Amazing archaeological relics

[Magical Realist]

Amazing! Art was there from the very beginning.

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"Carved from mammoth ivory around 40,000 years ago, the Vogelherd Horse belongs among humanity’s earliest known figurative artworks. Archaeologists found it inside Germany’s Vogelherd Cave, a site linked to Aurignacian communities.

Measuring 4.8 centimetres long and 2.5 centimetres high, the tiny sculpture captures a horse with a curved neck and powerful posture. Its missing legs have not erased the artist’s careful work or clear sense of movement.

Who carved it, and what did the horse mean to people living through the Ice Age? ??"

[Magical Realist]

A Scottish village older than Stonehenge...

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1337876774647605

[Magical Realist]

"Nearly half a million years ago, ancient humans at Kalambo Falls in Zambia shaped and fitted together large pieces of wood to build a substantial structure. The discovery, dated to at least 476,000 years ago, predates the evolution of Homo sapiens and provides the earliest known evidence of humans using wood for construction.

The researchers said stone-tool cut marks show that the early humans shaped and joined two logs, possibly to create the foundation of a platform, walkway or raised working area. The precise purpose remains uncertain, but the builders clearly modified the logs so they would fit together. This is the earliest evidence of the deliberate crafting of logs to fit together, as evidence for the human use of wood had been limited to its use for making fire, sticks and spears.

Wood is rarely found at ancient sites, as it usually rots and disappears. However, the permanently high water levels at Kalambo Falls preserved this precious specimen. The finding also challenges the view that Stone Age humans were constantly mobile and invested little effort in modifying the places where they lived. At Kalambo, people had dependable access to water, woodland and food. They stayed long enough, or returned often enough, to undertake a construction project that required planning, tools and considerable physical effort.

“This find has changed how I think about our early ancestors. Forget the label ‘Stone Age,’ look at what these people were doing: they made something new, and large, from wood. They used their intelligence, imagination, and skills to create something they’d never seen before,” Larry Barham, one of the study authors, said in a news release.

Ancient, mysterious wood

The wood found in Zambia was too old to be directly dated using radiocarbon techniques. Instead, the researchers at the University of Liverpool and Aberystwyth University used a technique called luminescence dating, which uses the last time minerals in the sand near the finds were exposed to sunlight to determine their age.

This method allows researchers to go much further back in time and gives “a glimpse into human evolution,” Geoff Duller, one of the study authors, said in a news release. Using luminescence dating, Duller found that the structure was 476,000 years old. They also dated four wooden tools found in the area (such as a wedge) at 324,000 years old.

The researchers don’t know which ancient human species made the structure and the tools, but it’s unlikely to have been Homo sapiens. The oldest widely accepted early members of our species come from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco and date to around 315,000 years ago — more than 150,000 years after the Kalambo structure was made. Dull told CNN that he believes the people who made the structure must have been cognitively sophisticated.

Several hominin species lived in Africa during the broader period, but no fossils were found beside the logs that would allow researchers to identify the builders. Whoever they were, the construction shows that they could select suitable materials, shape large timbers and solve the practical problem of joining them together."---- https://www.zmescience.com/science/archa...piens-rep/