You never know what you’ll find at a flea market … like a 4,000-year-old piece of pottery. That’s what a guy in England discovered, though he didn’t realize what he had until later, after he’d repurposed the jar as a toothbrush holder.
The pottery vessel, adorned with the painting of an antelope, caught the eye of Karl Martin while he was browsing a yard sale five years ago. He picked the jar up, along with another pot, for about $5 (4 pounds).
“I liked it straight away,” Martin said in a statement from Hansons Auctioneers, where he now works and where the pottery was auctioned — selling for about $100 (80 pounds) in November.
The jar dates to the Indus Valley Harappan civilization, which thrived in the northwestern regions of South Asia during the Bronze Age, according to James Brenchley, head of antiquities at Hansons Auctioneers. Read more.
A pair of researchers at Temple University has found evidence that suggests Neanderthals mated and produced offspring with anatomically modern humans multiple times—not just once, as has been suggested by prior research. In their paper published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, Fernando Villanea and Joshua Schraiber describe their genetic analysis of East Asian and European people and how they compared to people from other places. Fabrizio Mafessoni with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology offers a News and Views piece on the work done by the pair in the same journal issue.
In recent years, scientists have discovered that early humans moving out of Africa encountered Neanderthals living in parts of what is now Europe and Eastern Asia. In comparing Neanderthal DNA with modern humans, researchers have found that there was a least one pairing that led to offspring, which is reflected in the DNA of humans—approximately 2 percent of the DNA in non-African humans today is Neanderthal. In this new effort, the researchers have found evidence that suggests there was more than one such encounter. Read more.
This month marks the golden jubilee of a watershed event in the history of this nation that should cause all Australians to pause and reflect.
On July 15, 1968, while searching for clues to past climates and ancient landscapes on land under the joint care of Paakantyi/Barkindji, Ngiyampaa and Mutthi Mutthi people, Earth scientist Jim Bowler ambled across the cremated remains of an Aboriginal woman eroding from a crescent-shaped dune flanking the shoreline of now-dry Lake Mungo in western New South Wales.
The 40,000-year-old “Mungo Lady” and the equally ancient remains of Mungo Man, found nearby in 1974, doubled scientific estimates of how long Aboriginal people had called Australia home.
The discovery taught us Aboriginal history stretched back to a time when the only humans in Europe were Neanderthals, and people had not yet reached America. The scientific, cultural and political reverberations still resonate today. Read more.
House of Brat 