16,000 year-old mother goddess figurine excavated in Turkey

ANI

Ankara (Turkey), August 18 (ANI): Archeologists have unearthed a 16,000 year-old mother goddess figurine during excavations in Direkli Cave in the southern province of Kahramanmaras in Turkey.

According to a report in Today’s Zaman, Gazi University Archeology Department lecturer Cevdet Merih Erek told the Anatolia news agency that the excavations in Direkli Cave, 65 km away from Kahramanmaras, started on July 15.

Noting that it was the third cave excavation of Turkey, Erek said that the clay mother goddess figurine they found was 16,000 years old.

Erek said that the figurine showed that the social status of women was very important 16,000 years ago.

He noted that the oldest fired clay god or goddess figurines - unearthed in Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Near East - were made in 5,000 BC.

He added that experts believed that the clay was used earliest in that period, however, the goddess figurine showed that this method was older than thought.

Skeletons uncovered during tube excavations in Turkey

Turkish Daily News

Human skeletons, which experts say could be more than 8,000 years old, were found in four prehistoric graves recently unearthed at the Marmaray tunnel excavation site in the Yenikapı district of Istanbul (Turkey).
"These graves reveal Istanbul used to be home to some of the earliest types of settlements during the Stone Age when people migrated from Anatolia to the European continent," said Mehmet Özdoğan, professor of prehistory at Istanbul University. "They also show that the Marmara Sea used to be a small and shallow water in ancient times." Özdoğan said the graves, two of which were smaller than the others, might date back to between 6,400 BCE and 6,200 BCE. The human skeletons were the oldest skeletons unearthed so far during the Marmaray project, which will be the first underwater tube to connect Europe and Asia beneath the Bosporus. He said the site was plastered and the Stone Age skeletons have been moved to the Istanbul Archeology Museum.
Excavations on the area where tube station will be constructed are lingering due to the discovery of new relics one after the other. The excavations in Yenikapı started on a 58,000-square-meter area in 2004. Some archaeological excavations have been held on about 30,000 square meters so far.

Archaeological excavations begin in ancient city of Rhodiapolis

KUMLUCA - Anatolia News Agency

Archaeological excavations began in the ancient city of Rhodiapolis near Kumluca in the popular resort city of Antalya in southern Turkey.

Associate Professor Isa Kızgut from Akdeniz University said it was the fifth year of excavations in the ancient city, adding: "Some 60 people will join this year's excavations, which will last for two months. During the excavations in the last four years, we succeeded in unearthing an important part of the ancient city," he said.

Rhodiapolis

Located near the village of Sarıcasu, Rhodiapolis received its name from the Rhodians, who colonized the city. The ancient city was discovered after a forest fire in 2000. Excavations in Rhodiapolis began in 2006.

The best known figure from the city was Opramoas, who lived in the period of Antoninus Pius (138-161 A.D.). He was the richest man in Lycia and the most renowned philanthropist. His best known work was his own monumental tomb.

Most of the visible ruins in the ancient city dated from the Roman and Byzantine periods. The remains include a theatre, a bathhouse, a public forum, temples, a church, cisterns, a cenotaph (a statue commemorating the dead), a necropolis (a structure for graves) and houses. More than 60 coins were also unearthed during the excavations.

900-year-old Byzantine church unearthed in S Turkey

DEMRE-Anotolia News Agency

A 900-year-old Byzantine church has been unearthed in the ancient city of Myra located in the town of Demre in the Mediterranean province of Antalya.

Professor Engin Akyürek from Istanbul University's Art History Department, who is also responsible for the Byzantine period artifacts unearthed during the ongoing excavations at Myra, told Anatolia on Wednesday that a well-preserved Byzantine church had been found six meters below ground level at the ancient site.

Akyürek said the five-meter-wide and 10-meter-high temple dome had been partially destroyed, but the tiles on the roof were still in good condition.

"The church most probably belongs to the 12th century A.D., but we will be able to determine its exact period once we enter the building," Akyürek said.

All Byzantine-period buildings that have managed to survive until today have either undergone restoration or have had their roofs changed, Akyürek said, but added that the Myra church still had its original structure.

Myra was a leading city of the Lycian Union and surpassed Xanthos in early Byzantine times, becoming the capital of Lycia. Its remains are situated about 1.5 km north of today's Demre, on the Kaş-Finike road.

The date of Myra's foundation is unknown as there is no literary mention of it before the 1st century B.C., when it was said to be one of the six leading cities of the Lycian Union, the other five being Xanthos, Tlos, Pinara, Patara and Olympos. It is believed to date back much further however, as an outer defensive wall has been dated to the 5th century B.C.

The city is well known for its amphitheater, the largest in Lycia, and the plethora of rock-cut tombs carved into the cliff above the venue.

Lucy fossil gets jolted upright by Big Man

Science News

An older guy has sauntered into Lucy's life, and some researchers believe he stands ready to recast much of what scientists know about the celebrated early hominid and her species.

Excavations in Ethiopia's Afar region have uncovered a 3.6-million-year-old partial male skeleton of the species Australopithecus afarensis. This is the first time since the excavation of Lucy in 1974 that paleoanthropologists have turned up more than isolated pieces of an adult from the species, which lived in East Africa from about 4 million to 3 million years ago.

A nearly complete skeleton of an A. afarensis child has been retrieved from another Ethiopian site (SN: 9/23/06, p. 195).

Discoverers of the skeleton, led by anthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, consider this a Desi Arnaz moment. As the late actor often exclaimed on his classic television show, "Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!" But other researchers are not so convinced that the new fossil changes much of what they already knew about Lucy and her kind.

Haile-Selassie's team has dubbed its new find Kadanuumuu, which means "big man" in the Afar language. At an estimated 5 to 5½ feet tall, he would have towered over 3½-foot-tall Lucy. Excavations between 2005 and 2008 in a part of Afar called Woranso-Mille - about 48 kilometers north of where Lucy's 3.2-million-year-old remains were found - yielded fossils from 32 bones of the same individual.

Big Man's long legs, relatively narrow chest and inwardly curving back denote a nearly humanlike gait and ground-based lifestyle, according to a preliminary report published online June 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Lucy has often been portrayed as having had a fairly primitive two-legged gait and a penchant for tree climbing.

Big Man's humanlike shoulder blade differs as much from those of chimpanzees as it does from those of gorillas, Haile-Selassie says. The shape of that bone, combined with characteristics of five recovered ribs, suggest to Haile-Selassie's team that Big Man's chest had a humanlike shape. Earlier reconstructions of Lucy's rib cage had endowed her with a chimplike, funnel-shaped chest.

So despite chimps' close genetic relationship to people, he says, this new fossil evidence supports the view that chimps have evolved a great deal since diverging from a common human-chimp ancestor roughly 7 million years ago and are not good models for ancient hominids.

Big Man's shoulder blade bolsters recent analyses of 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus that also challenge traditional views of ancient hominids as chimplike (SN: 1/16/10, p. 22).

Estimates of Lucy's build were based on comparisons to chimps and indicated to some scientists that she lacked the easy, straight-legged stride of people today. Haile-Selassie and his colleagues suspect that their final reconstruction of Big Man's anatomy will provide a better model for assessing what Lucy looked like.

"Whatever we've been saying about afarensis based on Lucy was mostly wrong," Haile-Selassie says. "The skeletal framework to enable efficient two-legged walking was established by the time her species had evolved."

Lucy's legs were short because of her small size, he adds. If Lucy had been as large as Big Man, her legs would have nearly equaled his in length, Haile-Selassie estimates.

Although lacking a skull and teeth, Big Man preserves most of the same skeletal parts as Lucy, as well as a nearly complete shoulder blade and a substantial part of the rib cage.

"This beautiful afarensis specimen confirms the unique skeletal shape of this species at a larger size than Lucy, in what appears to be a male," remarks anthropologist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri in Columbia.

A long-standing debate over how well Lucy's kind walked and whether they spent much time in the trees appears unlikely to abate as a result of Big Man's discovery, though. "There's nothing special I can see on this new find that will change anyone's opinion" on how the species navigated the landscape, comments Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman.

Haile-Selassie's team disagrees. Big Man demonstrates that A. afarensis spent most of the time on the ground, the researchers conclude.

"They were good walkers, but we don't know how well they ran," Haile-Selassie says. Big Man's long-legged stride indicates that members of his species could have made 3.6-million-year-old footprints found more than 30 years ago at Laetoli, Tanzania (SN Online: 3/22/10),

Anthropologist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio, a coauthor of the new paper, regards Big Man as having been an "excellent runner." His pelvis supported humanlike hamstring muscles and, as indicated by the Laetoli footprints, his feet had arches, Lovejoy holds.

Fossil hominid skeletons as complete as Big Man "are few and far between," says anthropologist William Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York. But the new find mostly confirms what was already known about Lucy, he asserts. Lucy's kind, including Big Man, were decent tree climbers, even if they couldn't hang from branches or swing from limb to limb as chimpanzees do, he says.

"Riddle me this," asks Jungers in considering Hailie-Selassie's emphasis on a ground-dwelling A. afarensis. "Where did they sleep? Did they wait for fruit to fall to the ground? Where did they go to escape predators?"

Groups of A. afarensis individuals must have devised ground-based strategies to ward off predators, Lovejoy responds. Some big cats would have negotiated trees better than Lucy's kind, he notes.

Jungers also doubts Lovejoy and Haile-Selassie's contention that a nearly humanlike gait had evolved in A. afarensis. Big Man includes only one nearly complete limb bone, from the lower left leg, which makes it difficult to estimate how long his legs were relative to his arms, Jungers contends.

Limb remains of hominid species that came after afarensis indicate that they evolved increasingly longer legs and a more efficient walking stance, Jungers adds.

In his view, hips conducive to walking slowly with legs wide apart evolved in an even earlier hominid, 6-million-year-old Orrorin tugenensis (SN: 3/29/08, p. 205)

] and characterized later Australopithecus species, including Lucy's kind.

Haile-Selassie counters that features of Big Man's pelvis related to walking closely resemble those of a 1.4-million to 900,000-year-old female Homo erectus from another Ethiopian site (SN: 12/6/08, p. 14).

Big Man's legs also demonstrate that the comparably long legs of nearly 2-million-year-old South African hominids don't represent a transition to the Homo genus (SN: 5/8/10, p. 14), Haile-Selassie asserts.

Haile-Selassie doubts that additional pieces of Big Man's skeleton will turn up. "If anything more was there, we would have found it by now," he says with a resigned laugh.

Separation between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens might have occurred 500,000 years earlier

EurekAlert

The separation of Neardenthal and Homo sapiens might have occurred at least one million years ago, more than 500.000 years earlier than previously believed after DNA based analyses.

A doctoral thesis conducted at the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana) -associated with the University of Granada-, analysed the teeth of almost all species of hominids that have existed during the past 4 million years. Quantitative methods were employed and they managed to identify Neanderthal features in ancient European populations.

The main purpose of this research whose author is Aida Gómez Robles- was to reconstruct the history of evolution of Human species using the information provided by the teeth, which are the most numerous and best preserved remains of the fossil record. To this purpose, a large sample of dental fossils from different sites in Africa, Asia and Europe was analysed. The morphological differences of each dental class was assessed and the ability of each tooth to identify the species to which its owner belonged was analysed.

The researcher concluded that it is possible to correctly determine the species to which an isolated tooth belonged with a success rate ranging from 60% to 80%. Although these values are not very high, they increase as different dental classes from the same individual are added. That means that if several teeth from the same individual are analysed, the probability of correctly identifying the species can reach 100%.

Aida Gómez Robles explains that, from all the species of hominids currently known "none of them has a probability higher than 5% to be the common ancestor of Neardenthals and Homo sapiens. Therefore, the common ancestor of this lineage is likely to have not been discovered yet".

Computer Simulation

What is innovative about this study is that computer simulation was employed to observe the effects of environmental changes on morphology of the teeth. Similar studies had been conducted on the evolution and development of different groups of mammals, but never on human evolution.

Additionally, the research conducted at CENIEH and at the University of Granada is pioneer together with recent studies based on the shape of the skull- in using mathematical methods to make and estimation of the morphology of the teeth of common ancestors in the evolutionary tree of the human species. "However, in this study, only dental morphology was analysed. The same methodology can be used to rebuild other parts of the skeletum of that species, which would provide other models that would serve as a reference for future comparative studies of new fossil finds."

To carry out this study, Gómez Robles employed fossils from a number of archaeological-paleontological sites, such as that of the Gran Colina and the Sima de los Huesos, located in Atapuerca range (Burgos, Spain), and the site of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia. She also studied different fossil collections by visiting international institutions as the National Museum of Georgia, the Institute of Human Paleontology and the Museum of Mankind in Paris, the European Research Centre Tautavel (France), the Senckenberg Institute Frankfurt, the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and the Museum of Natural History in New York and Cleveland.

Although the results of this research were disclosed in two articles published in one of the most prestigious journals in the field of human evolution, Journal of Human Evolution (2007 and 2008), they will be thoroughly presented within a few months.

Women in Pharaonic Egypt Asharq Al Awsat

Asharq Al Awsat

When we talk about the grand history of [Egypt] which extends more than fifty centuries into the past, we find ourselves continually speaking about the ancient Egyptian man, whether this is ancient Egyptian engineers who built temples and pyramids, the ancient Egyptian doctors who carried out the first medical operations in human history, or the ancient Egyptian artists who carved huge statues and inscribed hieroglyphics on the walls of temples and tombs.

However we rarely find mention of ancient Egyptian women, as if this great civilization was built by men alone, and as if ancient society was comprised solely of men, which of course is something that is completely untrue.

Yes, there is a clear injustice regarding how the role that was played by ancient Egyptian women in building this ancient civilization is portrayed in comparison to how the role of men is portrayed; however what is strange is that this injustice is a product of modern research and did not exist within ancient Egyptian society. Women played an important role in ancient Egyptian civilization, and they also enjoyed unparalleled luxury compared to other women at the time, and this is why when I decided to publish a book about the role played by women in Pharaonic Egypt I decided that the best and more accurate title for this would be "Silent Images: Women in Pharaonic Egypt."

After a long examination of Pharaonic antiquities I discovered that ancient Egyptian women were represented by a number of goddesses, such as the goddess "Isis" who was the goddess of fertility and worshipped as the ideal mother, the goddess "Hathor" who personified motherhood and was worshipped as a protector, "Sekhmet" the warrior goddess, and "Bastet" the protector goddess. Upper Egypt also worshipped its own patron goddess "Nekhbet" while Lower Egypt worshipped the patron goddess "Wadjet." This represents the religious aspect; however at the political level the wife of the pharaoh also played an important role with regards to the continuation of the royal line, while ancient Egyptian princesses could also politically increase the strength of the ruling family through marriage.

Pharaonic Queens bore the burden of rule and raising their young children and teaching them to govern, for example Queen-Consort "Ankhesenpepi II" the mother of Pharaoh "Pepi II" ruled in her son's name until he was old enough to take power.

Queen "Khentkaus II" also acted as regent for her two young sons Pharaoh "Neferefre" and his successor "Nyuserre Ini" protecting the throne until the latter came of age. Prior to this, historical sources have preserved the name of Queen "Nimaethap" for the important role she played as regent and for her protection of the throne for her son Pharaoh "Djoser" the first King of the Third Dynasty.

Throughout ancient Egypt's history, the names of just a few ruling Queens have been made known, with the great Queen "Hatshepsut" who became a legend amongst ancient women enjoying the longest and most successful reign. Hatshepsut ruled over an Egyptian golden age during which ancient Egypt was unrivalled in power in the Near East.

During a 20-year reign, Queen Hatshepsut protected the borders of her empire, wearing the same royal regalia as worn by male Pharaoh's. She attributed her birth and divine right to rule to the ancient Egyptian god Amun-Ra. Queen Hatshepsut did indeed rule over Egypt, and she was responsible for the construction of a beautiful temple complex [Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut] at Deir al Bahari on the west bank of the Nile.

Just one visit to this magnificent temple which was constructed by a woman is sufficient for anybody to feel the glory and grandeur of Egypt's past, which is something that fill's one's soul with the conviction that the earth belongs to those who take action, for history does not remember those who don't.