What was found, in the Cango Valley along with Circular stone hearths and calcified dung remains of domesticated sheep, that is a cutting tool shaped somewhat like an axe that dates back to the stone age?
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Boomplaas Cave Boomplaas Cave is located in the Cango Valley in the foothills of the Swartberg mountain range, north of Oudtshoorn, Eden District Municipality in the Western Cape Province, South Africa. It has a 5 m deep stratified archaeological sequence of human presence, occupation and hunter-gatherer/herder acculturation dating back 80,000 years. The site's documentation contributed to the reconstruction of palaeo-environments in the context of changes in climate within periods of the Late Pleistocene (12,000 - 80,000 years BP) and the Holocene (since 12,000 years BP). The cave has served multiple functions during its occupation, such as a kraal (enclosure) for animals, a place for the storage of oil rich fruits and as a hunting camp. Circular stone hearths and calcified dung remains of domesticated sheep as well as stone adzes and pottery art (painted stones) were excavated indicating that humans lived at the site and kept animals.
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Adze The adze ( ; alternative spelling: adz) is a cutting tool shaped somewhat like an axe that dates back to the stone age. It can be any tool with a sharp cutting edge. Adzes are used for smoothing or carving wood in hand woodworking, similar to an axe but with the cutting edge perpendicular to the handle. Two basic forms of an adze are the hand adze, a short handled tool swung with one hand, and a foot adze, a long handled tool capable of powerful swings using both hands, the cutting edge usually striking at foot or shin level. The blade of an adze is set at right angles to the tool's shaft (like a hoe or plane), in contrast to an axe's blade, which is in plane with the shaft. A similar, but blunt, tool used for digging in hard ground is called a mattock.
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Olorgesailie Olorgesailie is a geological formation in East Africa containing a group of Lower Paleolithic archaeological sites. It is on the floor of the Eastern Rift Valley in southern Kenya, 40 mi southwest of Nairobi along the road to Lake Magadi. Olorgesailie is noted for the large number of Acheulean hand axes discovered there that are associated with animal butchering. According to the National Museums of Kenya, the finds are internationally significant for archaeology, palaeontology, and geology.
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Vogelheimer Klinge The Vogelheimer Klinge (German: Vogelheim Blade) is an approximately 280,000 year old flint tool, discovered in 1926 during the construction of the Rhine-Herne Canal in Vogelheim, north of the city of Essen. In older publications it is also known as the Klingenschaber von Vogelheim. It was long considered to be the oldest accurately dated artifact in North Rhine-Westphalia and can be found in the .
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Sacrum bone of Tequixquiac The Sacrum bone of Tequixquiac is an ancient paleo-Indian sculpture carved in a pleistocene-era bone of a prehistoric camel. It was found by Mexican naturalist Mariano Bárcena in 1870. It is considered among the earliest pieces of art from the American continent.
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Chopping tool In archaeology a chopping tool is a stone tool. Stone tools have been dated using scientific dating such as Carbon 14 dating and Potassium argon dating. Stone tools have been found to be almost 2 million years old. Chopping tools have been found to be about 2 million years old as well. The oldest object in the British Museum is a Chopping Tool. It was found in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Since Chopping tools are a sub category of stone tools we can see how these tools have developed over time.
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Es Skhul Es-Skhul (Arabic: السخول‎ ‎ , meaning kid, young goat) is a prehistoric cave site situated 20 km south of the city of Haifa, Israel, and around 3 km from the Mediterranean Sea. The site was first excavated by Dorothy Garrod during summer of 1928. The excavation revealed the first evidence of the late Epipaleolithic Natufian culture, characterized by the presence of numerous microlith stone tools, human burials and ground stone tools. Skhul also represents an area where Neanderthals - present in the region from 200,000 to 45,000 years ago - lived alongside these humans dating to 100,000 years ago. The cave also has Middle Palaeolithic layers.
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Prehistory of Myanmar The prehistory of Burma (Myanmar) spanned hundreds of millennia to about 200 BCE. Archaeological evidence shows that the "Homo erectus" had lived in the region now known as Burma as early as 750,000 years ago, and the "Homo sapiens" about 11,000 BCE, in a Stone Age culture called the "Anyathian". Named after the central dry zone sites where most of the early settlement finds are located, the "Anyathian" period was when plants and animals were first domesticated and polished stone tools appeared in Burma. Though these sites are situated in fertile areas, evidence shows these early people were not yet familiar with agricultural methods.
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Honey Creek (Mason County, Texas) Honey Creek, is a tributary of the Llano River, and an archaeological site located on the Edwards Plateau, between Grit and Streeter, in the county of Mason in the U.S. state of Texas. The Prehistoric midden site (41MS32) has been of interest to scientific research since 1987, when Glenn T. Goode of the Texas Department of Transportation uncovered it during an otherwise routine infrastructural project. Stephen L. Black and the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory included it in a wider study of burned rock midden. Researchers have been able to date the midden at Honey Creek, used to bake native plants, to having evolved 1110–1700 AD, and is the end result of an estimated 165 ovens used by hunter-gatherer bands over that six-century period. Texas A&M University archeobotanist Phil Dering identified 14 varieties of local plants in charred remains found. The oldest artifact found at the site is the "Martindale dart point" believed to date to 5000–6000 BC for hunting, but chipped and refashioned in later years to be used as a tool at the midden.
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Microburin technique The microburin technique is a special procedure for cutting up lithic blades which yields fragments that can be used in the manufacture of utensils. The usable fragments are basically geometric microliths. This technique has been recorded through the Old World, from at least the Mesolithic. It has also been recorded from the later phases of the Upper Paleolithic, as triangular and trapeze shaped microliths have been found from the end of the French Magdalenian although they are very rare. The microburin blow technique has not been found, at present, in the New World.
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Prehistoric Albania Prehistoric Albania, compared to the other regions of the Mediterranean Europe, was relatively lately inhabited by "Homo sapiens". The earliest known human settlement dates back to the Upper Paleolithic, 40,000 BC in the Kryegjata Valley, near the antique site of Apollonia. Several further Paleolithic sites have been excavated, out of which the most prominent ones are the cave of Konispol (24,700 BC), the flint tools found near Xarrë, the shelters of the Blaz Cave near Urakë and the habitation of Mount Dajt, then during the period of the Mesolithic the aforementioned Kryegjata, Konispol and Gajtan sites represent more developed stone, flint and horn tools. Another important site of the Mesolithic industrial activity is the flint mine of Goranxi that was in operation around 7,000 BC.
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Fontbrégoua Cave Fontbrégoua Cave is an archaeological site located in Provence, Southeastern France. It was used by humans in the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, in what is now known as the Early and Middle Neolithic. A temporary residential site, it was used by Neolithic agriculturalists as a storage area for their herds of goats and sheep, and also contained a number of bone depositions, containing the remains of domestic species, wild animals, and humans. The inclusion of the latter of these deposits led the archaeological team studying the site to propose that cannibalism had taken place at Fontbrégoua, although other archaeologists have instead suggested that they represent evidence of secondary burial.
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Verraco The verracos (English: "boar") (Spanish: "verraco" ; Portuguese: "berrão" ), in the Iberian Peninsula, are the Vettones's granite megalithic monuments, sculptures of animals as found in the west of the Iberian "meseta" - the high central plain of the Iberian peninsula - in the Spanish provinces of Ávila, Salamanca, Segovia, Salamanca, Zamora, and Cáceres, but also in the north of Portugal and Galicia. Over 400 "verracos" have been identified.
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Remedello culture The Remedello culture (Italian "Cultura di Remedello") developed during the Copper Age (3rd millennium BC) in Northern Italy, particularly in the area of the Po valley. The name comes from the town of Remedello (Brescia) where several burials were discovered in the late 19th century.
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Holy Spirit Grotto The Holy Spirit Grotto ("La Gruta del Espíritu Santo" in Spanish), also known as Corinto Cave, in Corinto, Morazán, El Salvador, is a registered national monument of petroglyphs. The cave is largely associated with the Xibalba legend. The archaeologist Wolfgang Haberland performed studies in the late 1970s indicating the art belongs to the pre-Classic stage of Mesoamerican civilization. The cave likely got its name due to the Mesoamerican association of caves with the underworld, meaning that they are "considered an entrance to the underground world governed by spirits and deities of death, disease, water, and fertility." The cave is an important cultural and religious site for the Lenca nation, forming part of their traditions and legends of the place where ancestors of Balam Colop parted (which is mentioned in the Popol vuh), according to their legends and traditions, is father of all Lenca people, given the association of caves with the underworld by Mesoamericans, the name of 'Holy Spirit Cave' is ironic and perhaps an attempt by early Spanish to "exorcise" the cave in El Salvador. The "holy" nature of this cave is further confirmed by a man named Don Argelio Alvarez, who happens to be one of its guardians. Roughly translated, he claims that the cave contains "something magical and inexplicable that inspires tranquility and peace." Many people from various religious groups also continue to visit the site and carry out ceremonies, such as what Don Argelio believed to have taken place in the cave many centuries ago. However, it is entirely possible that the cave was instead used for other means. A German scientist found some handcrafted arrows and knives made of obsidian within the cave, leading him to believe that it may have actually been a shelter for hunters instead.
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Warratyi Warratyi is the site of a prehistoric rock shelter in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. Located around 550 km north of Adelaide and about 200 km inland, it has been identified as the oldest known site of human habitation in inland Australia. It was discovered by chance in 2011 by a local resident who stumbled upon it while looking for somewhere to go to the toilet. Researchers found thousands of artefacts and bone fragments, which enabled them to date the shelter's occupation to a number of periods between 49,000 and 10,000 years ago. The finds include the earliest evidence in Australia of the development of bone and stone-axe technology, the use of ochre, and interaction with megafauna such as "Diprotodon".
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Miguelón Miguelón is the popular nickname for the most complete skull of an "Homo heidelbergensis" ever found. It has been estimated to date to 400,000 years ago. More than 5,500 human fossils of this species, which are considered to be the direct ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis, have been found in the Sima de los Huesos ("pit of bones") site in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain.
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La Chapelle-aux-Saints The La Chapelle-aux-Saints cave, bordering the Sourdoire valley, revealed many archeological artifacts belonging to the late Mousterian techno-complex, including the first ever recognized Neanderthal burial discovered on August 3, 1908. Jean and Amédée Bouyssonie, as well as L. Bardon, led archaeological digs in the cave from 1905 to 1908, discovering over 1,000 pieces of stone industry (mainly flint), bones of different fauna including reindeer, bovid, horse, fox, wolf and even a rhinoceros’ tooth. The most spectacular discovery was that of a very well preserved skeleton of an adult Neanderthal man who appears to have been intentionally buried in a rectangular pit 30 cm deep, 1.45 m long and 1 m wide.
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San José Mogote San José Mogote is a pre-Columbian archaeological site of the Zapotec, a Mesoamerican culture that flourished in the region of what is now the Mexican state of Oaxaca. A forerunner to the better-known Zapotec site of Monte Albán, San José Mogote was the largest and most important settlement in the Valley of Oaxaca during the Early and Middle Formative periods (ca. 1500-500 BCE) of Mesoamerican cultural development.
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Manot 1 Manot 1 is a fossil specimen designated to a skullcap that represents an archaic modern human discovered in Israel. It represents extinct humans called Manot people who lived in the Manot Cave (hence the name) in Western Galilee during the early Paleolithic period. It was discovered in 2008 and the scientific description was first published in an online edition of "Nature" on 28 January 2015. Radiometric dating indicates that it is about 54,700 years old, which in turn shows that it is the oldest known specimen that belongs to modern human. In addition it is also a good evidence for the Out of Africa theory. It also supports the idea that modern human ancestors could have interbred with another human species, the Neanderthals, as posited by genome analyses.
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Goat The domestic goat ("Capra aegagrus hircus") is a subspecies of goat domesticated from the wild goat of southwest Asia and Eastern Europe.
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Prehistoric Rock-Art Site of the Côa Valley The Prehistoric Rock-Art Site of the Côa Valley is an open-air Paleolithic archaeological site located in a region of northeastern Portugal, along the Portuguese-Spanish border.