io9: mega anthropology

Ice Ages Start and End So Suddenly "It's Like a Button Was Pressed," Say Scientists

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 10:30:00 PST

Dutch researchers drilling into the glaciers of Greenland have discovered that climate change occurs more rapidly than previously believed - indeed, the most recent ice age ended abruptly in just one year.

The NordGrip drilling project in Greenland has extracted ice cores from the ancient ice sheets there which reveal that the world's most recent ice age ended precisely 11,711 years ago. An ice core is a long cylinder drilled out of the ice, made up of layers of snow and ice that have fallen in the region for millennia. By examining the amount of snowfall buried in those layers, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen have determined the exact year the ice age halted and gave way to our current climate.

According to ice core researcher Jørgen Peder Steffensen:

Our new, extremely detailed data from the examination of the ice cores shows that in the transition from the ice age to our current warm, interglacial period the climate shift is so sudden that it is as if a button was pressed.

This discovery suggests that our current climate could undergo a similar rapid change, shifting back into ice age mode in just one year.

Anthropologist John Hawks comments that the idea of extremely rapid climate change has gained a lot of currency in the past decade. But no, it does not mean that ice ages start Day After Tomorrow style, with climate changes chasing people down hallways.

Politiken.dk [via John Hawks]

Photo via Niels Bohr Institute.

Ancient Mayan Tooth Bling Stolen - and Returned by Mystery Benefactor

Annalee Newitz — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 08:40:00 PST

These Mayan jawbones are centuries old, and demonstrate the venerable tradition of tooth bling (in this case, jade and iron pyrite). But they're also part of a strange tale of international bone theft.

It's long been known that the ancient Mayan ruling classes drilled holes in their teeth and put jewels in them. This was a popular practice at the height of the highly-advanced Mayan Empire, which lasted over a millennium before 900 AD, when it abruptly lost control over vast portions of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.

These jawbones, which scientists have identified as being from two individuals, showed up in a small box delivered to the Honduran Embassy in the Netherlands last week. Local authorities speculated that the bones had been stolen in Honduras after researchers at Leiden University ran an analysis on them.

According to the Latin American Herald Tribune:

After the bones were received at the embassy in the Netherlands, the government of that European country requested that they be examined at Leiden University to determine their origin and to document the dental adornment, the Honduran foreign relations secretariat said.
It added that the pieces were studied using strontium isotope analysis, which showed that the ratio of strontium in the tooth enamel was consistent with that found in the water of Honduras' Copan River.

The tests determined that the individuals to whom the remains belonged were from an area of western Honduras now known as the Copan ruins, the Central American country's most important archaeological site.

The bones were delivered anonymously to the embassy, and nobody has any idea who did it. Perhaps a Dutch collector who felt they should go to their country of origin? A guilt-wracked member of an international ring of archaeologist pirates?

Regardless of who it was, the bones have now been returned to Honduras, where they will remain at a research institute.

SOURCE: Latin American Herald Tribune

Photo by Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images.

See the Submerged Ruins of Cleopatra's Palace in Egypt's Underwater Museum

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:19:58 PDT

In a few years, you may be able to see Alexandria the way it once was — deep beneath the sea. The areas of classical Alexandria that contained the ancient world's biggest library along with Cleopatra's palace have sunk beneath the waves, but now it looks as if the United Nations may step in and help Egypt show off these structures in a unique underwater museum (architectural drawing above). Above the water, the museum will have illuminated sail-like structures and be connected to the mainland via fiberglass tunnel. Want to gawk at some of the underwater treasures that museum visitors might see?

This is a statue of a priest of Isis, standing among fallen columns. Though this statue was pulled out of the water in the late 1990s, there are many other sculptures like these still underwater. This gorgeous art, along with the city's famed lighthouse, made Alexandria a favored tourist spot for Romans on holiday over 2,000 years ago.

Here's another glimpse inside Cleopatra's palace, where you can see the marble head of Roman princess Antonia Minor. The great buildings of Alexandria were destroyed by earthquakes, and then by encroaching waters. Photos via National Geographic.

Underwater Museum for Egypt Sunken Treasures? [via National Geographic] Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

Remains of a 1500-Year-Old City Uncovered in Amazonian Jungle

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:09:36 PDT

A 1500-year-old Amazonian city, full of artificial lakes, large public plazas, and agricultural regions (including fish farms), is being excavated and mapped for the first time in modern memory. Until recently, the remains of the ancient city had been almost completely hidden by jungle. A group of Brazilian and U.S. researchers report in tomorrow's issue of Science that they used satellite photos to determine that the now-vanished city was structured as a group of small towns connected by roads, ditches, and shared farmlands. The researchers say the lifestyle here was clearly "urbanism," and compared it to cities that one might have seen in Ancient Greece or medieval Europe.

The city was located in a region of the Amazon known as Upper Xingu (today in Brazil), which is currently inhabited by people of the Kuikoro tribe. Members of the Kuikoro helped identify the remains of the towns to scientists. In this satellite photo (below), the red lines are raised berms that would have served to elevate roads and plazas, while black lines show ditches that were used for defensive purposes.

Scientists have found about 28 ancient town sites in the region, each of which they estimate probably contained about 800-1000 in the "inner city" area, and about 1500 more in outlying farm areas. So each town probably had about 2500 people, making the region really quite dense and populous.

According to MSNBC:

Each village had a central plaza, the team reports. Larger communities could cover 150 acres (60 hectares) and included gates and secondary plazas. And each settlement had a formal road connected to the central plaza and oriented northeast to southwest, the direction of the summer solstice . . . . [Anthropology professor Mike] Heckenberger and his colleagues said the findings suggest future solutions for supporting the modern-day indigenous populations in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso and other regions of the Amazon — and demonstrate that the area can return to a "pristine" state even after centuries of human activity.
"Some of the practices that these folks hammered out may provide alternative forms of understanding how to do low-level sustainable development today," Heckenberg said.

No one knows for sure what happened to the city, but one of the more common theories is that its population was wiped out by diseases brought by European colonists about 500 years ago.

How the Amazon's Cities Worked [MSNBC]