VINDOLANDA
TR
UST
STUCK...
Residues of adhesives have been detected
on a small number of 1,000 stone tools
recovered from two caves on the western
coast of southern Italy – Grotta del
Fossellone and Grotta di Sant’Agostino. The
tools were dated to between 40,000 and
55,000years old, and so had been worked
by Neanderthals long before modern
humans entered Europe. Small rocks had
been chipped and pummelled into sharp-
edged hand-held tools for millions ofyears,
but attaching them to wooden or bone
handles marked a major advance. The
tools would be slotted onto the handles
and bound with sinews or plant fibres, but
these objects found in the Italian caves
indicate a further advance by the much-
maligned Neanderthals in adding a wonder
substance, glue, to fix the tools to their
handles even more securely.Archaeology;
arstechnica, 2 July 2019....AND UNSTUCK
A team of 400 volunteers have unearthed
some interesting 1,800-year-old objects at
the Roman fort ofVindolanda in Hexham,
near Hadrian’s Wall. Onewas the sole
of a soldier’s shoe (size 11), and
another the remnants of a playing
board for agame calledLudus
latrunculorum. But the star
finds were two gemstones,
carnelian and red jasper,
carved with figures thought to
represent the gods Minerva
and Apollo. They had become
unstuck from rings because the
glue fixing themwas not strong
enough. (Perhaps the Romans could
have taken a tip from our Neanderthal
forerunners.)
“These stones were recovered from the
Third Century bath house toilet drain – their
owners either did not initially notice that
their gemstones had fallen out of the rings
and into the loo or they could not face
climbing down into the toilet to try to
recover them,” opined Dr Andrew
Birley, chiefexecutive officer
at theVindolandaTrust.BBC
News, 29 June 2019.YET ANOTHER ONE
Evidence ofyet another
previously unknown species
of hominin (earlyexample of
the human genus) has been
found. This newly discovered human
forerunner has been dubbedHomo
luzonensis:the 50,000-year-old fossil
remains of at least two adults and one
youngster have been uncovered in the Callao
Cave on Luzon Island, Philippines.“The fossil remains included adult
finger and toe bones, as well as teeth,”
informs Professor Philip Piper of Australian
National University. “The teeth are really
very small...The size of the teeth
generally, though not always,
reflect the overall body-size of
a mammal, so we thinkHomo
luzonensiswas probably
relatively small. Exactly how
small we don’t knowyet.”
In fact, it seems thatHomo
luzonensisshares some
unique skeletal features with tiny
Homo floresiensis, aka ‘the hobbit’,
discovered on the island of Flores near the
Philippine archipelago, about which FT has
reported since 2004 [FT191:4-5, 355:16,
etc]. (Species that develop in island isolation
tend to be subject to ‘island dwarfism’–
perhaps due to a need toexist on limited
resources.)
“The Philippines is made up of a group
of large islands that have been
separated long enough to have
potentially facilitated archipelago
speciation,” Piper points
out. “There is no reason why
archæological research in the
Philippines couldn’t discover
several species of hominin. It’s
probably just a matter of time.”
EurekAlert, 10 April 2019. (Full
account in the journal, Nature,10 April.)ATLANTIS OF THE NORTH
Doggerland, mentioned previously in this
column, and often tagged as ‘Britain’s
Atlantis’, is a submerged landmassbeneathwhat is today’s North Sea. Itwas
drowned circa 6,000 BC due to sea level rise
caused by ice melt after the last IceAge.
Fishermen, oil andgas companies, have from
time to time brought uprandom bits and
pieces showing that therewas land there
in the deep, then more formal sediment
samples have provided pollen and other
environmental evidence that suggest that
the now submerged areas would have once
been great landscapes of plants (especially
woodland) and animals. If animals, then the
question has been, did humans ever roam
this land prior to its inundation?
Now, since May thisyear, teams from
English and Belgian universities are making
more organised studies of the lost land using
the latest soundwave technology. And it is
already bearing results. Homing in on what
may have been a human habitation site
25 miles (40km) out to sea from England’s
east coast, alongside a former riverbed
(dubbed‘South River’) in Doggerland, the
researchers have recovered a sediment
sample containing artefacts: a large worked
hammerstone used for making stone tools,
and a shard of flint sliced off from a stone
tool during manufacture. Such items may not
seem much to the untrained eye, but they tell
archæologists that these are proof of human
activity in the Mesolithic era, possibly dating
back to 8,000 BC or earlier. The samples
were recovered from near what seems to
be a flint deposit, and researchers think
they have identified two tool-making bases
on either side of the South River. The next
stage of the survey will involve an unmanned
mini-submarine, and, eventually, divers.BBC
News, NewYork Post, 12 June 2019.PAUL DEVEREUX,Managing Editor ofTime & Mind, digs up the latest archæological discoveriesNOEL CELIS / AFP / GETTY IMAGES14 FTABOVE:Associate Professor Armand Salvador Mijares of the University of the Philippines holds up a bone of the
newly discovered human foreunner,Homo luzonensis.BELOW: The carved gemstones unearthed in Hexham.ARCHÆOLOGY A MONTHLY EXCAVATION OF ODDITIES AND ANTIQUITIES