Kevin's Watch

Priceless Stone Age surprise

Cache of axes, knives, cleavers and other tools found at Cradle of Humankind



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A R350 million private-public heritage partnership near Krugersdorp has delivered an unexpected pay-off in the form of priceless Stone Age artefacts.

The tools, thought to have been used by our Homo habilis or Homo erectus forebears, are estimated at between 500 000 and 1,8 million years old.

Maropeng Africa chief executive Rob King told reporters on Thursday that scientists still have to determine the exact age of the implements.

The discovery was made a week ago on the site of a new visitors' centre being built in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site.

University of Witwatersrand archaeologists filled three boxes with axes, knives, cleavers, and related tools in barely 30 minutes, King said, while conducting journalists around the dusty site.

Scientists were being shown the progress made on the construction of a market place when the relic hunters spotted the implements in a gravel bed running like a seam through the excavated area. The seam is about 50 cm underground.

King showed journalists the cavities left when some of the tools were taken out. The area will now be the subject of a proper archaeological dig to find more of the tools, he added.

Ironically, a heritage impact assessment of the site before construction put the likelihood of any archaeological discovery at less than two percent.

The find was a "huge surprise to all of us", King said.

"Had we not excavated here, we would never have found it."

The announcement of the find coincided with Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa's renaming the site Maropeng.

Translated, it variously means "the place where we once lived" or refers to "the place of origin".

Groundbreaking Research Sheds Light on Ancient Mystery
RIT researcher creates new population model to help predict and prevent societal collapse


A researcher at Rochester Institute of Technology is unraveling a mystery surrounding Easter Island. William Basener, assistant professor of mathematics, has created the first mathematical formula to accurately model the island’s monumental societal collapse.


Between 1200 and 1500 A.D., the small, remote island, 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile, was inhabited by over 10,000 people and had a relatively sophisticated and technologically advanced society. During this time, inhabitants used large boats for fishing and navigation, constructed numerous buildings and built many of the large statues, known as Tiki Gods, for which the island is now best known. However, by the late 18th century, when European explorers first discovered the island, the population had dropped to 2,000 and islanders were living in near primitive conditions, with almost all elements of the previous society completely wiped out.


“The reasons behind the Easter Island population crash are complex but do stem from the fact that the inhabitants eventually ran out of finite resources, including food and building materials, causing a massive famine and the collapse of their society,” Basener says. “Unfortunately, none of the current mathematical models used to study population development predict this sort of growth and quick decay in human communities.”


Population scientists use differential equation models to mimic the development of a society and predict how that population will change over time. Since incidents like Easter Island do not follow the normal progression of most societies, entirely new equations were needed to model the outcome. Computer simulations using Basener’s formula predict values very close to the actual archeological findings on Easter Island. His team’s results were recently published in SIAM Journal of Applied Math.


Basener will next use his formula to analyze the collapse of the Mayan and Viking populations. He also hopes to modify his work to predict population changes in modern day societies.


“It is my hope this research can be used to create a better understanding of past societies,” Basener adds. “It will also eventually help scientists and governments develop better population management skills to avert future famines and population collapses.”


Basener’s research was done in collaboration with David Ross, visiting professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia, mathematicians Bernie Brooks, Mike Radin and Tamas Wiandt and a group of RIT mathematics students.

Kins wrote:Africa promises to be the most important area for important archaeological and anthropological finds but much of it is simply not safe enough for western archaeologists to work there and unfortunately few Native Africans have taken up the trowel. There are some but not nearly enough and little available money too.

Point may be oldest Idaho human artifact

Associated Press


SALMON, Idaho - The discovery of a carved obsidian spear point indicates that the earliest humans in what is now Idaho apparently spent time in the area's mountains as well as its canyons.

The spear point, believed to be 11,000 years old, was found last year just west of the Idaho-Montana border in the Beaverhead Mountains southeast of Salmon. If proved to be that age, it would be the oldest example of humans in that area, said Lane Allgood, a spokesman for North Wind, a company hired to help the Bureau of Land Management to investigate the cultural resources of the area.

Denise Stark, an environmental planner and archaeological technician with North Wind, found the point just below the ridge line of the Continental Divide. Following protocol, she left it on the mountain, and North Wind retrieved it a year later only after analysis and authorization by the BLM.

"I could see why they were hunting here, but it was rugged," Stark said. "I just kept thinking these people must have been nuts."

The age of the point was determined first by its shape and then by its similarity to a spear point discovered at Coopers Ferry on the Lower Salmon River, about 25 miles to the west. The shape suggested the spear point was of the Lind Coulee type, named for its discovery site in Washington state. It dates to the late Pleistocene period, when its makers used the spear to hunt big game, including now extinct forms of bison, elephants, camel, horse, mountain sheep, elk and deer.

Archaeologists at the Coopers Ferry site were able to carbon date materials at that site, setting the age at 11,000 years old.

"They are the least-known people from an archaeological standpoint," said Bill Harding, an archaeologist for North Wind. "If it holds up it is concurrent with the Clovis people recognized as the oldest people in North America."

The Clovis People were a mammoth-hunting nomadic group that likely came over the Bering Strait to North America.

Steve Wright, an archaeologist with the BLM Salmon field office, said if the point is of the Lind Coulee type, it will be among the earliest of artifacts recovered in that region.

The BLM hired North Wind to survey the area because it is required to conduct archaeological surveys when planning major work in an area. The agency plans to do a forest restoration project.

After the BLM has completed its analysis of the point, the artifact, an analysis and records of its location will be kept at the Idaho Museum of Natural History on the campus of Idaho State University in Pocatello.

Secret of Delphi Found in Ancient Text



Researchers at the University of Leicester have unravelled a 2,700 year old mystery concerning The Oracle of Delphi – by consulting an ancient farmer’s manual.

The researchers from the School of Archaeology and Ancient History sought to explain how people from across Greece came to consult with the Oracle – a hotline to the god Apollo- on a particular day of the year even though there was no common calendar.

Now their findings, published in this month’s edition of the journal Antiquity, suggests celestial signs observed by farmers could also have determined the rituals associated with Apollo Delphinios

Postgraduate student Alun Salt said: “The manual, Works and Days by Hesiod, dating to the eight century BC, describes the right time to plant crops or harvest by observing a variety of signs. One particular event he frequently looked for was the heliacal rising of a star, its first appearance that year in the morning sky.

“I was playing around with a planisphere while suffering from insomnia. This is when I noticed that the constellation Delphinus would have been rising in the eastern sky in late December and early January. This is the same time that some cities were sacrificing to Apollo Delphinios.

“I wondered if ritual events could use the same system described by Hesiod. The problem was that January wasn’t the time Apollo Delphinios was questioned at Delphi. Delphi was a month late compared to other cities. I knew the cliffs at Delphi would delay the rising of Delphinus there, but I didn’t know by how much.”

Efrosyni Boutsikas, a fellow postgraduate at Leicester, had surveyed Delphi as part of her PhD and had the figures. She said: “The temple of Apollo at Delphi is overlooked by huge cliffs to the east. These block out the view of the lower part of the eastern sky. The horizon is so high the stars have to climb a long way before they are visible just before sunrise.

“This means that if you’re holding an early morning ritual like preparing to consult Apollo, and you want to see a constellation, you have to wait around a month after other cities with flat horizons.”

Alun Salt concluded; “The great advantage that constellation spotting has over waiting for the sun to rise over a stone is that this system is portable. It could be used by Greeks across the Mediterranean who wanted to know when to visit Delphi without having to rely on knowing what the local date was in Delphi’s calendar. It also explains why Delphi’s calendar is slightly out of step with calendars in places like Athens.”

Does this make Delphi a Greek Stonehenge? Could this event still be seen by visitors today? Alun Salt is doubtful: “The event still happens, about a month later these days because of the way the Earth’s movement in the heavens has changed since ancient times. The big problem is light pollution. The stars of Delphinus are quite faint. You won’t see them from Athens, and I don’t know if the sky around Delphi is dark enough to make them out. It’s a challenge for anyone at Delphi around the start of February.

The findings are published in this month’s edition of the archaeological journal Antiquity.

Evolutionary Tools Help Unlock Origins of Ancient Languages



The key to understanding how languages evolved may lie in their structure, not their vocabularies, a new report suggests. Findings published today in the journal Science indicate that a linguistic technique that borrows some features from evolutionary biology tools can unlock secrets of languages more than 10,000 years old.
Because vocabularies change so quickly, using them to trace how languages evolve over time can only reach back about 8,000 to 10,000 years. To study tongues from the Pleistocene, the period between 1.8 million and 10,000 years ago, Michael Dunn and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics developed a computer program that analyzes language based on how words relate to one another. They developed a database containing 125 "structural language features," which include traits such as verb placement within clauses, for two sets of languages. Sixteen Austronesian languages made up the first set; the second was composed of 15 Papuan languages. (The image above shows an outrigger sailing canoe in a region where languages from the two sets are spoken. Called Island Melanesia, it is east of Papua New Guinea and northeast of Australia.) When the researchers used the new approach to reveal historical connections between languages, the results for the Austronesian languages closely resembled previous results that were based on vocabulary.



In contrast, the vocabulary-based method could not yield results for the Papuan languages but the novel technique did. It suggests that the languages are related in ways that are consistent with geographic relationships between them. In an accompanying commentary, Russell Gray of the University of Auckland in New Zealand cautions that the new technique still has uncertainty. But he contends that the approach "is likely to be widely emulated by researchers working on languages in other regions. In the future we may see the development of Web-based databases for the languages of the world. " --Sarah Graham

The Goddess of the Israelites

Colin Bower



20 September 2005 11:00


Asherah was the consort of the most senior deity in ancient Palestine and a goddess in her own right
The discovery that the deities of ancient Palestine were female ought to be good news for all of humanity, not just women. Even the increasingly beleaguered monotheistic religions might find reason to be pleased, for it gives them opportunity to reinvent a deity that will represent the yin and the yang, the yoni as well as the lingam, the mother as well as the father, the wife as well as the husband.

In his newly published book, Did God Have a Wife?, archaeologist William G Dever brings the record of matriarchy worship up to date. His findings will not be new to the world of scholarship, but they will be to the general public -- and their significance should reverb-erate in church councils and congregations for they thoroughly subvert conventional Christian and Judaic beliefs.

Dever finds that 90% of the people of ancient Palestine -- of the second millennium and the early centuries of the first millennium BCE -- lived in scattered and isolated rural communities, even after Jerusalem had emerged as the capital of a united monarchy. These communities practised a folk religion quite different from the monotheistic, patriarchal, literary and theo-retical religion we find in the Old Testament and the Hebrew scriptures. It was characterised by what people did, rather than what they thought; polytheistic, not bound by written rules and egalitarian. But, most importantly, it was matriarchal.

Their principal goddess was Asherah, consort of the most senior of the ancient deities of the area. Also in the pantheon of goddesses was Shapsh (Sun), Yarih (Moon), Astarte (androgynous) and Anat (warrior), some of whom were also sometimes identified with Asherah.

The cult of Asherah is confirmed by the archaeological record, which allows us to reinterpret previously incomprehensible passages in ancient texts. These include the Bible itself, which provides ample evidence of attempts to suppress information of the widespread worship of Asherah and other polytheistic practices.

She was a central deity to whom women and men both gave allegiance. Jewish Kabbalistic writings also confirm an early goddess called Shekinah, and testify to the holy act of sexual union between her and Yahweh, sometimes graphically described. Under the matriarchy, sex is not just holy, it is also very sexy; under the patriarchy it is regulated, controlled and, finally, under Paul, barely tolerated.

Of course, the existence of the matriarchy as predating patriarchal deities in many ancient civilisations is commonly accepted, and some argue for the one Great Mother as the original deity of all. But what is new and controversial is the discovery that the matriarchy was so firmly entrenched in the heartland of the world’s three great monotheistic religions.

Dever finds evidence of folk religion in cultic shrines all over Palestine, and of goddess worship in unmistakable terracotta figurines, in graphic art depicting stylised emblems of female worship and in the many disguised biblical references to Asherah.

The figurines invariably depict a nude female figure with large breasts and an often graphically displayed pubic triangle. The Bible refers to the shrines as “high places” characterised by Asherah -- typically translated as “groves” or wooden poles, but now believed to have been symbols of the goddess. Asherah was fully identified with trees -- the embodiment of wisdom in ancient Canaanite religion -- and many depictions show her growing from a tree trunk.

What will most challenge Christian and Judaic belief is Dever’s assertion that their holy scripts are the product of a tiny, but increasingly powerful, Jerusalem-based male literary and theological elite.

Monotheism was a late development, possibly as late as the Persian or Hellenistic periods, well after the Babylonian exile, and, therefore, a back-projection of the writers and redactors of the Bible.

This contradicts the conventional understanding of biblical texts as describing the universal story of the founding of mankind by a male god, Yahweh, of his exclusive guidance of a promised people to nationhood, and of the common destiny of the people who be came known as Israelites.

Post-modern critical theory has long taught us that texts are never quite what they seem to be. As a result of Dever’s work, we can now see more clearly that the religion of the Old Testament and the Hebrew scriptures is a humanly contrived narrative written to serve the interests of a particular group with a vested interest to propound and defend. That interest was monotheistic, elitist, priestly, literary and male. It conferred prestige and power upon those who served it.

Monotheistic, patriarchal narratives have largely enslaved the human consciousness for 3 000 years or more.

Dever’s work helps us understand that the Old Testament is one of these, and that it rightfully belongs in the mythical realm of the Gilgamesh epic and the Odyssey.

Kinslaughterer wrote:anthropology as a empricial social science.

Long-sought Maya City — Site Q — found in Guatemala




New Haven, Conn. -- A team of scientists including Marcello Canuto, professor of anthropology at Yale, has found incontrovertible proof of Site Q, a long-speculated Maya city, during a mission to the northwest Peten region of Guatemala.

The proof—an in-situ panel carved with over 140 hieroglyphs that fill in a key 30 year chapter in classic Maya history—was found in a little known ancient royal center called La Corona.

Roughly 40 years ago, the antiquities market was flooded with many exquisitely carved monuments of apparent Mayan origin. Many were purchased for private and museum collections despite a lack of provenance. Because of their similar style and shared subject matter, it was suggested that they came from some still unknown site located somewhere in the Peten lowlands. This site called Site Q — an abbreviation of the Spanish “ ¿que? ” or “ which? ” —has been the target of many expeditions.

The expedition to Guatemala this past April was to set up camp for an in-depth study later this year. On their last day in camp, Canuto and his team happened upon what they believe to be one of the monuments of Site Q.

“This panel exactly mirrors the style, size, subject matter, and historical chronology of the Site Q texts,” said Canuto. “This discovery, therefore, concludes one of the longest and widest hunts for a Maya city in the history of the discipline.”

In addition to confirming the existence and location of Site Q, the find is one of the longest hieroglyphic texts discovered in Guatemala in the last several decades. Canuto also noted that the two blocks making up the panel appeared to be in their original location in a temple platform and were in no way damaged or looted.

“The discovery reinforces the existence of a ‘royal road,’ a strategic overland route that links the Maya capital to its vassal kingdoms in the southern lowlands,” said team member David Freidel, professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University. “For this reason, the forested enclave of Laguna del Tigre should receive serious consideration as a World Heritage Region.”

The group will be returning to Guatemala to continue the study, which was supported in part by the National Geographic Society, the El Perú-Waka’ Archaeological Project directed by David Freidel and Héctor Escobedo, and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Other researchers included a mapping team of Damien Marken and Lia Tsesmeli, and an epigrapher Stanley Guenter, all of Southern Methodist University. Logistics for the expedition were carried out by Roan McNabb of the Wildlife Conservation Society, and Salvador Lopez, head of the department of Monumentos Prehispánicos of the Guatemalan Instituto de Antropologia e Historia (IDAEH).


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Ice Age infant skeletons found


Vienna - The 27 000 year old skeletons of two ice age infants have been found near Krems in northern Austria, the first discovery of its kind in Europe, the Austrian press reported on Saturday.

The perfectly preserved skeletons measuring 40cm had been protected by a mammoth's shoulder-blade bone, under which they had been buried on a sheltered hillside on the banks of the Danube river.

The grave, discovered 5.5m below ground, also contained a necklace of 31 pearls made from mammoth ivory and was located next to an area inhabited by ancient "homo sapiens fossilis", newspapers reported.

"It is the first discovery of a child's grave dating from this period," confirmed the excavation manager, Christine Neugebauer-Maresch, to the daily newspaper Kurier. "They may have been twins, but we have not yet been able to establish that," she told Die Presse.

The age of the skeletons will be analysed by the Institute of Natural Sciences in Vienna, which will also determine the cause of death.

"Homo sapiens fossilis" came out of Asia during the ice age as Neanderthal Man was dying out, and mastered stone and wood, but did not discover metal.