2 April 2019 - RARE 1,000 YEAR-OLD COPPERHEAD ARROW FOUND

RARE 1,000 YEAR-OLD

 COPPERHEAD 

ARROW FOUND

G'day folks,

A rare example of copper metallurgy has been found in Yukon.

IN JUNE 2016, GREG HARE, an archaeologist working for the territory of Yukon, in northwestern Canada, was standing on a patch of ice near Carcross, where Bennett Lake and Nares Lake meet, when he noticed something sticking out of the ground. Carcross was a famous stopover during the Klondike Gold Rush, and also a fertile caribou-hunting ground for First Nations peoples, so it is not uncommon to find wood, antler, or bone hunting implements sticking out of the ice. Such tools are easy to lose track of once they have been launched.

“We knew it was an arrow right away as we have recovered enough similar tools before,” Hare says, “but the curious part was that when we tried to extract it from ice it kept sticking.” That’s because attached to the barbed antler arrowhead was a large, heavy tip made of copper, a very unusual find in Yukon. “The few copper arrowheads that were found before had never been attached to anything,” he explains. “This is the first intact copper arrow we encountered.”

Around 1,100 years ago, local indigenous people made the transition from hunting with darts, launched with a spear-thrower known as an atlatl, to bow-and-arrow technology. Radiocarbon dating places the new arrowhead at nearly 1,000 years old, just after the transition, and well before any contact with Europeans. “The arrowhead is made of 99.5 percent pure copper,” Hare continues, “which shows it comes from local copper nuggets as opposed to European smelted copper [alloys].” Such a find is exceptionally rare and is providing insight into the evolution of hunting technology in this part of the Arctic.

Clancy's comment: I love reading about these finds. They prove how little we have come, or how advanced our forebears were.

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23 March 2019 - DOGS HAVE BEEN HELPING US HUNT FOR 12,000 YEARS

DOGS HAVE BEEN HELPING

 US HUNT FOR 12,000 YEARS

G'day folks,

New findings in Jordan indicate that they’ve been assisting us for nearly 12,000 years.

IN THE NEAR EAST, HUMANS may have domesticated dogs as many as 14,000 years ago, during the Epipaleolithic period. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but it came at great cost to small prey including hare, according to a new study in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

The study, by archaeologists from the University of Copenhagen and University College London, looks at animal bones found in a Neolithic settlement known as Shubayqa 6, established 11,500 years ago, in the Black Desert of northeast Jordan. The bones suggest that the site’s residents were using their dogs to help them hunt, a finding that can help clarify the murky origins of dog domestication. It hasn’t been clear, the researchers write in a release, whether that process was deliberate or accidental, but this new evidence of canine-assisted hunting implies that these Stone Age humans were highly dependent indeed on their dogs.

At Shubayqa 6, the evidence for a hunting partnership between humans and dogs, who would’ve been more similar to wolves at this point than the domesticated canines we know today, is written in the bones themselves. The remains bear “unmistakable signs of having passed through the digestive tract of another animal,” said lead author Lisa Yeomans in the release, and some are larger than anything even the most determined humans could shove down their gullets.

At the same time, the researchers also found that the remains of small prey—mostly hare, but also some fox—began to appear much more frequently around the time that dogs arrived at Shubayqa 6. The two developments seem linked, as it’s possible that the dogs helped the hunters refine their methods. 

Before using dogs, the hunters may have relied more heavily on imprecise methods like netting—less effective than setting packs of hungry canines onto a hare’s bushy tail. The researchers also established that people occupied Shubayqa 6 year round, meaning that the dogs wouldn’t have simply been prowling around on their own, and further supporting the theory that humans were intentionally using these dogs to hunt.

Number 6 isn’t the only part of the Shubayqa area in northeast Jordan to bear significant evidence of our developing knack for harvesting food. In July 2018, researchers published their analysis of the oldest bread ever found, at a site known as Shubayqa 1. The crumbs predate the advent of agriculture. Just as the hare remains can change our understanding of the history of canine domestication, the bread offers new insight into the domestication of cereal grains.

Clancy's comment: There ya go. Man's best friend, eh?

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