Path of the Dead and Child Burial – Neolithic News
LiDAR technology in Ireland reveals hidden structures that could guide spirits into the afterlife. A child’s burial site from the 4th millennium BC was found in Armenia.
DNA analysis reveals features of people’s lives in other eras
DNA has revealed incest, smallpox and violent deaths among Christians living in caves in medieval Spain. And a Stone Age burial site in France, used for 800 years, is made up almost entirely of men; ancient DNA shows they are heavily related.
Archaeologists continue to dig up medieval burial sites in Eurasia
The first medieval necropolis has been discovered in Veliky Novgorod. A 1,700-year-old “barbarian” burial site has been discovered on the border of the Roman Empire in Germany. Archaeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered 10 kurgans, or burial mounds, dating back to the Middle Ages, and some of them have “whiskers.”
LUCA – the new universally recognized ancestor of all life on Earth
New research suggests that all life today descended from a cell that lived 4.2 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Earth formed. This last universal common ancestor, affectionately nicknamed LUCA by biologists, wasn’t all that different from the fairly complex bacteria that exist today — and it lived in an ecosystem teeming with other life and viruses.
Ediacaran animals are still considered the earliest multicellular animals on Earth
And paleontologists and geneticists are finding more and more evidence to support this fact. Using fossils and genetic dating, scientists have put forward very different candidates for the role of the world’s first animal. Today, animals of all shapes and sizes roam the Earth, from nearly microscopic creatures like tardigrades to 80-foot (25-meter) blue whales. These organisms emerged and developed over millions of years of evolution. But which animal was the first on the planet?
Cambrian animals add new mysteries to researchers
Jaws found in 500-million-year-old fossils. A new study by scientists at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) has concluded that O. alata was likely one of the first arthropods with lower jaws, a departure from previous research that suggested the animal may have been a filter feeder.
Matching dinosaur footprints found in Africa and South America
Tens of millions of years ago, South America and Africa were part of the same landmass, an ancient supercontinent called Gondwana. At some point, the two continents began to drift apart until only a thin strip of land remained above, holding them together. A team of scientists in a new study argues that matching dinosaur tracks found in what are now Brazil and Cameroon were left along this narrow passage 120 million years ago, before the continents split apart.
Dinosaurs could live underground
A newly discovered dinosaur may have spent part of its life underground. Paleontologists have recently uncovered a new fossilized animal — and this time, it’s a burrower. Fona herzogae, discovered in Utah by researchers and paleontologists from North Carolina State University, was a small, herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the Cenomanian period — about 100 to 66 million years ago.
New archaeological discoveries have shown that humans are capable of surviving in the most extreme conditions
The fossilized bones of a giant, extinct armored mammal provide the latest clue about when humans arrived in South America. At the time, in the late Pleistocene, numerous large animals inhabited the harsh, cold landscape, including giant sloths, mastodons, and saber-toothed cats. Humans were well-adapted to drought and resource scarcity, able to move along dry riverbeds in search of pools and the prey that grazed around them. The authors call this a “blue highway” that operated during the harshest periods.
The oldest human remains, 850 thousand years old, have been found
Archaeologists in Spain have made an unexpected discovery. The oldest human remains have been found in the Gran Dolina mountain range. Archaeologists from Spain have discovered the bones of some of the oldest archaic humans in Europe, who lived in the Sierra de Atapuerca mountain range, Gran Dolina, 850 thousand years ago, according to a press release from the Catalan University of Human Paleoecology and Social Revolution.