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Cache and Carry | Ohio History Connection
Between the 1840s and the 1920s and from the various excavations of Squier and Davis, Warren Moorehead and Henry Shetrone, upwards of 11,000 large, crudely flaked Hornstone bifaces or discs were recovered from a single deposit in Mound #2 at the Hopewell Earthworks in Ross County, Ohio. Considering that a single item could average a pound or more, the entire deposit might weigh in at greater than 6 tons! Whatever the motivation was to expend the energy needed to travel to the quarry area, extract the raw material and reduce it to disc form and transport it all several hundred miles back to the Hopewell site just to create a relatively small feature in a 110 acre earthwork complex can only be imagined.
Humans Roasted Starchy Carbs 170,000 Years Ago | Discover Magazine
Roasting rhizomes and other starchy plant material also makes finding evidence of them, tens of thousands of years later, much more likely.
Authors of the new research note that, had the plants been eaten raw, it's unlikely any sign of them would have been preserved in the archaeological record. Something to keep in mind when you hear claims that ancient humans skipped eating starchy plants.
The multiple specimens found in the ancient hearth appear to belong to the genus Hypoxis, flowering plants that include H. hemerocallidea, also known as the African potato. Researchers believe the ancient rhizomes they analyzed may belong to H. angustifolia, a species found today in much of sub-Saharan Africa and also the southern Arabian Peninsula.
According to the authors, H. angustifolia would have been a reliable, year-round food source for hunter-gatherer groups moving across the ancient Southern African landscape. The rhizome provides about 120 calories per 3.5 ounces and, note the researchers, the relative ease of digging them up could have provided an entire day's caloric needs in about two hours.
Prehistoric Britons rack up food miles for feasts near Stonehenge: Landmark study reveals the monumental distances traveled for national mass gatherings -- ScienceDaily
Using isotope analysis, which identifies chemical signals from the food and water that animals have consumed, the researchers were able to determine geographical areas where the pigs were raised. The study offers the most detailed picture yet of the degree of mobility across Britain at the time of Stonehenge.
Dr Madgwick said: "Arguably the most startling finding is the efforts that participants invested in contributing pigs that they themselves had raised. Procuring them in the vicinity of the feasting sites would have been relatively easy.
"Pigs are not nearly as well-suited to movement over distance as cattle and transporting them, either slaughtered or on the hoof, over hundreds or even tens of kilometres, would have required a monumental effort.
"This suggests that prescribed contributions were required and that rules dictated that offered pigs must be raised by the feasting participants, accompanying them on their journey, rather than being acquired locally."
Stone Age Cave Symbols May All Be Part of a Single Prehistoric Proto-Writing System
And when von Petzinger looked through archaeology papers for mentions or illustrations of symbols in cave art outside Europe, she found that many of her 32 signs were used around the world. There is even tantalising evidence that an earlier human, Homo erectus, deliberately etched a zigzag on a shell on Java some 500,000 years ago. “The ability of humans to produce a system of signs is clearly not something that starts 40,000 years ago. This capacity goes back at least 100,000 years,” says Francesco d’Errico from the University of Bordeaux, France.
Vision, not limbs, led fish onto land 385 million years ago -- ScienceDaily
Neuroscientist and engineer Malcolm A. MacIver of Northwestern and evolutionary biologist and paleontologist Lars Schmitz of Claremont McKenna, Scripps and Pitzer colleges studied the fossil record and discovered that eyes nearly tripled in size before -- not after -- the water-to-land transition. The tripling coincided with a shift in location of the eyes from the side of the head to the top. The expanded visual range of seeing through air may have eventually led to larger brains in early terrestrial vertebrates and the ability to plan and not merely react, as fish do.
"Why did we come up onto land 385 million years ago? We are the first to think that vision might have something to do with it," said MacIver, professor of biomedical engineering and of mechanical engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering.
"We found a huge increase in visual capability in vertebrates just before the transition from water to land. Our hypothesis is that maybe it was seeing an unexploited cornucopia of food on land -- millipedes, centipedes, spiders and more -- that drove evolution to come up with limbs from fins," MacIver said. (Invertebrates came onto land 50 million years before our vertebrate ancestors made that transition.)
38,000-year-old carving includes enigmatic “punctuation” pattern | Ars Technica
There are punctuations, which form a clear pattern behind and beneath the animal. There are also "short, parallel marks" in front of the aurochs' chest. And there is a deep line that cuts straight through the center of the stone and the aurochs' body, as well as a "tunnel-like depression" right in the abdomen. Indeed this line was cut so deeply that the researchers believe it eventually caused the slab to split in two. Interestingly, analysis revealed that this deep cut was carved first, then the punctuations, followed by the aurochs. So the animal's body was drawn on top of these abstract dots and lines, and some of the dots were even joined to create the aurochs' legs, hindquarters, and abdomen. "The animal figure, executed after the creation of the deep depression, was constructed so as to integrate this feature, which seems to have an important role in the overall graphic construct," the research team wrote.
Further Reading
First discovery of 50,000-year-old human settlements in Australian interior
Early archaeologists believed these punctuations, which are found throughout the region, were a way of tracking phases of the moon.