Ancient Native Americans Ate Pachyderms; Site Challenges Theory of Where New World Culture Began

Ancient Native Americans Ate Pachyderms; Site Challenges Theory of Where New World Culture Began

Do these ancient 'geoglyphs' hold a secret to preserving the Amazon? - CSMonitor.com

Do these ancient 'geoglyphs' hold a secret to preserving the Amazon? - CSMonitor.com

Some believe their existence implied vast land-clearing, but evidence from a recent study suggests otherwise. Rather, the geoglyph builders of millenniums past may have relied on small-scale burning to open relatively tight spaces within carefully cultivated forests, revealing sophisticated agroforestry practices that could have serious implications for current conservation efforts in both North and South America.

The new paper contributes to the growing body of research suggesting that the popular image of the pre-Columbian Americas as “pristine landscapes” is nothing more than a myth, as journalist Charles Mann argued in his book “1491.” From widespread burning of the Eastern forest in North America, to the extensive control over watersheds in the southwest, “basically a zillion archaeological studies show all kinds of human manipulation,” he tells The Christian Science Monitor in an email.

This new thinking suggests that efforts to preserve forest ecosystems in some apocryphal "natural" state through absolute control may do more harm than good, because it neglects the fact that they never were truly wild: forests evolved together with humans.

The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets | History | Smithsonian

The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets | History | Smithsonian

How a huge landslide shaped Zion National Park

How a huge landslide shaped Zion National Park:

A Utah mountainside collapsed 4,800 years ago in a gargantuan landslide known as a "rock avalanche," creating the flat floor of what is now Zion National Park by damming the Virgin River to create a lake that existed for 700 years.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2016-05-huge-landslide-zion-national.html#jCp

Ancient DNA Sheds New Light on Arctic's Earliest People

Ancient DNA Sheds New Light on Arctic's Earliest People

Inuit hunters in the Canadian Arctic have long told stories about a mysterious ancient people known as the Tunit, who once inhabited the far north. Tunit men, they recalled, possessed powerful magic and were strong enough to crush the neck of a walrus and singlehandedly haul the massive carcass home over the ice.  Yet the stories described the Tunit as a reticent people who kept to themselves, avoiding contact with their neighbors.

http://dailydigestnews.com/2014/08/inuit-myths-confirmed-nervous-giants-were-first-settlers-of-arctic-say-scientists/

http://dailydigestnews.com/2014/08/study-ancient-arctic-dwellers-were-not-really-into-sex/

http://www.digitaljournal.com/science/ancient-dna-shows-inuit-were-not-the-first-to-settle-the-arctic/article/400257

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/29/science/study-offers-clues-to-arctic-mystery-paleo-eskimos-abrupt-extinction.html

1,000 Years Ago, Corn Made Cahokia, An American Indian City Big. Then, Climate Change Destroyed It : The Salt : NPR

1,000 Years Ago, Corn Made Cahokia, An American Indian City Big. Then, Climate Change Destroyed It : The Salt : NPR:

Seattle-area dig uncovers 10,000-year-old stone tools - SFGate

Seattle-area dig uncovers 10,000-year-old stone tools

Quotes:

By the time excavations were done, crews had unearthed more than 4,000 stone flakes, scrapers, awls and spear points crafted at least 10,000 years ago by some of the region’s earliest inhabitants.

“We were pretty amazed,” said archaeologist Robert Kopperl, who led the field investigation. “This is the oldest archaeological site in the Puget Sound lowland with stone tools.”

Kopperl and his colleagues published their initial analysis earlier this year in the journal PaleoAmerica. He’ll discuss the findings Saturday morning in a presentation sponsored by theRedmond Historical Society.

The discovery is yielding new insights into the period when the last ice age was drawing to a close and prehistoric bison and mammoths still roamed what is now Western Washington.

The site on the shores of Bear Creek, a tributary to the Sammamish River, appears to have been occupied by small groups of people who were making and repairing stone tools, said Kopperl, of SWCA Environmental Consultants.

Sophisticated 600-year-old canoe discovered in New Zealand | Fox News

Sophisticated 600-year-old canoe discovered in New Zealand

Denisovans: High-altitude gene links Tibetans, Sherpas to extinct race - SFGate

High-altitude gene links Tibetans, Sherpas to extinct race - SFGate

If the story of human evolution is written in our genes, then Tibetans and the Sherpas of today hold genetic evidence that their ancestors once coupled with a long-vanished group of humans known as the Denisovans, distant kin of the Neanderthals.

These ancient rats were the size of lap dogs

These ancient rats were the size of lap dogs - The Washington Post:

Abominable News: Yeti Identified As Ancestral Polar Bear

Abominable News: Yeti Identified As Ancestral Polar Bear:

Samples of hair believed to be from the abominable snowman are actually from an ancestor of the polar bear.  The discovery raises the possibility that stories of an undiscovered giant primate living in the Himalayas may be based on large and aggressive, but reclusive, bears.

Ancient Baby Boom Offers Warning

Ancient Baby Boom Offers Warning

Washington State Univ. researchers have sketched out one of the greatest baby booms in North American history, a centuries-long “growth blip” among southwestern Native Americans between 500 and 1300 A.D.

It was a time when the early features of civilization — including farming and food storage — had matured to where birth rates likely “exceeded the highest in the world today,” the researchers write in PNAS.

A crash followed, says Tim Kohler, WSU Regents professor of anthropology, offering a warning sign to the modern world about the dangers of overpopulation.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study looks at the data from thousands of human remains found over the past century at hundreds of sites across the Four Corners region of the Southwest. While many of the remains have been repatriated, the data let Kohler assemble a detailed chronology of the region’s Neolithic Demographic Transition, in which stone tools reflect an agricultural transition from cutting meat to pounding grain.

Maize, which we know as corn, was grown in the region as early as 2000 B.C. At first, populations were slow to respond, probably because of low productivity, says Kohler. But by 400 B.C., he says, the crop provided 80 percent of the region’s calories.

Caffeinated 'Vomit Drink' Nauseated North America's First City

Cahokia existed near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers from about 1050 to 1350 in what is now in St. Louis, East St. Louis and the surrounding five counties, and inspired short-lived settlements as far away as Wisconsin. The core of this society, Greater Cahokia, had as many as 50,000 residents in its heyday living amidst earthen mounds, some more than 100 feet (30 meters) in height, making it the largest prehistoric North American settlement north of Mexico.

http://www.livescience.com/22136-caffeinated-black-drink-first-city.html

Caffeine-loaded black drinks apparently dominated the heartland of America earlier than once thought — a beverage neither coffee nor cola, but instead brewed from holly leaves, researchers say.

The ancient people may have downed the brew before ritual vomiting as part of purification ceremonies, the scientists added.

Indian Marker Trees

Indian Marker Trees 

Sacrificial skull mound in Mexico puzzles experts

http://www.sfgate.com/news/science/article/Sacrificial-skull-mound-in-Mexico-puzzles-experts-4239694.php

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Archaeologists say they have turned up about 150 skulls of human sacrifice victims in a field in central Mexico, one of the first times that such a large accumulation of severed heads has been found outside of a major pyramid or temple complex in Mexico.

Experts are puzzled by the unexpected find of such a large number of skulls at what appears to have been a small, unremarkable shrine. The heads were carefully deposited in rows or in small mounds, mostly facing east toward the rising sun, sometime between 660 and 860 A.D., a period when the nearby city-state of Teotihuacan had already declined but the Aztec empire, founded in 1325, was still centuries in the future.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/science/article/Sacrificial-skull-mound-in-Mexico-puzzles-experts-4239694.php#ixzz2JbO2aqLU

Denisovan genome

A number of these changes influence genes linked with brain function and nervous system development, leading to speculation that we may think differently from the Denisovans. Other changes are linked with the skin, eyes and teeth.


http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/08/30/genome-mysterious-extinct-human-completed-scientists-say/

In African Cave, Signs of an Ancient Paint Factory

Digging deeper in a South African cave that had already yielded surprises from the Middle Stone Age, archaeologists have uncovered a 100,000-year-old workshop holding the tools and ingredients with which early modern humans apparently mixed some of the first known paint.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/science/14paint.html

Prehistoric clay disks found in northwestern Alaska

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Four decorated clay disks have been discovered at a prehistoric site in Alaska, apparently the first artifacts of their type discovered in the state, the University of Alaska Museum of the North said.

The disks were found during a summer expedition in Noatak National Preserve, at a site where archeologists have for decades been studying lakefront pit dwellings that date back 1,000 years, officials at the Fairbanks museum said.

The disks are etched, and two of them have holes in the center.

They were discovered when a team from the museum and the National Park Service traveled to the site in northwestern Alaska to make records of previously discovered prehistoric petroglyphs on boulders.

Such prehistoric rock art is extremely rare in interior and northern Alaska, though common in the southwestern part of the United States and other regions, museum and Park Service officials said.

http://news.yahoo.com/prehistoric-clay-disks-found-northwestern-alaska-222029097.html;_ylt=AsBB1MECjqVtbpVC34i9OOtvzwcF;_ylu=X3oDMTNvYm5uNmNrBG1pdANUb3BTdG9yeSBVU1NGBHBrZwMwMmU2ZTM0OC03OWZhLTM1YmMtOTIzMy00Y2Q3MGUxMDFjYTYEcG9zAzEzBHNlYwN0b3Bfc3RvcnkEdmVyAzRiMzA3NmYwLWRiMzItMTFlMC1iZGRmLTIwMTQ0NTk4ZjI0Yg--;_ylg=X3oDMTFtdTQ1b3RjBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdAN1cwRwdANzZWN0aW9ucwR0ZXN0Aw--;_ylv=3

Blog entry on inter-native american warfare and a mythical lake living tribe

Blog entry on inter-native American warfare and a mythical lake living tribe:

http://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/spirit-cave-man/

The rest of the blog looks like a fertile source of ideas as well!

Ancient bison kill site uncovered in Montana

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100808/ap_on_re_us/us_bison_kill_site

BROWNING, Mont. – Archaeologists working on the Blackfeet Indian reservation in northwestern Montana say they have uncovered a vast former hunting complex where bison were stampeded over a cliff at least 1,000 years ago.
Researchers say the 9-mile-long area contains a well-preserved "drive line" system used to funnel bison to their deaths, along with bison bones and the remnants of campsites with hundreds of tepee rings.
The site is on a remote plateau overlooking the Two Medicine River. Researchers say it could become one of the largest and most significant Blackfeet heritage sites in the region.
Plains Indians harvested bison hundreds of years ago by stampeding them over cliffs. John Murray, the Blackfeet Tribe's historic preservation officer, says research at the new site will help tribal members better understand their history.