Carvings at ancient monument may be world's oldest calendars

Markings on a stone pillar at a 12,000 year-old archaeological site in Turkey likely represent the world's oldest solar calendar, created as a memorial to a devastating comet strike, experts suggest.

The markings at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey -- an ancient complex of temple-like enclosures adorned with intricately carved symbols -- could record an astronomical event that triggered a key shift in human civilisation, researchers say.

The research suggests ancient people were able to record their observations of the sun, moon and constellations in the form of a solar calendar, created to keep track of time and mark the change of seasons.

Fresh analysis of V-shaped symbols carved onto pillars at the site has found that each V could represent a single day. This interpretation allowed researchers to count a solar calendar of 365 days on one of the pillars, consisting of 12 lunar months plus 11 extra days.

The summer solstice appears as a separate, special day, represented by a V worn around the neck of a bird-like beast thought to represent the summer solstice constellation at the time. Other statues nearby, possibly representing deities, have been found with similar V-markings at their necks.

Since both the moon's and the sun's cycles are depicted, the carvings could represent the world's earliest so-called lunisolar calendar, based on the phases of the moon and the position of the sun -- pre-dating other known calendars of this type by many millennia.

Ancient people may have created these carvings at Göbekli Tepe to record the date a swarm of comet fragments hit Earth nearly 13,000 years ago -- or 10,850 BC -- researchers say.

The comet strike is suggested to have ushered in a mini ice age lasting over 1,200 years, wiping out many species of large animals. It could also have triggered changes in lifestyle and agriculture thought to be linked to the birth of civilisation soon afterwards in the fertile crescent of West Asia.

Another pillar at the site appears to picture the Taurid meteor stream -- which is thought to be the source of the comet fragments -- lasting 27 days and emanating from the directions of Aquarius and Pisces.

The find also appears to confirm that ancient people were able to record dates using precession -- the wobble in Earth's axis which affects the movement of constellations across the sky -- at least 10,000 years before the phenomenon was documented by Hipparchus of Ancient Greece in 150 BC.

The carvings appear to have remained important to the people of Göbekli Tepe for millennia, suggesting the impact event may have triggered a new cult or religion that influenced the development of civilisation.

The find also supports a theory that Earth faces increased comet strikes as its orbit crosses the path of circling comet fragments, which we normally experience as meteor streams.

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Anthropologists' research unveils early stone plaza in the Andes

Two University of Wyoming anthropology professors have discovered one of the earliest circular plazas in Andean South America, showcasing monumental megalithic architecture, which refers to construction that uses large stones placed upright with no mortar.

Located at the Callacpuma archaeological site in the Cajamarca Basin of northern Peru, the plaza is built with large, vertically placed megalithic stones -- a construction method previously unseen in the Andes.

Associate Professor Jason Toohey, project lead, and Professor Melissa Murphy have been researching this topic since the project's inception in 2015.

Excavations took place in the plaza starting in 2018.

Their paper, which reports new data on this earliest known megalithic circular plaza in the northern Andes, is titled "A Monumental Stone Plaza at 4750 BP in the Cajamarca Valley of Peru" and has been published today (Feb.

14) in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.

Radiocarbon dating places its initial construction around 4,750 years ago during the Late Preceramic Period, making it one of the earliest instances of such architecture in the Americas.

To better understand this timeline, the team carefully excavated within the plaza, uncovering artifacts related to life in the past and collecting charcoal samples for dating.

All material remains then were cleaned, processed and analyzed in the laboratory.

"This structure was built approximately 100 years before the Great Pyramids of Egypt and around the same time as Stonehenge," Toohey says.

These dates signify that the circular plaza at Callacpuma is the earliest known example of monumental and megalithic architecture in the Cajamarca Valley -- and one of the earliest examples in ancient Peru.

"It was probably a gathering place and ceremonial location for some of the earliest people living in this part of the Cajamarca Valley," Toohey adds.

"These people were living a primarily hunting-and-gathering lifestyle and probably had only recently begun growing crops and domesticating animals."

The plaza is formed by two concentric walls and measures about 60 feet in diameter.

The project is led by Toohey and Patricia Chirinos Ogata from the University of California-Santa Barbara.

The team also includes Murphy, as well as undergraduate and graduate students from Peru and the U.S.

Toohey is an anthropological archaeologist who is dedicated to taking a holistic and multidisciplinary approach to the field.

He has conducted fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes since 2003.

The department head for anthropology at UW, Murphy is a biological anthropologist specializing in bioarchaeology and committed to multidisciplinary approaches within anthropology.

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Long-distance weaponry identified at the 31,000-year-old archaeological site of Maisières-Canal

The hunter-gatherers who settled on the banks of the Haine, a river in southern Belgium, 31,000 years ago were already using spearthrowers to hunt their game. This is the finding of a new study conducted at TraceoLab at the University of Liège. The material found at the archaeological site of Maisières-Canal permits establishing the use of this hunting technique 10,000 years earlier than the oldest currently known preserved spearthrowers. This discovery, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, is prompting archaeologists to reconsider the age of this important technological innovation.

The spearthrower is a weapon designed for throwing darts, which are large projectiles resembling arrows that generally measure over two metres long. Spearthrowers can propel darts over a distance of up to eighty metres. The invention of long-range hunting weapons has had significant consequences for human evolution, as it changed hunting practices and the dynamics between humans and their prey, as well as the diet and social organisation of prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups. The date of invention and spread of these weapons has therefore long been the subject of lively debate within the scientific community.

"Until now, the early weapons have been infamously hard to detect at archaeological sites because they were made of organic components that preserve rarely, explains Justin Coppe, researcher at TraceoLab. Stone points that armed ancient projectiles and that are much more frequently encountered at archaeological excavations have been difficult to connect to particular weapons reliably." Most recently published claims for early use of spearthrowers and bows in Europe and Africa have relied exclusively on projectile point size to link them to these weapon systems. However, ethnographic reviews and experimental testing have cast serious doubt on this line of reasoning by showing that arrow, dart, and spear tips can be highly variable in size, with overlapping ranges.

The innovative approach developed by the archaeologists at TraceoLab combines ballistic analysis and fracture mechanics to gain a better understanding of the traces preserved on the flint points. "We carried out a large-scale experiment in which we fired replicas of Palaeolithic projectiles using different weapons such as spears, bows and spearthrowers," explains Noora Taipale, FNRS research fellow at TraceoLab. By carefully examining the fractures on these stone points, we were able to understand how each weapon affected the fracturing of the points when they impacted the target." Each weapon left distinct marks on the stone points, enabling archaeologists to match these marks to archaeological finds. In a way, it's like identifying a gun from the marks the barrel leaves on a bullet, a practice known from forensic science.

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