close
    • chevron_right

      Listen to haunting notes from an 18,000-year-old conch shell trumpet

      Kiona N. Smith · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 12 February, 2021 - 15:57 · 1 minute

    Color photo of a person with a conch shell raised to their mouth, silhouetted against a red-painted cave wall.

    Enlarge / Archaeologists in 1931 found the conch shell near the entrance of Marsoulas Cave. This is a reconstruction of where and how the shell might have been played. (credit: G. Tosello)

    After 18,000 years of silence, an ancient musical instrument played its first notes. The last time anyone heard a sound from the conch shell trumpet, thick sheets of ice still covered most of Europe.

    University of Toulouse archaeologist Carole Fritz and her colleagues recently recognized the shell as a musical instrument. To understand more about how ancient people crafted a trumpet from a 31cm (1 foot) long conch shell, the archaeologists used high-resolution CT scans to examine the shell’s inner structure: delicate-looking whorls of shell and open chambers, coiled around a central axis, or columella. A series of overlapping photographs and careful measurements became a full-color, 3D digital model of the shell, and image enhancement software helped reveal how Magdalenian people had decorated the instrument with red ocher dots.

    And in a lab at the University of Toulouse, a horn player and musicology researcher became the first person in 18,000 years to play the conch shell. The musician blew into the broken tip, or apex, of the shell and vibrated his lips as if he were playing a trumpet or trombone. Very carefully, he coaxed three loud, clear, resonant notes from the ancient instrument:

    Read 26 remaining paragraphs | Comments

    index?i=IGCBVnCCVQA:GN8GnLw6Gro:V_sGLiPBpWUindex?i=IGCBVnCCVQA:GN8GnLw6Gro:F7zBnMyn0Loindex?d=qj6IDK7rITsindex?d=yIl2AUoC8zA
    • chevron_right

      This 9,000-year-old skeleton is the oldest cremation in the Near East

      Kiona N. Smith · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 17 August, 2020 - 17:24 · 1 minute

    Fire.

    Enlarge / Fire. (credit: Soreen D. / Flickr )

    A cremation pit recently unearthed at Beisamoun, just north of the Sea of Galilee, contained the burned remains of a person who died sometime between 7013 and 6700 BCE (according to radiocarbon dating). The person's name and story are lost to us, but their remains are evidence of a drastic change not only in how people lived but in what they believed about life and death.

    A time of change

    The cremation dates to a time of social and cultural change in the region around what is now northern Israel. Around 7000 BCE, people abandoned many of the larger settlements in the region; the archaeological record shows homes and villages falling into disuse and disrepair. Until that time, people in villages like Beisamoun had often buried their dead in the floors of their homes. People evidently wanted to keep their ancestors and relatives close to the center of family life. At Beisamoun, people stuck around, but they started building in a lighter construction style and stopped burying dead relatives under the floor. It marked the end of a period that archaeologists working in the Levant call the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, which is precise but not terribly catchy.

    It’s no coincidence that the oldest evidence of cremation in the Near East dates from this same time of cultural and social change. “The way you handle the dead is directly connected to beliefs,” Fanny Bocquentin, an archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), told Ars.

    Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

    index?i=1Qkxs1UzLe0:bQ0y3Y9Lpt4:V_sGLiPBpWUindex?i=1Qkxs1UzLe0:bQ0y3Y9Lpt4:F7zBnMyn0Loindex?d=qj6IDK7rITsindex?d=yIl2AUoC8zA
    • chevron_right

      People slept on comfy grass beds 200,000 years ago

      Kiona N. Smith · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 14 August, 2020 - 14:56 · 1 minute

    People slept on comfy grass beds 200,000 years ago

    Enlarge

    Fragments of glassy petrified grass and microscopic traces of plant material, dating to around 200,000 years ago, are all that’s left of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer’s bed in the back of Border Cave. In the same part of the rock shelter, archaeologists found layers of ash with more recent (as in only around 43,000 years old) and better-preserved leaves of dried grass laid on top, as if people had burned their old, dirty bedding and then laid fresh, clean sheaves of grass over the ashes—the rock shelter version of changing the sheets.

    The finds shed light on an aspect of early human life that we rarely get to consider. Most of the artifacts that survive from more than a few thousand years ago are made of stone and bone; even wooden tools are rare. That means we tend to think of the Paleolithic in terms of hard, sharp stone tools and the bones of butchered animals. Through that lens, life looks very harsh—perhaps even harsher than it really was. Most of the human experience is missing from the archaeological record, including creature comforts like soft, clean beds.

    Beds were burning

    Until now, the oldest bedding archaeologists had ever found came from another South African site called Sibudu, where people 77,000 years ago had piled up layers of grasslike wetland plants called sedge, mixed with assorted medicinal plants, and occasionally burned the old layers. Some modern people in parts of Africa also use plants as bedding in similar ways. The Border Cave find shows that people have been making comfy sleeping pallets out of grass for at least 200,000 years—nearly as long as there have been Homo sapiens in the world.

    Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

    index?i=5OQuJgDMDNA:UqwKEejBxFo:V_sGLiPBpWUindex?i=5OQuJgDMDNA:UqwKEejBxFo:F7zBnMyn0Loindex?d=qj6IDK7rITsindex?d=yIl2AUoC8zA