KV-63 ~ Newly Discovered Tomb
KV-63 is located in the Valley of the Kings approximately 14.5 meters from the south edge of KV-62, the Tomb of Tutankhamun.
Dr. Zahi Hawass officially pronounced our newly discovered tomb, KV-63 on 10 February 2006. However, the initial shaft was discovered a few days before the end of our 2005 season.
KV-63 is the first tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings since 1922.
--APyramid mystery cracked?
Paris - A French architect said on Friday he had cracked a 4 500-year-old mystery surrounding Egypt's Great Pyramid, saying it was built from the inside out.
Previous theories have suggested Pharaoh Khufu's tomb, the last surviving example of the seven great wonders of antiquity, was built using either a vast frontal ramp or a ramp in a corkscrew shape around the exterior to haul up the stonework.
But flouting previous wisdom, Jean-Pierre Houdin said advanced 3D technology had shown the main ramp which was used to haul the massive stones to the apex was contained 10-15m beneath the outer skin, tracing a pyramid within a pyramid.
"This is better than the other theories, because it is the only theory that works," Houdin told Reuters after unveiling his hypothesis in a lavish ceremony using 3D computer simulation.
To prove his case, Houdin teamed up with a French company that builds 3D models for auto and airplane design, Dassault Systemes, which put 14 engineers for 2 years on the project.
Now, an international team is being assembled to probe the pyramid using radars and heat detecting cameras supplied by a French defence firm, as long as Egyptian authorities agree.
"This goes against both main existing theories. I've been teaching them myself for 20 years but deep down I know they're wrong," Egyptologist Bob Brier told Reuters at the unveiling.
"Houdin's vision is credible, but right now this is just a theory. Everybody thinks it has got to be taken seriously," said Brier, a senior research fellow at Long Island University.
Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities was not immediately available for comment. Dassault said Brier and other Egyptologists attending the ceremony were supporters of Houdin's theory but had no financial links to him or the firm.
Intuition
Houdin began working full-time on the riddle eight years ago after a flash of intuition passed to him by his engineer father, and five years before actually visiting the site.
He found that a frontal, mile-long ramp would have used up as much stone as the pyramid, while being too steep near the top. He believes an external ramp was used only to supply the base.
An external corkscrew ramp would have blocked the sight lines needed to build an accurate pyramid and been difficult to fix to the surface, while leaving little room to work.
"What characterised the Egyptians was their sense of perfection and economy. We talk of durable development now, but it was the Egyptians who invented it. They didn't waste a single stone. They relied purely on intelligence," Houdin said.
Houdin also claimed to have shed light on a second enigma surrounding the purpose of a Grand Gallery inside the pyramid.
The Frenchman believes its tall, narrow shape suggests it accommodated a giant counter-weight to help haul five 60-ton granite beams to their position above the King's Chamber.
He thinks that no more than 4,000 people could have built the pyramid using these techniques rather than the 100 000 or so assigned by past historians to the task of burying the pharaoh.
Houdin, 56, brushed aside concerns about the popular curse which is supposed to punish those who penetrate the secrets of the pyramids, dating back to the opening of Tutankhamun tomb.
"Why should I be worried? I'm just explaining that the people of the time were architects of genius and that Khufu was a genius to order the pyramid's construction. What could happen to me, except that Khufu would thank me?," he said.
--AJoan of Arc Relics Are Actually Egyptian Mummy Remains, Research Reveals
The charred bones that were long believed to be remains of St. Joan of Arc don't belong to the French heroine but are instead the remains of an Egyptian mummy, a new study has shown...
...Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at the Raymond Poincaré Hospital in Paris, France, obtained permission last year to study the relics from the church in Normandy where they are housed...
...Charlier's team studied the relics—including a fragment of cloth and a human rib—under the microscope and subjected them to chemical tests.
Close inspection of the human rib showed that it had not been burned but may have been heated to create a blackened crust on the surface, Charlier said.
Meanwhile the fragment of linen cloth had a coating characteristic of mummy wrappings and contained large amounts of pine pollen.
"Pine resin was widely used in Egypt during embalming," Charlier explained, adding that pine trees did not grow in Normandy during Joan of Arc's time...
This is one of the reasons I love archaeology so...there's more than one way to skin a cat. This is why its becoming a truly successful holistic science.Dung-eating mites throw light on Inca civilisationMark Henderson, Science Editor
Mites that eat llama dung are providing scientists with critical new clues to the rise and fall of the Inca empire and the civilisations that preceded it.
The soil invertebrates are allowing researchers to trace the growth and decline of the peoples of the Andes several centuries before the Spanish conquest in 1532 brought written records to the region for the first time.
The evidence gleaned from fossilised mites, preserved in sediments at a lake about 50km (30 miles) from the Inca capital of Cuzco, has shown how the great empire increased in size and complexity in the early 15th century.
The abundance of the fossil mites is directly linked to the amount of llama dung that was deposited on the pastures around Lake Maracocha at particular times, and can thus be used as a proxy for estimating the size of the herds and pack trains that grazed there.
From this a team led by Alex Chepstow-Lusty, of Montpellier University in France, has been able to reconstruct the fluctuating fortunes of local populations for an era from which no written records exist.
The new research suggests that after a period of sharp growth, the Inca civilisation’s power had already started to wane immediately before the arrival of Francisco Pizarro’s conquistadors. This could reflect the advent of European diseases to which indigenous people and livestock had no resistance. Even further back in history, the mite records also show how two earlier civilisations, the Whari and the Tiwanaku, moved higher into the Andes as temperatures rose during the 11th century, then declined, partly because of prolonged drought.
Dr Chepstow-Lusty said that the mite evidence opened a valuable new window on a period that has always been difficult to study because Andean civilisations never developed forms of record-keeping.
“We don’t have any historical documents before the Spanish arrived, and we have had to rely on archaeology and evidence from things like pollen and charcoal,” Dr Chepstow-Lusty said. “What we have now is a new tool that can be used directly to study large herbivore populations, which in this part of the world are intimately linked to humans.”
In a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, his team has shown how mite numbers rise and fall in concert with well-documented socio-economic changes in the postconquest period. “When the Spanish arrived, the Inca seem already to have been in some kind of decline,” Dr Chepstow-Lusty said.
How invertebrates followed the empire
c1100 AD Whari and Tiwanaku civilisations start to decline. First major dip in the mite record from Lake Maracocha seen
c1200 Inca civilisation starts growing in Cuzco region
c1400 First signs of Inca expansion in mite record
c1438 Dramatic expansion of Inca empire; dramatic increase in the number of mites found at Maracocha
1525 Death of Huayna Capac provokes civil war between his sons, Huascar and Atahualpa. Mite data suggests decline
1532 First encounter between Francisco Pizarro and Atahualpa at Cajamarca, at which 168 Spaniards defeat Inca army and kidnap Atahualpa
1533 Murder of Atahualpa by the Spanish, followed by a rapid depopulation of the region because of smallpox and other diseases
1544-45 Two thirds of llamas in Cuzco area die of llama mange, a skin disease imported by the Spanish. Further fall in mite numbers
1572 Defeat of Tupac Amaru, the last Inca leader to resist Spanish rule
c1600 Reestablishment of rural communities in the region. Mite numbers begin to rise again
1719 Plague strikes Ollantaytambo region, with one hacienda reporting the loss of almost all indigenous workers. Mite numbers fall again
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Ancient Mexicans brought human sacrifice victims from hundreds of miles (km) away over centuries to sanctify a pyramid in the oldest city in North America, an archeologist said on Wednesday.
DNA tests on the skeletons of more than 50 victims discovered in 2004 in the Pyramid of the Moon at the Teotihuacan ruins revealed they were from far away Mayan, Pacific or Atlantic coastal cultures.
The bodies, many of which were decapitated, dated from between 50 AD and 500 AD and were killed at different times to dedicate new stages of construction of the pyramid just north of Mexico City.
The victims were likely either captured in war or obtained through some kind of diplomacy, said archeologist Ruben Cabrera, who led the excavation at the pyramid, the smaller of two main pyramids are Teotihuacan, which housed some 200,000 inhabitants at its height of power around 500 AD.
"Teotihuacan may have had a tradition of capturing prisoners for sacrifice," said Cabrera.
Ancient Mexican civilizations like the Aztecs sacrificed humans by cutting their hearts out but researchers are not sure how the victims at Teotihuacan were killed.
Little is known about the race that inhabited Teotihuacan or what language they spoke.
The site, Mexico's oldest major archeological site, was revered by later Mesoamerican civilizations, including the Aztecs, who gave it its current name, meaning "The place where gods are made" in their Nahuatl language.
Teotihuacan icons found in far away Mayan ruins in Guatemala and Honduras show the city's broad reach.
Littered among the victims' bodies at the pyramid are remains of animals that had symbolic importance including pumas, coyotes, eagles and snakes as well as a large number of precious objects like obsidian knives.
Discoveries in the early 1980s of sacrificial victims and weapons skewered previous theories that Teotihuacan had a peaceful culture, unlike the warlike Aztecs and Maya.
"Researchers always tried to throw a little fog over it, but there was human sacrifice even if we don't know if it had to do with wars," said Cabrera.
Fossil shows that chickens are descended from T Rex
By John von Radowitz
Published: 13 April 2007
Protein resembling that found in chicken has been extracted from a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bone, providing further evidence of the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.
The collagen tissue was removed from a fossilised thigh bone belonging to one of the giant predator dinosaurs. Analysis showed it was structurally similar to chicken protein.
The bone was unearthed in 2003 in the American state of Montana. Two years later, the find hit the headlines with the discovery that it seemed to contain soft tissues, including blood vessels.
Writing yesterday in the journal Science, researchers at North Carolina State University confirmed they had found fragments of the protein collagen preserved in the fossil. Mary Schweitzer, who led the US team, said: "For centuries it was believed that the process of fossilisation destroyed any original material, consequently no one looked carefully at really old bones."
The researchers used mass spectrometry to show the Tyrannosaurus fossil contained sequences of amino acids - protein building blocks - typical of collagen. The pattern looked like that of chicken collagen, and there were also similarities with frog and newt protein. "The similarity to chicken is definitely what we would expect given the relationship between modern birds and dinosaurs," said Dr Schweitzer.
"This data will help us learn more about dinosaurs' evolutionary relationships, about how preservation happens, and about how molecules degrade over time, which could also have some important medical implications for treating disease."
Ancient T. rex and mastodon protein fragments discovered, sequenced
68-million-year-old T. rex proteins are oldest ever sequenced
Scientists have confirmed the existence of protein in soft tissue recovered from the fossil bones of a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) and a half-million-year-old mastodon.
Their results may change the way people think about fossil preservation and present a new method for studying diseases in which identification of proteins is important, such as cancer.
When an animal dies, protein immediately begins to degrade and, in the case of fossils, is slowly replaced by mineral. This substitution process was thought to be complete by 1 million years. Researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and Harvard Medical School now know otherwise.
The researchers' findings appear as companion papers in this week's issue of the journal Science.
"Not only was protein detectably present in these fossils, the preserved material was in good enough condition that it could be identified," said Paul Filmer, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. "We now know much more about what conditions proteins can survive in. It turns out that some proteins can survive for very long time periods, far longer than anyone predicted."
Mary Schweitzer of NCSU and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences discovered soft tissue in the leg bone of a T. rex and other fossils recovered from the Hell Creek sediment formation in Montana.
After her chemical and molecular analyses of the tissue indicated that original protein fragments might be preserved, she turned to colleagues John Asara and Lewis Cantley of Harvard Medical School, to see if they could confirm her suspicions by finding the amino acid used to make collagen, a fibrous protein found in bone.
Bone is a composite material, consisting of both protein and mineral. In modern bones, when minerals are removed, a collagen matrix--fibrous, resilient material that gives the bones structure and flexibility--is left behind. When Schweitzer demineralized the T. rex bone, she was surprised to find such a matrix, because current theories of fossilization held that no original organic material could survive that long.
"This information will help us learn more about evolutionary relationships, about how preservation happens, and about how molecules degrade over time, which could have important applications in medicine," Schweitzer said.
To see if the material had characteristics indicating the presence of collagen, which is plentiful, durable and has been recovered from other fossil materials, the scientists examined the resulting soft tissue with electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy. They then tested it against various antibodies that are known to react with collagen. Identifying collagen would indicate that it is original to T. rex--that the tissue contains remnants of the molecules produced by the dinosaur.
"This is the breakthrough that says it's possible to get sequences beyond 1 million years," said Cantley. "At 68 million years, it's still possible."
Asara and Cantley successfully sequenced portions of the dinosaur and mastodon proteins, identifying the amino acids and confirming that the material was collagen. When they compared the collagen sequences to a database that contains existing sequences from modern species, they found that the T. rex sequence had similarities to those of chickens, and that the mastodon was more closely related to mammals, including the African elephant.
The protein fragments in the T. rex fossil appear to most closely match amino acid sequences found in collagen of present-day chickens, lending support to the idea that birds and dinosaurs are evolutionarily related.
"Most people believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but that's based on the 'architecture' of the bones," Asara said. "This finding allows us the ability to say that they really are related because their sequences are related."
"Scientists had long assumed that the material in fossil bones would not be preserved after millions of years of burial," said Enriqueta Barrera, program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences. "This discovery has implications for the study of similarly well-preserved fossil material."
###
You might have heard of these archaeologists
Here's a list of archaeologists associated with prominent excavations.
GIOVANNI BATTISTA BELZONI (1778-1823). Italian. Belzoni removed the colossal bust of Ramesses II at Thebes for shipment to England, where it's on display at the British Museum.
FLAVIO BIONDO (1392-1463). Italian. Regarded by some as the first archaeologist, Flavio explored and documented the ruins and topography of ancient Rome.
HOWARD CARTER (1874-1939). British. His 15-year search led to the discovery of the century: the well-preserved tomb of King Tutankhamun, which Carter unearthed in 1922 at ancient Thebes. The British Museum's "Treasures of Tutankhamun" tour, which ran from 1972 to 1979, was America's first museum blockbuster.
SIR ARTHUR JOHN EVANS (1851-1941). British. Excavating on the Greek island of Crete, Evans found the remains of the Minoan civilization and devised an accurate chronology of this previously undocumented Bronze Age culture.
WILLIAM FLINDERS PETRIE (1853-1942). British. Petrie excavated at the Egyptian capitals of Memphis and Thebes, where his findings included an inscription with the earliest known Egyptian reference to Israel.
HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN (1822-90). German. After making a fortune in the indigo trade and as a military contractor, Schliemann set out to prove that Troy was more than a legend. In 1870, he hit the jackpot at Hissarlik, in what is now Turkey, but tarnished his image with his greed and deceptions.
LEONARD WOOLLEY (1880-1960). British. T.E. Lawrence worked with Woolley at Carchemish, where the Babylonians defeated the Egyptians in battle. Woolley excavated the royal tombs at Ur of the Chaldees in Mesopotamia.
ALSO ...
LARA CROFT British. Self-taught archaeologist, linguist and antiquities-hunter-for hire, Croft excavated the Atlantean pyramid. Her critics consider her irresponsible.
INDIANA JONES (1899-). American. On leave from teaching at Marshall College, archaeologist recovered the Sankara stone in 1935 and the Ark of the Covenant in 1936 (the Holy Grail, alas, slipped through his fingers). Given his lack of effort to publish, it's a wonder he hasn't perished. Results of his latest expedition will be revealed in May 2008.
LANKESTER MERRIN Swedish or Dutch. Jesuit priest is known for his studies of demon-worship relics. His findings include a statue of Pazuzu, a Sumerian demigod he later had to help exorcise from a 12-year-old American girl.
INFOPLEASE.COM, ARCHAEOLOGYEXPERT.CO.UK, INDIANAJONES.COM, IMDB.COM
King Herod's tomb may have been found By STEVE WEIZMAN, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 17 minutes ago
An Israeli archaeologist on Tuesday said he has found remnants of the tomb of King Herod, the legendary builder of ancient Jerusalem, on a flattened hilltop in the Judean Desert where the biblical monarch built a palace.
Hebrew University archaeologist Ehud Netzer said the tomb was found at Herodium, a site where he has been exploring since the 1970s.
Netzer said a team of researchers found pieces of a limestone sarcophagus believed to belong to the ancient king. Although there were no bones in the container, he said the sarcophagus' location and ornate appearance indicated it is Herod's.
"It's a sarcophagus we don't just see anywhere," Netzer said at a news conference. "It is something very special."
Netzer led the team, although he said he was not on the site when the sarcophagus was found.
Stephen Pfann, an expert in the Second Temple period at the University of the Holy Land, called the find a "major discovery by all means," but cautioned further research is needed.
He said all signs indicate the tomb belongs to Herod, but said ruins with an inscription on it were needed for full verification.
"We're moving in the right direction. It will be clinched once we have an inscription that bears his name," said Pfann, a textual scholar who did not participate in Netzer's dig.
The fragments of carved limestone found at the sandy site are decorated with floral motives, but do not include any inscriptions.
Herod became the ruler of the Holy Land under the Romans around 40 B.C. The wall he built around the Old City of Jerusalem during the time of the Jewish Second Temple is the one that can be seen today. He also undertook massive construction projects in Caesaria, Jericho, the hilltop fortress of Massada and other locations.
It has long been assumed that Herod was buried at Herodium, but decades of excavations failed to turn up the site until now. The first century historian Josephus Flavius described the tomb and Herod's funeral procession.
Herodium was one of the last strong points held by Jewish rebels fighting against the Romans, and it was conquered and destroyed by Roman forces in A.D. 71, a year after they destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
Hebrew University had hoped to keep the find a secret until Netzer's news conference on Tuesday. But the university announced the find in a brief statement late Monday after the Haaretz daily found out about the discovery and published an article on its Web site.
Could this not just show how popular llama was on the menu?Quote:
Dung-eating mites throw light on Inca civilisationMark Henderson, Science Editor
Mites that eat llama dung are providing scientists with critical new clues to the rise and fall of the Inca empire and the civilisations that preceded it.
The soil invertebrates are allowing researchers to trace the growth and decline of the peoples of the Andes several centuries before the Spanish conquest in 1532 brought written records to the region for the first time.
The evidence gleaned from fossilised mites, preserved in sediments at a lake about 50km (30 miles) from the Inca capital of Cuzco, has shown how the great empire increased in size and complexity in the early 15th century.
The abundance of the fossil mites is directly linked to the amount of llama dung that was deposited on the pastures around Lake Maracocha at particular times, and can thus be used as a proxy for estimating the size of the herds and pack trains that grazed there.
From this a team led by Alex Chepstow-Lusty, of Montpellier University in France, has been able to reconstruct the fluctuating fortunes of local populations for an era from which no written records exist.
The new research suggests that after a period of sharp growth, the Inca civilisation’s power had already started to wane immediately before the arrival of Francisco Pizarro’s conquistadors. This could reflect the advent of European diseases to which indigenous people and livestock had no resistance. Even further back in history, the mite records also show how two earlier civilisations, the Whari and the Tiwanaku, moved higher into the Andes as temperatures rose during the 11th century, then declined, partly because of prolonged drought.
Dr Chepstow-Lusty said that the mite evidence opened a valuable new window on a period that has always been difficult to study because Andean civilisations never developed forms of record-keeping.
“We don’t have any historical documents before the Spanish arrived, and we have had to rely on archaeology and evidence from things like pollen and charcoal,” Dr Chepstow-Lusty said. “What we have now is a new tool that can be used directly to study large herbivore populations, which in this part of the world are intimately linked to humans.”
In a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, his team has shown how mite numbers rise and fall in concert with well-documented socio-economic changes in the postconquest period. “When the Spanish arrived, the Inca seem already to have been in some kind of decline,” Dr Chepstow-Lusty said.
How invertebrates followed the empire
c1100 AD Whari and Tiwanaku civilisations start to decline. First major dip in the mite record from Lake Maracocha seen
c1200 Inca civilisation starts growing in Cuzco region
c1400 First signs of Inca expansion in mite record
c1438 Dramatic expansion of Inca empire; dramatic increase in the number of mites found at Maracocha
1525 Death of Huayna Capac provokes civil war between his sons, Huascar and Atahualpa. Mite data suggests decline
1532 First encounter between Francisco Pizarro and Atahualpa at Cajamarca, at which 168 Spaniards defeat Inca army and kidnap Atahualpa
1533 Murder of Atahualpa by the Spanish, followed by a rapid depopulation of the region because of smallpox and other diseases
1544-45 Two thirds of llamas in Cuzco area die of llama mange, a skin disease imported by the Spanish. Further fall in mite numbers
1572 Defeat of Tupac Amaru, the last Inca leader to resist Spanish rule
c1600 Reestablishment of rural communities in the region. Mite numbers begin to rise again
1719 Plague strikes Ollantaytambo region, with one hacienda reporting the loss of almost all indigenous workers. Mite numbers fall again
This is one of the reasons I love archaeology so...there's more than one way to skin a cat. This is why its becoming a truly successful holistic science.
--A3 000-year-old mummy found
Cairo - Archaeologists have discovered the 3 000-year-old mummy of a high priest to the god Amun in the southern city of Luxor, antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass told the official Mena news agency on Saturday.
The 18th Dynasty mummy of Sennefer was unearthed in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings - one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world - by a team from Britain's Cambridge University.
"The mummy was found in tomb 99 in the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of Luxor," Hawass said.
A high priest was considered to be the most important man after the king, performing duties, religious rituals and offerings on his behalf.
Other mummies were found during the excavation, including one with a brain tumour, a foetus, a female mummy wrapped in plaster and others which appeared to have suffered from arthritis, Hawass said.
Valley of the Kings
The Valley of the Kings was used as a burial site for royalty and nobles to the west of present day Luxor, some 700 kilometres south of Cairo.
Millions of foreign tourists come to see Egypt's pharaonic treasures each year, including hundreds of thousands making the long journey south from the capital to the Valley of the Kings.
Hawass said a report on the findings would be presented to Culture Minister Faruq Hosni, in order to allocate resources for continued excavations in the area.
--ASA reveals 'modern man' secret
Washington - In one of the earliest hints of "modern" living, humans 164 000 years ago put on primitive makeup and hit the seashore for steaming mussels, new archaeological finds show.
Call it a beach party for early man.
But it is a beach party thrown by people who were not supposed to be advanced enough for this type of behaviour. What was found in a cave in South Africa may change how scientists believe Homo sapiens marched into modernity.
Instead of undergoing a revolution into modern living about 40 000 to 70 000 years ago, as commonly thought, man may have become modern in stuttering fits and starts, or through a long slow march that began even earlier.
At least that is the case being made in a study appearing in the journal Nature on Thursday.
Hallmarks of modern life
Researchers found three hallmarks of modern life at Pinnacle Point overlooking the Indian Ocean near Mossel Bay: harvested and cooked seafood, reddish pigment from ground rocks, and early tiny blade technology.
Scientific optical dating techniques show that these hallmarks were from 164 000 years ago - plus or minus 12 000 years.
"Together as a package this looks like the archaeological record of a much later time period," said study author Curtis Marean, professor of anthropology at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.
This means humans were eating seafood about 40 000 years earlier than previously thought.
And this is the earliest record of humans eating something other than what they caught or gathered on the land, Marean said.
Most of what Marean found were the remnants of brown mussels, but he also found black mussels, small saltwater clams, sea snails and even a barnacle that indicates whale blubber or skin was brought into the cave.
Cooked over hot rocks
Marean figured the early people, probably women, had to trudge three to five kilometers to where the mussels, clams and snails were harvested and to bring them back to the cave.
Then they put them over hot rocks to cook. When the food was done, the shells popped open in a process similar to modern-day mussel-steaming, but without the pot.
Marean and colleagues tried out that ancient cooking technique in a kind of archaeological test kitchen.
"We've prepped them the same way," Marean said in telephone interview from South Africa. "They're a little less moist (than modern steamed mussels). They definitely lose some moisture."
Marean also found 57 pieces of ground-up rock that would have been reddish- or pinkish-brown. That would be used for self-decoration and sending social signals to other people, much the way makeup is used now, he said.
'Almost mordern'
There have been reports of earlier but sporadic pigment use in Africa. The same goes with rocks that were fashioned into small pointy tools.
But having all three together shows a grouping of people that is almost modern, Marean said.
Seafood harvesting, unlike other hunter-gatherer activities, encourages people to stay put, and that leads to more social interactions, he said.
Yet 110 000 years later, no such modern activity, except for seafood dining, could be found in that part of South Africa, said Alison Brooks, a George Washington University anthropology professor who was not associated with Marean's study.
That shows that the dip into modern life was not built upon, said Brooks, who called Marean's work "a fantastic find".
Similar "blips of rather precocious kinds of behaviours seem to be emerging at certain sites," said Kathy Schick, an Indiana University anthropologist and co-director of the Stone Age Institute.
Schick and Brooks said Marean's work shows that anthropologists have to revise their previous belief in a steady "human revolution" about 40 000 to 70 000 years ago.
Unfortunately, I suspect that if asked to name famous archaeologists, those last few would be named more often than any other.