Lost Worlds of Archaeology

  Ground-breaking new research, through comparative study of rock art, genetics, artifacts and oral tradition, had definitely pushed back the arrival of humans to Australia to in or around 60,000 years ago, a migration involving long-distance ocean voyaging. Other lands and islands in the Australasian region were soon to be followed; the snakelike island of New Ireland was colonised as early as 40,000 BP, and New Britain either shortly after or immediately before. However, our species wasn’t the first to take to the waves in this region, as the dwarf species Homo Floresiensis , which lived (or depending on who you ask, still lives) on the island of Flores from roughly 700,000 until around 5,000 BCE, demonstrates. Archaeological work over the last decade has revealed that before the earliest Homo Sapiens , another, possibly Erectus -related species made their mark on Sulawesi, where their choppers, flakes and prepared cores are known together as the Cabenge Industry. The site of Talep

Last week, a team of scientists and archaeologists from the Polish-Georgian Permanent Archaeological Research Group, working in Kutiasi, the third-largest and oldest city in the republic, announced they had found a number of Late Bronze Age artefacts, dating from the 14th-12th centuries BCE, which stylistically and typologically suggest contact with Greek civilization. The implication is that there may be some truth to the stories of Jason and the Argonauts, where a band of Greek adventures sail to distant Colchis in the eastern Black Sea in search of the mythical Golden Fleece, shorn from a ram sacrificed to Zeus.  The tale is  first found in full in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, writing in the 3rd century BCE, but is referenced by much older writers such as Homer and Pindar. Traditionally, Jason and his companions are said to have lived two generations before the events of the Trojan War, placing them in or around 1250 BCE. Their journey took them to the court of the Colchia

 A new study, published on the 27th of April, makes some bold claims about the origin of the Uralic language family, which today includes the distantly related Finnish, Hungarian and Samoyedic. Today, it's divided into two groups east and west of the Ural mountains, but around 4,500 years ago it was one continues language spoken with various accents and dialects across western Siberia, which is hinted at by a word for the cedar tree common to all of the branches, which only grows north of the steppe.  The study claims that the 4.2 kiloyear event, a drastic period of drought in the Mediterrnaean and wetter climate in northern Eurasia, facilitates the spread of early Uralic speakers westwards to the Baltic Sea and eastern Europe, where they mingled with Proto-Indo-Iranian horse riders and settlers to produce what is archaeologically known as the 'Seima-Turbino Transcultural Phenomenon', defined by spearheads and axes. This phenomena was spread through rivers and smaller water

 DNA in archaeology has had a rocky start since its first application in the early 2000s, but as technology improves and more rigorous samples are taken, it has given powerful insights that capture the finer details of how people moved and intermarried in prehistory and in the historical period.  One of best DNA discoveries of the past decade was the genome of 'Denny', a hominid ancestor who lived in Denisova Cave, that was derived from a single surviving tooth; the results showed that she was the direct offspring of mating between a Neanderthal male and a Denisovan female, simultaneously providing evidence for inter-species mixing and single-handedly pushing the range of Neanderthals thousands of kilometers eastwards. The historical Avar migrations compared with the results from the genetic data ( Gnecchi-Ruscone et al., 2022) In the last few months, ancient DNA sampling has shone light into a much more proto-historic event, the Avar migrations. Byzantine sources describe the