forbidden archeology

[Intrinsic]

Some of bits and pieces of arrow heads, tools and scrap chips I’ve kept over the years,

The white scrapping tool was found in death valley np while diggin down about 3 feet to uncover the “spring”.
The rest in the Sierras, one find these old camps just littered with obsidian flakes

Thanks for looking

[bentech]

its gone now

but i had me this big chunck

it was whats refererend to a a "core"

big chunk of primary material
you hit to slame off pieces that
youd then further work
to make your tooks

it actually took a bit to recognize what i was

back in the stone age

it would have been a resource

something hiked across great disttance

or burried
to come back for

[bentech]

once i fitured out what it was

i wondered

how many years there were
in beteween

the man whod last "worked" it
and me picking it up

a skilled person

could
have

looked at the marks
the pattern

and have given a good guess

every age had their way about it

and these left fingerprints

[bentech]

huge discovery
and right out of the museum


World's oldest engraving discovered

The chiselled shell, dating back between 540,000 and 430,000 years, was among the iconic fossil collection established in the 19th century by Eugène Dubois, at Trinil, in Java, Indonesia, where he discovered the first Homo erectus.


http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/ ... discovered" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[bentech]

pretty fuck
evidence we ate our own



Kelso’s team found the remains, which belonged to a 14-year-old girl, in a trash pile with the bones of butchered horses, dogs, rats, and mice. Someone trying to separate flesh from the bones with a knife left marks on the skull, jawbone, and tibia. The marks appear to have been made inexpertly, or by someone who was hesitating to butcher the bones. “There’s no question that this is evidence for survival cannibalism,”


http://www.archaeology.org/issues/96-13 ... annibalism" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[bentech]

you know then
what the deal was?

things were so desperate

you didnt bury the girl
or at least
you dug her back up

they were so set on "theyre" ways
they couldnt fit into where they had washed up

so they had to eat their children

and here the story is
we were bringing civilization

what a laugh

[bentech]

heart breaking

Even as Beirut reinvents itself yet again—this time as a skyscraper-studded center of finance—a new generation of young Lebanese archaeologists is fighting to reclaim the city's complicated past before it is gone for good. In the rush to build during the past decade, Roman ruins were bulldozed, columns were crushed into cement, and piles of ancient debris were relegated to the city dump.

"http://www.archaeology.org/issues/96-13 ... annibalism

[bentech]

What we know of Beirut's ancient history is more a series of snapshots than a continuous record. Sixty thousand years ago, early humans made stone tools on the tongue of land that extends out from the Lebanon Mountains and forms the city's modern boundaries. Archaeologists have uncovered a small Neolithic village dating to 4000 B.C. near today's airport. As civilization emerged in the third millennium B.C., the first major cities along the Mediterranean coast took root nearby. Byblos, now a half-hour drive up the coast, flourished, while Tyre and Sidon grew to the south. These important ports became centers for the seafaring Phoenicians, a trading people who spread across the region between the sixteenth and fourth centuries B.C.

[Intrinsic]

Boffins unearth the ultimate antique art - 500,000 years old
Early Homo was about more than being erect
By Iain Thomson, 5 Dec 2014

The oldest example of our ancestors' artistic talents has been unearthed, after spending over a century hiding in plain view.

The artifact in question is a mussel shell found near the bones of a member of the species Homo Erectus in the 1890s by Dutch paleontologist Eugène Dubois on the island of Java in what's now Indonesia. After more than 70 years gathering dust in a museum in Leiden a new examination showed one of the shells had been inscribed by an artistic hominid up to 500,000 years ago.

Josephine Joordens, a biologist at Leiden University, was studying the shells to see how the hominid would have used marine resources. A large number of the shells had a small hole punched into a specific spot, which would have severed the mussel's muscle that kept it clammed up and made it easier to open.

Looking at the inside the shell she noticed that someone had carved a series of triangular symbols on the interior, about one centimeter tall. The markings, though faint, came from a mollusc that was around 500,000 years old, making it the earliest artwork ever discovered.

"People never found this engraving because it's hardly visible," Joordens told Nature. "It's only when you have light from a certain angle that it stands out."

Tests on similar shells show that it took a lot of effort to make the carvings. Since Erectus didn't use metal tools, Joordens speculated that a shark's tooth had been used to make the inscription.

If you don't know the intention of the person who made it, it's impossible to call it art," said Joordens.

"But on the other hand, it is an ancient drawing. It is a way of expressing yourself. What was meant by the person who did this, we simply don't know. It could have been to impress his girlfriend, or to doodle a bit, or to mark the shell as his own property."

Art is one of the signs of higher cognitive brain functions and early Homo Sapiens spent a lot of time slapping paint on cave walls for his or her edification. In September the first piece of Neanderthal art was discovered from around 40,000 years ago, but the age of this latest find dramatically increases estimates of how long mankind and our ancestors have had an artistic bent.

Clive Finlayson, a zoologist at the Gibraltar Museum who co-authored the Nature paper, said that the find could cause scientists to reconsider what markers we use to indicate advanced human intelligence and to reconsider the role of Homo Erectus, which died out around 140,000 years ago.

"I've been suggesting increasingly strongly that a lot of these things that are meant to be modern human we're finding in other hominids," he said. "We really need to revisit these concepts and take stock."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/05 ... years_old/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[country boy]

That's 1 hell of a gap between 'art....500k to 40k!
Here's a link to the Nature article (no longer behind a paywall):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/va ... 13962.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;