Fossils found in Moroccan cave may be a close Homo sapiens ancestor
The fossilized lower jawbones of two adults and a toddler, as well as teeth, a thigh bone, and some vertebrae, were unearthed in a cave in Casablanca, Morocco.
The fossilized lower jawbones of two adults and a toddler, as well as teeth, a thigh bone, and some vertebrae, were unearthed in a cave in Casablanca, Morocco.
Archaeologists from GUARD Archaeology uncovered the unusual Bronze Age burial site near Twentyshilling Hill, Dumfries and Galloway, while working on a wind farm project.
The hand-held lasers concentrate flickering beams of light onto the stone, with the heat they generate lifting away black deposits of pollution to reveal the white Carrara marble beneath.
Archaeologists found a nearly complete peahen fresco, missing its head, dating to the mid-first century B.C., that may have belonged to Poppaea Sabina, the second wife of Emperor Nero.
“Sites that appear on the surface as scattered stones suddenly become coherent, organized spaces, and it saves a lot of research time,” Dr. Yitzchak Jaffe said.
The Civil Administration said the artifacts add to a growing corpus of Second Temple–era material recovered in recent years across the West Bank.
Cast almost entirely of lead, the pendant is decorated on both sides with an identical image of a menorah framed within a circular border.
Officers seized around 10,000 archaeological artifacts, including 7,000 coins issued by various Greek city-states that existed on Sicily in ancient times.
The site is widely identified with the ancient village of Bet Zecharia, where the Seleucid army and the forces of Judah Maccabee clashed in what is known as the fifth Maccabean battle.
"We think humans brought pyrite to the site with the intention of making fire. And this has huge implications, pushing back the earliest fire-making," said archaeologist Nick Ashton.
Research focused on human remains found at the Troisième caverne of Goyet, a cave site in present-day Belgium that contains one of the largest known assemblages of Neanderthal bones in northern EU.