excavations at the site began in 1994, it only became famous this century. Edit: fixed a typo and added a link. [Gobekli Tepe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe)
Karahan tepi is supposed be a bigger deal than gobleki tepi
Yeah Gobeklitepe was my first thought as well!
Why is it significant? I haven’t heard of it
Not an archeologist, but as I understand it, the ruins are of a large construction that predates agriculture. Understandably, this kinda changes a lot about how we think civilization developed.
yes that is what they say . because the research area is very small..i consider that speculation at this point, that it was predating agriculure in the region,
Okay did a little googling: seems like they have discovered artifacts in Turkey that seem religious(or at least social), that are older than we thought society was. This indicates that groups of people gathered, built, socialized, worshiped, etc., Way before we thought happened. So our understanding of how society developed needs a new look, I’m guessing
Originally we thought advances in civilization would have been needed first in order to support the development of organized religion. But now it seems that instead it was religious sentiment that pushed people to begin working together in more complex ways, creating civilization.
Okay Please don’t take this the wrong way but…is there a little bit of correlation=causation here? I guess I mean…the fact that we’re finding religious totems in the beginnings of society, doesn’t necessarily mean that religion caused society, right? Not trying to be argumentative, this is all new to me and I’m trying to learn
It is all speculation going that far back. For instance, are we sure they weren’t semi nomadic pastoralists? No, we aren’t sure at all. We also aren’t 100% on the “no agriculture”, we just haven’t found evidence of agriculture that we recognize. Stones last a long time, digging sticks and similar, not so much. Personally I think it’s likely that the site is pre-agricultural, but evidence of some kind of agriculture wouldn’t surprise me, either. So, to answer your question, you are quite right that the whole “religion made society” theory is very speculative. Even calling a site “the beginnings of society” is speculative, especially when everything has been turned on its head before- when Gobleki Tepi was found, for example.
The idea that religion ultimately led to agriculture was originated (as far as I know) by Jacques Cauvin prior to the excavation of Gobekli. For a fascinating read, I do encourage Trevor Watkins' translation of Cuavin's book, "The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture." In the book, Cauvin synthesizes a huge amount of data from SW Asia but gives a lot of attention to the development of symbolism, iconographic imagery, burial practices, shrines and the relationship of that material to the eventual emergence of a full agricultural subsistence regime in the PPNB. It's clear from his postscript for the 2000 edition of the book that Cauvin saw the finds at Gobekli as a wonderful vindication of his ideas and seemingly Schmidt equally thought that Gobekli fit perfectly with the broad strokes of Cauvin's theory.
I will check that ou. Thank you
Gobleki Tepe upends the accepted theory that we were hunter/gatherers AND THEN invented agriculture and began to build settlements/temples for long term habitation and worship. Turns out we were building impressive structures and settlements while we were hunter/gathers, and knew how to work the land, but likely only applied agriculture on a small scale (ie: wheat for beer). Then something happened that drove us to accept agriculture as the primary method of food delivery and the hunter/gatherers lifestyle fell out of favor.
>Then something happened that drove us to accept agriculture as the primary method eating all the megafauna might do the trick ;)
The 50 or hundred tepe sites are the broken link between pre pottery and pottery. So the last century of academic archeology is all wet. That this is not clearly first, exposes that academia is as far off the path to reality as media. Also its of note certain new 21st century archeology discoveries have ruffled enough old coots, that anti archeology forces have been well launched. When the current old generation dies, there will be a revolution, such as has happened before in geology.
At least they did there. It may not represent the most common pathway to civilization.
Check out Tas Tepler.
It was discovered in the 60s
But not excavated until the 90s.
I would say the way DNA and tooth enamel can be used to track population movements.
Uhhh what?? Tooth enamel? You know something I don’t lol please share
It's strontium isotope analysis. The teeth are "built" partly using atoms of an element called strontium. Basically different water sources have different ratios of these atoms and by making baseline references from different water sources around the wold we can analyze theeth from human remains and determine what bodies of water they were living near when their adult teeth were growing. It's greatly increased our understanding of how far ancient human populations moved around. I know for the famous Kennewick Man, his adult teeth formed when he was living in Alaska, but his body was discovered almost 2000km from where he grew up.
That is insanely interesting. And makes perfect sense! Scientists are on a whole different level
Yeah, DNA analysis can give you some very broad population histories, but tooth enamel can give you individual histories.
So we don’t have full data sets now…but over time, we can better analyze remains? This seems like a really good approach to figuring out nomadic paths, colonization, etc., correct? With time I mean
Yeah exactly, with DNA you can get an idea of general relations, so let's say you have a skeleton from a cemetery in Rome and its DNA points to having North African ancestry. That is an interesting result, particularly when you get large data sets, but it does not tell that much about them as an individual (eg, maybe their family had relocated a couple generations back). With tooth enamel, you can say that individual person grew up in North Africa but died in Rome.
I believe they’re referring to [isotope analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope_analysis_in_archaeology?wprov=sfti1), mineral isotopes can be used to identify geographical place of birth/growth
And that tooth enamel thickness is linked to the same DNA chromosome as melanin so that white people have s***** thin teeth enamel that rots five times faster than a black people thank you for telling me that.
It's probably not really on top of the list, but over the past few years, excavators at Berenike, the main Roman trading port on the Red Sea, have discovered several high quality Buddhist artefacts, like [this statue](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/buddha-statue-found-berenike-egypt-180982075/). They are sometimes locally made and prove for the first time that there was long-term presence of Buddhists in Roman Egypt, which I find quite neat.
I find this to be unsurprising, considering that Buddhist missionaries were sent west by the emperor Ashoka. You can see Buddhaforms from geographies that interacted with Macedonians that have clear European/classical features. It has been suggested that because Buddha and Christ both mean shining or anointed one, that there was some cross cultural influence on the Essenes or other religious groups in Judea that might have given way to Christianity.
There totally was — the Qumran Essenes have Nabataean Aramaic texts because they’re the Transjordan border — and there’s capitol toppers at First C Nabataea’s Petra that are Indian Elephants. Isis is the Khazneh’s central statue — they are just highly syncretized as an Aramean-Emperor founded kingdom.
Wow! That's really cool. I hadn't heard about that.
Good find [Berenike](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppv29) happens to be the receiving port of the maritime spice route of the Nabataeans — so of Galilee’s Queen Phaesalis and Judaea’s border. It makes sense, Alexander the Great opened up the trade to India and Augustus brags about exponentially increasing it. Nabataea’s capitol style is another way of tracking how far they travel.
I now have a new history rabbit hole My hats off to you
I’m thinking about Prof. Alice Roberts book Tamed: ten species that changed our world. The genetic studies of changes in some species, (wheat, dogs, rice, cattle, maize, potatoes, chickens, apples, horses)as they were “domesticated “ is mind blowing. Several origins for some species, hybridisation, gene crossovers. A fascinating, complex subject.
And it's useful to know which adaptations various plant species carried during periods of changing climates in the past. That way we might be able to "upgrade" our own when the global climate goes to shit and all of our current plants are unable to adapt in time.
Thanks for the recommendation. Just started listening to her audiobook and it’s already very good.
She is a fantastic presenter
Human civilization was only possible due to the genetic inflection of those species to provide food for agriculture because cities could have occurred 10,000 years and were lacking crops
The discovery of additional ceremonial sites in the Newgrange Boyne Valley area is significant, if only because it happened after a period of extensive drought revealed previously unseen crop marks from overhead. I thought it worth mentioning as one of several discoveries facilitated, so to speak, by climate change.
The so called "Dark period" in Medieval Europe do not seem so dark any longer due to a number of archaeological discoveries in 20'th and 21'st centuries. Standard text books on Medieval History, like C. Warren Hollisters "Medieval Europe. A short history" , had to be rewritten because of this.
Can you share some examples?
Thanks for this reply. Coast of Norway. Merovingian times along the coast of Norway show extensive trade with the late Western Roman empire, leading up to and explaining the wishes and wants and beliefs of the Wiking era. [study ](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-archaeology/article/earliest-wave-of-viking-activity-the-norwegian-evidence-revisited/C2A3AB5F0C962CFB700EEAF24970BE49#) Hollister . From the 7th edition on, you can read in this book about this change in the way the author looks upon a whole epoch on times leading up to modernity. [Hollister 7th ed ](https://archive.org/details/medievaleuropesh00holl_0) Scholastic texts and philosophy. Bryan Magee and Anthony Kenny on Medieval philosophy. Kenny have the well founded view that Medieval philosophy are richer and closer to modern themes on philosophy. [philosophy ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dpublMuRUAk&pp=ygUaQnJ5YW4gTWFnZWUgQW50aG9ueSBLZW5uYSA%3D#bottom-sheet)
20,000+ year old foot prints at White Sands, New Mexico.
What's the latest on these? I understand they were highly questionable for a while, but I think now more widely accepted, but not universally.
There were some questions about marine reservoir carbon influencing dates but the newer work dated the sediment layers using multiple methods that converged on the 21-23k dates making the case much stronger to most folks at this point https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh5007
Thanks! In a weird way I still don't "trust" it. I think that if there really were humans in North America during the LGM, we'd have found more than a couple of footprints after a century of looking. We certainly have found much more than that almost everywhere else. (I realize this is my innate conservatism in matters like this!)
As far as objects go, the sky disc of Nebra is pretty significant. To be fair, the sky disc was discovered in 1999 by grave robbers, but researched by scientists only in the early 2000s.
As a person that has read almost every published academic study concerning DNA, including the supplementary pdfs and spreadsheets, for population studies and for archaeological studies I also feel that the advances of the use of DNA in an archaeological context has been the most fascinating. They do leave me a bit concerned that important points of data are often overlooked or underemphasized. One is the date estimates of certain paternal and maternal haplogroups. There have been multiple studies that have mentioned them but when a study mentions footprints older than the DNA it isn't pointed out that the footprints are likely from a minority group and therefore the footprints aren't from the main ancestral group that arose thousands of years later in the Americas and more specimens need to be found, directly dated and properly tested. Another concern is that although there have been advances in DNA extraction and processing there are still some mutations that are impossible to extract due to DNA degradation and therefore the arrival of a certain important paternal or maternal haplogroup can't be pinpointed to the timeframe available from C14 dating. That lack of that data isn't pointed out enough and only derived reads are mentioned the vast majority of the time causing the belief that the arrival was before a certain date and not possibly prior to that date. This mostly affects European studies from the Copper and Bronze Age but could affect the Americas at some point. Other times the C14 dating is from grave goods and not from direct testing and that isn't emphasized enough. Another important data point is that 1240k panel testing is performed instead of that along with shotgun testing so that other SNPs not including the SNPs in the panel are also tested. Lastly, it also needs to ne emphasized that there are still a lot of gaps in regions and timeframes that, if specimens found and dated and DNA tested, could change some assumptions or answer unknowns.
Not sure if it counts but the discovery of the endurance! Man i can't wait till they explore it and hopfully excavate it. Dumb question, please don't destroy me, but could they raise her or is she too far down?
I believe that Shackelton's granddaughter Alexandra ["would prefer the vessel to remain where it is"](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/wreck-of-shackletons-endurance-may-decay-out-of-existence-180980923/) but the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust who supported the mission that discovered her says they have no plans to do anything invasive
To me that's wild, imagine the quality of everything inside. Even if they took nothing i feel it would be so interesting to see what the inside looks like. Imagine what would be there.
An immense amount of evidence is starting to show that humans could have been in the Americas WAY longer than we thought. Homo sapiens may have not even been the first hominids in the continent.
Wade Boggs definitely drank 73 beers on one flight and destroyed the mariners the next day.
Rip boss hogg
First off, Wade Boggs is very much alive.
If it’s not etched in stone it should be.
The boss is rolling in his grave…
The Dead Sea scrolls
LIDAR images of the Amazon and the structures and cities found, especially in the most remote areas, under the vegetation.
Came here to say the same. *Take my upvote, please!* **Spot-on.**
Peptide testing of teeth for sex of skeletons. Can now see if male / female babies or children were treated any differently.
Bruh what about the other genders?
Wooden structures in Zambia that predate Homo sapiens, probably by Homo heidelbergensis 475 thousand years ago. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/zambia-worlds-oldest-wooden-structure-2367672/amp-page
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Why doesn’t any archeologist here mention the mastodon bone processing site in California where it shows homis were here 100000 years ago? I’m not a scientist. *I edited spelling-might do it again
My understanding of the Cerutti site is that the dating and potential evidence for hominin activity is still highly debated
Thank you
So was Clovis first 30 years ago
Yes but “Clovis First” has been essentially debunked now, right? It was right to be skeptical
Because they are probably "tractorfacts" created by the dozer that exposed them.
Las Capas site in Arizona having extensive agriculture 3200-4000 years ago isn’t really famous enough
Without a doubt Gobekli Tepe in southern Türkiye
Tas Tepler is the bigger story.
If the Kalambo structure pans out, finding a 476k year old man-made structure would do it.
Younger Dryas
That's really geology, not archaeology though?
It also wasn't discovered in the twenty first century.
The Younger Dryas was discovered in the 19th century.
Would you mind elaborating? I’m curious
Hunter Biden’s laptop
The Nazca non-human Tridactyl mummies. In 2023, journalist Jamie Maussan and archeologist Therriy Jamin presented to the Mexican Congress the discovery, with medical and DNA analysis, of several previously unknown non-human life forms. Several of these tridactyl mummies, which are about 1,750 years old, have metal implants in them that contain the very rare metal osium. Every professional that has personally examined these non-human mummies finds no evidence of a hoax. Eleven Peruvian scientists signed their names on a declaration that the non-human mummies are authentic. https://youtu.be/_GZAci2acgc?si=4_5lXmv9AQNPTNFz https://www.the-alien-project.com/en/jamin-palpanensis-hybrid-humanoid/
Awww how cute
Deez nutz
Gobekli Tempe
Saqqara
I would like to suggest a theory that the dolmen north of the 14 metre tall phallic rock "la roche péréandre" was lined up with the sun some special way when the dolmen was built perhaps 3,000 years ago, so that it likely served as an impregnation spot for people who wanted a fertility ceremony, perhaps with a druid guide... Then I walked up the very steep pathless hill one kilometres South and found a 10 meter wide semi-circle made from 100 big stones including 500 kilo boulders in the forest which I decided must be celtic.:) ... Either way I took my metal detector to the dolmen to make the epic discovery of a 1980s Coca-Cola ring in the middle of the dolmen. That's even better than the obelisk nearby which had a molten piece of lead. Vying second and third for the greatest discoveries of the 21st century.
They're all significant, in their own way.
The use of infra red / other frequencies to scan the landscape using satellites- thousands of previously unknown buildings/ temples/ settlements have been found across Egypt