The two new sites were discovered during the annual survey of Vasal River and 25 villages along its stretch. Survey began from Korda village, from where the river originates; Source: Indian Express

Pottery fragments found here are believed to be nearly 2,000 years old. Although no structure has been found at any of the sites, there are indications that an old Harappan settlement existed in the area, which is now an agricultural land.

“Pottery fragments with designs have been found in large numbers from the two mounds. These include pieces of clay jar, bowl and plates. Although no structure has been found, there are indications that a settlement did exist in the area. We have prepared a report on this and submitted it to the state government,” said D K Rathod, Assistant Superintendent, Archaeology Department, Rajkot.

These two sites were discovered during the annual survey of Vasal River and 25 villages along its stretch. Survey began from Korda village, from where the river originates.

One of the sites is located at the farmland of one Manji Nagar in revenue record survey number 189. The second site is exactly opposite to it, on the other side of the river.

Rathod said: “As it is an agricultural land, the site has been ploughed all these years and there is hardly any sign of a mound. Besides, as it is a private land for several years now, it’s difficult to protect it and convert into an archeological site.”

The finding assumes significance as Saurashtra-Kutch has had a rich maritime history dating back to the Harappan era.

One of the most extant Harappan sites excavated in the region is Dholavira. Previous excavations have revealed traces of Harappan settlements in Prabhas Patan, Nageshwar, Bet Dwarka, Maliya Miyana and Barda in Porbandar.

Source: Indian Express

The wall is in amazingly good condition considering that it is several hundred years old, and is underwater; Source: Telegraph UK; Credit: MATHIEU MEUR/NATIONAL

A team of professional divers braved the murky conditions to get some ghostly shots of the wall which ran from 13 metres below the surface to the bottom at 35 metres.

Though urban legend has it being the only man-made object visible from space this one part is lying up to 100 feet below a valley flooded when a dam was built.

Mr Meur, the expedition photographer, said just getting the 500kg of equipment down hundreds of steps to the water’s edge was a challenge in itself.

“The lake itself is rather barren, with only a couple of species of freshwater fish and shrimps,” he said.

“The real stars here really are the ruins. The wall is in amazingly good condition considering that it is several hundred years old, and is underwater.

“The top of it was at around 13m depth, and we located a guard tower, with openings on all sides, which created underwater tunnels.”

He added: “Throughout the dives, the weight of history was very present on our minds. It was incredible to navigate the wall and guard posts, thinking that centuries ago soldiers were walking the same location, keeping China safe from intruders.”

“We did two dives on the Wall and wanted to do more but were plagued by technical problems.

“The diving was challenging as it was 25 centigrade on the surface but dropped to just six degrees when you got 35 metres down on the bottom.

“Visibility was limited to about 1-5 metres maximum, as the bottom is very silty. If you stir the bottom, you end up diving in soup.”

The parts of the wall that are best known date from the mid 16th century, although the first great wall was ordered to be built in 214 BC.

The most comprehensive archaeological survey, using advanced technologies, has recently concluded that the entire Great Wall, with all of its branches, stretches for 8,851.8 km (5,500.3 miles).

This is made up of 6,259.6 km (3,889.5 miles) of sections of actual wall, 359.7 km (223.5 miles) of trenches and 2,232.5 km (1,387.2 miles) of natural defensive barriers such as hills and rivers.

Panjiakou reservoir was created in 1977 during the grip of the cultural revolution when the valley near Tangshan was flooded, submerging a village and wall to create a dam.

Source: Telegraph UK

The Idol of a rare 2 feet long, granite stone, Lord Buddha; Source: Orissa Diary

village under Korei block of Jajpur district on Friday. The idol was found after some workers stumbled on the image while digging a pond. Later, the villagers stopped the digging work.

The stone image is a rare discovery in the state as Lord Buddha sits in a Bhumisparsha posture, said Buddhist researcher Dr Harish Chandra Prusty. Later, the villagers installed the image in the middle of the village and started worshipping it. Kuarada is situated near Kantikiarai village, where, two years back, a rare, gigantic Buddhist monastery was discovered in the river bed. According to Buddhist scholar Byabarta Ajay Das, the famous Buddhist sites of Lalitagiri, Ratnagari and Udayagiri are also situated in this area.

The recent unearthing of Buddha idols gives ample indication that the village and its nearby areas were parts of the Buddhist culture. But ironically, both the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the State Archeology department (SAD) have been paying little attention to the small unknown Buddhist sites for which many Buddha images and other archaeological findings are gathering dust. In many cases, antique lifters managed to pilfer the rare images from these areas. The unearthed Buddha image is not only historically significant but also reveals the artistic excellence and iconographic know-how of the era, Das added.

Source: Orissa Diary

Location of the Indonesian Island of Flores; Source: Google Earth

These early ancestors, or hominins, were previously thought to have arrived on the island about 800,000 years ago but artifacts found in a new archaeological site suggest they might have been around even earlier.

In a paper published in Nature, researchers said their findings suggest these hominins may have evolved into tiny hobbit-like humans, or “Flores man,” who stood about a meter tall and had skulls the size of grapefruit.

Skeletal remains of an 18,000-year-old “Flores man” were discovered about five years ago and scientists then determined it belonged to a species of human completely new to science.

Named Homo floresiensis, after the island on which it was found, the tiny human has also been dubbed “hobbit,” after the tiny creatures from the “Lord of the Rings.”

The arrival of hominins is also believed to have resulted quickly in the mass death of giant tortoises and the Stegondon sondaari, a pygmy elephant, on the island.

In their paper, the researchers said they found 45 stone tools in Wolo Sege in the Soa basin in Flores.

Led by Adam Brumm at the Center of Archaeological Science in the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, the researchers used new dating methods and found that the stone tools were about a million years old.

“It is now clear, however, in light of the evidence from Wolo Sege, that hominins were present on Flores (a million years ago). This suggests that the non-selective, mass death of Stegondon sondaari and giant tortoise … could represent a localized or regional extinction,” they wrote in their paper.

“Flores man” is thought to be a descendant of homo erectus, who had a large brain, was full-sized and spread out from Africa to Asia about two million years ago.

Scientists suspect “Flores man” lived at the same time as modern humans and became extinct after a massive volcanic eruption on the island around 12,000 years ago.

Source: ABC News

A Satellite image of India; Source: Google Earth

The international and multidisciplinary research team, led by Oxford University in collaboration with Indian institutions, has uncovered what it calls ‘Pompeii-like excavations’ beneath the Toba ash.

The seven-year project examines the environment that humans lived in, their stone tools, as well as the plants and animal bones of the time.

“This suggests that human populations were present in India prior to 74,000 years ago, or about 15,000 years earlier than expected based on some genetic clocks,” said project director Michael Petraglia, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford.

The team has concluded that many forms of life survived he super-eruption, contrary to other research which has suggested significant animal extinctions and genetic bottlenecks.

According to the team, a potentially ground-breaking implication of the new work is that the species responsible for making the stone tools in India was Homo sapiens.

Stone tool analysis has revealed that the artefacts consist of cores and flakes, which are classified in India as Middle Palaeolithic and are similar to those made by modern humans in Africa.

“Though we are still searching for human fossils to definitively prove the case, we are encouraged by the technological similarities.

An area of widespread speculation about the Toba super-eruption is that it nearly drove humanity to extinction.

The fact that the Middle Palaeolithic tools of similar styles are found right before and after the Toba super-eruption, suggests that the people who survived the eruption were the same populations, using the same kinds of tools, says Petraglia.

The research agrees with evidence that other human ancestors, such as the Neanderthals in Europe and the small brained Hobbits in Southeastern Asia, continued to survive well after Toba.

Although some scholars have speculated that the Toba volcano led to severe and wholesale environmental destruction, the Oxford-led research in India suggests that a mosaic of ecological settings was present, and some areas experienced a relatively rapid recovery after the volcanic event.

The team has not discovered much bone in Toba ash sites, but in the Billasurgam cave complex in Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh, the researchers have found deposits which they believe range from at least 100,000 years ago to the present.

They contain a wealth of animal bones such as wild cattle, carnivores and monkeys.

They have also identified plant materials in the Toba ash sites and caves, yielding important information about the impact of the Toba super-eruption on the ecological settings.

Source: BERNAMA

• DNA analysis of 2,000-year-old bones found in eastern Mongolia reveal a man of Western heritage.
• At the time, the vast territory in and around Mongolia included ethnically and linguistically diverse nomadic tribes.
• Two other skeletons found at the site show genetic links to people living in northeastern Asia.

Main:

Dead men can indeed tell tales, but they speak in a whispered double helix.

This man's remains lie close to the tomb, whom he may have served the person in the tomb in some way; Source: Discovery News; Credit: Prof. Kyung-yong Kim, et al.

Consider an older gentleman whose skeleton lay in one of more than 200 tombs recently excavated at a 2,000-year-old cemetery in eastern Mongolia, near China’s northern border. DNA extracted from this man’s bones pegs him as a descendant of Europeans or western Asians. Yet he still assumed a prominent position in ancient Mongolia’s Xiongnu Empire, say geneticist Kyung-Yong Kim of Chung-Ang University in Seoul, South Korea, and his colleagues.

On the basis of previous excavations and descriptions in ancient Chinese texts, researchers suspect that the Xiongnu Empire — which ruled a vast territory in and around Mongolia from 209 B.C. to A.D. 93 — included ethnically and linguistically diverse nomadic tribes. The Xiongnu Empire once ruled the major trading route known as the Asian Silk Road, opening it to both Western and Chinese influences.

Researchers have yet to pin down the language spoken by Xiongnu rulers and political elites, says archaeologist David Anthony of Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. But the new genetic evidence shows that the 2,000-year-old man “was multi-ethnic, like the Xiongnu polity itself,” Anthony remarks.

This long-dead individual possessed a set of genetic mutations on his Y chromosome, which is inherited from paternal ancestors, that commonly appears today among male speakers of Indo-European languages in eastern Europe, central Asia and northern India, Kim’s team reports in an upcoming American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The same man displayed a pattern of mitochondrial DNA mutations, inherited from maternal ancestors, characteristic of speakers of modern Indo-European languages in central Asia, the researchers say.

“We don’t know if this 60- to 70-year-old man reached Mongolia on his own or if his family had already lived there for many generations,” says study co-author Charles Brenner, a DNA analyst based in Oakland, Calif.

Two other skeletons from the Xiongnu cemetery in Duurlig Nars show genetic links to people who live in northeastern Asia, according to Kim’s team. Other team members include Kijeong Kim of Chung-Ang University, Eregzen Gelegdorj of the National Museum of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar and Eun-Jeong Chang of the National Museum of Korea in Seoul.

The Duurlig Nars man’s genetic signature supports the idea that Indo-European migrations to northeastern Asia started before 2,000 years ago. This notion is plausible, but not confirmed, says geneticist Peter Underhill of Stanford University. Further investigations of Y chromosome mutation frequencies in modern populations will allow for a more precise tracing of the Duurlig Nars man’s geographic roots, Underhill predicts.

Scholars have long sought to trace the origin and spread of related languages now found in Europe, India and other parts of Asia. One hypothesis holds that Indo-European languages proliferated via several waves of expansion and conquest by nomads known as Kurgans who had domesticated horses and thus could travel long distances. In this scenario, Kurgans left a homeland north of the Black Sea, in what’s now Russia, around 6,400 years ago.

Another view holds that farmers from ancient Turkey spread Indo-European tongues as they swallowed up one parcel of land after another, beginning around 9,000 years ago.

Since 1978, discoveries of 2,400- to 4,000-year-old mummified corpses with European features in northwestern China, not far from Mongolia, have fueled the Kurgan hypothesis (SN: 2/25/95, p. 120). Remains of large wheels found with these blond-haired individuals raise the controversial possibility that these foreigners introduced carts and chariots to the Chinese.

Add to those discoveries a report in the September 2009 Human Genetics. Geneticist Christine Keyser of the University of Strasbourg in France and her colleagues found that nine of 26 skeletons previously excavated at 11 Kurgan sites in northeastern Russia possess a Y chromosome mutation pattern thought to mark the eastward expansion of early Indo-Europeans. That same genetic signature characterizes the Duurlig Nars man.

By 2,000 years ago, the easternmost Indo-European languages were probably spoken in northwestern China, Anthony holds. So an Indo-European speaker could have aligned himself with Xiongnu political big shots and earned an eternal resting place in an elite Xiongnu cemetery, in his opinion.

Kim agrees. The Duurlig Nars man’s tomb lies close to the tomb of an especially high-ranking Xiongnu man whom he may have served in some way, he suggests.

Kim’s group plans to extract and study DNA from additional Duurlig Nars skeletons. For now, Anthony remarks, “this new study from Mongolia is important because it adds one more point of light to a largely dark prehistoric sky.”

Source: Discovery News

The Location of the discovery, Northwest Shaanxi Province, China; Source: Google Earth

The large tomb, located in Chang’an district of Xi’an, the capital city of ancient Western Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD), belongs to Zhang Anshi.

Zhang was credited with preserving stability along the western border in the Xinjiang region, China Business View reported Thursday, saying the discovery might help provide clues about the military during that time period.

It is the first tomb complex of a noble leader in the Han Dynasty, that had been intact when it was excavated in 2008, said the report, noting that tomb raiders might have broken into the tomb due to the discovery of some holes.

The main tomb is more than 60 meters long with a coffin chamber that covers an area of more than 35 meters in length, 24.5 meters in width and is 15 meters deep.

The main tomb is surrounded by six pits of different sizes, which are filled with mortuary objects such as pottery and wood figurines.

The pottery figurines, approximately 60 centimeters tall, were all naked, with some fragments of helmets, bronze arrowheads, and swords scattered around them. The organs on their faces were clear, with red lips and thick eyebrows.

“Although there are hundreds of pottery figurines, you could hardly find two identical faces,” said Shi Quanping, a local archeologist in Shaanxi.

The location of the tomb is consistent with the records of Zhang’s burial site, and giant stamps engraved “Zhang,” and “Military Nobel Stamp” were also unearthed, both of which helped proved his identify, said Zhang Zhongli, deputy chief of the Shaanxi archeologist institute.

Zhang believes that the pottery figures ought to be imagined as soldiers protecting the owner of the tomb.

“The pottery figurines were standing in formation when they were initially made, wearing helmets and armors, with a variety of weapons in their hands,” Shi said. “You can imagine the magnificent scene of such an army escorting the owner of the tomb.”

The debris from two horse-drawn carriages were found in a pit, including the bones of horses, which were buried alive.

They also found rotten fragments of a carriage, which were supposed to be granted by the emperor, Chongqing Evening News reported.

Black charcoals in the pit were well preserved, and the underpinning square bricks were laid properly, said the report.

Another tomb with a similar layout but of a smaller size was also found in an adjacent area, possibly the general’s wife, the China Business View quoted an expert as saying.

Source: Global Times