Category: archaeology

Posted on

Prehistoric Mammoth Traps Were Discovered Outside Mexico City

This is big news.

The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has revealed at a press conference that ancient traps containing the remains of 14 woolly mammoths were uncovered in Mexico.

At least 15,000 years old, the traps were discovered in Tultepec, a city approximately 25 miles north of Mexico City.

Named “Tultepec II,” the site has been under excavation for about 10 months, and archaeologists working there have discovered around 824 bones from 14 mammoths, including skulls, jaws and ribs. The site has been named a “Mammoth Megasite.”

At the press conference, Pedro Francisco Sánchez Nava, the national archeology coordinator at the INAH, said, “It represents a watershed, a touchstone for how we previously imagined groups of hunter-gatherers interacted with these enormous herbivores.”

Photo Credit: Wikimedia

Researchers think they now have a better understanding of how the beasts were hunted and used by hunter-gatherers in the Mexico Basin. Twenty or thirty hunters would separate one from the herd and, using torches, lure it into the trap. Once there, the animal would be killed, with most of the body either eaten or used in other ways.

One of the skeletons was laid out in a ceremonial way with evidence that indicated it took several hunts to bring it down completely. The arrangement of the bones points to a level of reverence the hunters had for such a fierce kill.

A Mammoth Museum is already open in Tultepec with a nearly complete wooly mammoth skeleton, discovered there in 2016, on display.

The post Prehistoric Mammoth Traps Were Discovered Outside Mexico City appeared first on UberFacts.

Posted on

The Famous ‘Lovers of Modena’ Skeletons Turned out to Be Men

This is a very interesting story.

The “Lovers of Modena” are a pair of ancient skeletons that were buried holding hands thousands of years ago. Recently, archaeologists discovered that both of the skeletons were actually male, leading them to conclude that they couldn’t possibly be lovers — because homosexuality isn’t a thing, right? Right.

Study author Federico Lugli said that the pair could be “siblings, cousins or soldiers who died together in battle,” the BBC reports.

“There are currently no other examples of this type,” Federico added. “Many tombs have been found in the past with couples holding hands, but in all cases there was a man and a woman. What might have been the bond between the two individuals in the burial in Modena remains a mystery.”

A mystery indeed.

But people on Twitter have some, uh, theories.

You know, just wild guesses.

Because it’s not totally obvious or anything.

Nobody has ever been gay in the history of mankind!

To be fair, these skeletons were buried between the 4th and 6th century AD in northern Italy. Homosexuality was illegal there at that time, and these two received a proper burial.

Still, it’s quite possible that this couple had some loved ones who secretly honored their relationship despite the cultural taboo.

Technically, we’ll never know whether the Lovers of Modena were really lovers or not. Either way, though, they’re basically icons of gay culture now.

The post The Famous ‘Lovers of Modena’ Skeletons Turned out to Be Men appeared first on UberFacts.

Posted on

Mysterious Skeleton of Powerful Viking Warrior Confirmed to be Female

Back in 1878, archaeologists came across a Viking burial chamber in an important trade center known as Birka. Judging by the way the body had bee placed into the grave, they assessed that it must have belonged to a prominent Viking warrior.

The body was found buried with their weapons, fancy clothes, and two horses. The assumption at the time was that the remains must have been those of a man,but a DNA study concluded that the remains were biologically female.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Critics of the findings argued that the weapons could have belonged to her husband or that there could have been two skeletons in the grave and the analysis was done on the wrong one. They argued that thinking that women were Viking warriors is wishful thinking and that we don’t have enough historical evidence to support the claim.

Researchers, though, are defending their findings in the journal Antiquity, saying the remains buried in the chamber are “unassailably female.” They confirm that there was only one skeleton in the grave, so they couldn’t have mixed up the remains, and asserted that all documentation was correct.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

“Grave Bj.581 had only one human occupant,” confirms Professor Neil Price to IFLScience. “An extra thigh-bone in the Bj.581 museum storage box – much hyped by our online critics – is clearly labeled as coming from another grave and had just been misplaced in the wrong box (the possibility of which is why bones are labeled to begin with!).”

He also continues to make an even finer point:

“To those who do take issue, we suggest that it is not supportable to react only now, when the individual has been shown to be female, without explaining why neither the warrior interpretations nor any supposed source-critical factors were a problem when the person in Bj.581 was believed to be male.”

Ideas about gender, of course, are not set in stone and vary between cultures, so it’s fair to say the skeleton could belong to a person who was both a female and a warrior, and also to accept the fact that being a woman might not have meant the same thing in that culture as it does in ours today.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Professor Price agrees.

“The body’s XX chromosomes revealed in the genomic study provide an unambiguously female sex determination, but the gender of the Bj.581 individual is a different matter. There is, of course, a broad spectrum of possibilities, many of them involving contested contemporary terminologies that can also be problematic to apply to people of the past.”

The archaeologists on the study expect that, in the future, we’ll probably find more and more Viking Age female warriors, whether they’re new finds or reassessments of remains already catalogued.

The future – and the past – is female, it would seem.

The post Mysterious Skeleton of Powerful Viking Warrior Confirmed to be Female appeared first on UberFacts.

Posted on

13-Year-Old Discovers a Danish King’s Buried Treasure

Talk about the discovery of a lifetime. In January 2018, amateur archaeologist René Schön and a 13-year-old student named Luca Malaschnitschenko were exploring the German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea when their metal detector hit on something.

Photo Pixabay

At first, the two thought it was simply aluminum, but they later realized they’d stumbled upon a 10th-century coin from a buried treasure that belonged to a Danish king. It wasn’t until a few months later that German archaeologists uncovered the entire hoard of treasure on the island. Schön and Malaschnitschenko were both invited back to take part in the big dig.

Photo Credit: Facebook,John Piazza

The archaeologists uncovered pearls, about 100 silver coins ranging from the 700s to the 900s, a Thor’s hammer, and jewelry. What a find for a 13-year-kid (and his trusty adult helper).

Researchers believe that the treasure trove belonged to Viking-born Danish king Harry Bluetooth, who abandoned the Viking lifestyle and brought Christianity to Denmark. The king fled Denmark in the late 980s, around the time the recently discovered treasure was buried. Bluetooth’s nickname came from a dead, bluish tooth he sported. The Bluetooth technology we all know and love today is named after the former king.

Photo Credit: Ancient Pages

h/t: Mental Floss

The post 13-Year-Old Discovers a Danish King’s Buried Treasure appeared first on UberFacts.

Posted on

In 2009, David Booth, a park ranger in Scotland…

In 2009, David Booth, a park ranger in Scotland, packed up his metal detector, drove to a field, and scored big. His first sweep yielded 4 gold neck bands, from the first century B.C.—the most important hoard of Iron Age gold found in Scotland to date. 00