Today's video is the longest episode of "Jungle of Stone", where a local Ranger brings us to an unknown city hidden deep in the jungles of Campeche, just north of Guatemala. Here, we documented 15+ enormous pyramids, and at-least one that resembled the architecture at El Mirador - the Maya's most ancient city.
A megalithic burial mound in Spain was built using “advanced engineering” 6,000 years ago, with stones weighing several times more than any used to make the UK’s iconic Stonehenge, archaeologists revealed in a new study.
Megalithic monuments began appearing in Europe around the fifth millennium BC with the earliest ones built in modern-day France and Spain.
The Dolmen de Menga burial mound is the oldest of its kind, built around 3800 to 3600 BC with all of its stones weighing several times more than any used to make the Stonehenge – making it one of the largest megaliths in Europe.
The stones used in the Menga mound – some weighing as much as 150 tonnes – were carved from a site about a kilometre from the Stone Age monument.
Researchers have proposed many theories over the years attempting to explain how a primitive Stone Age culture could have built such a massive monument.
Entrance to Menga (José Antonio Lozano Rodríguez/Science Advances (2024))
However, they say comprehensive efforts to understand the engineering and labour that went behind constructing the massive structure “have been quite rare”.
“Menga has never been analysed from an interdisciplinary perspective combining archaeological, sedimentological and paleontological evidence,” scientists wrote.
The new study, published in the journal Science Advances, suggests the Menga was built using advanced knowledge in the fields of geology, physics, geometry, and astronomy, enabling it to stand on its feet for almost 6000 years.
The megalithic structure consists of stone walls and a stone ceiling supported by stone pillars.
Researchers say stones used to build the monument, weighing over 100 tonnes each, were carved from a hill site about 850m away and then dragged on sledges over a wooden trackway.
They theorise that workers dragged the rocks to the site by wedging each tightly using counterweights and ramps.
New analysis suggests the stones were placed at a slight inward angle using levers, indicating that the Stone Age people had early knowledge of geometry.
Placing the stones in such an angle reduced the size of the roof needed, and made the monument look more trapezoidal, archaeologists say.
The Stone Age neolithic people then placed the pillar stones in a similar angled manner and finished the structure by placing massive capstones on top to serve as the roof.
The use of pillars to support the gigantic capstones and the precise interlocking of the upright stones are features requiring a high degree of precision that is not seen in any other megalithic construction of the time.
A submerged prehistoric structure has been found to be far older than once thought, a study reports.
The findings shed new light on the early human settlement of the Balearic Islands in the western Mediterranean Sea—an archipelago that includes Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza, which are now all part of Spain.
Reconstructing the early human colonization of the Balearics has long been challenging, largely thanks to limited archaeological evidence.
For the latest study, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, researchers examined a 25-foot-long prehistoric "bridge" structure now submerged inside Genovesa Cave, located on the coast of Mallorca.
Previous research had indicated, tentatively, that the structure was built around 3,500-3,000 years ago, thanks to pottery found in a chamber that the bridge led to.
But in the latest work, study lead author Bogdan Onac (with the University of South Florida) and colleagues dated the construction of the bridge to between around 6,000 and 5,600 years ago.
"This provides evidence for early human presence on the island dating at least 5,600 and possibly beyond around 6,000 years ago," the authors wrote in the study.
The latest findings challenge the current scientific consensus, which holds that the earliest human settlement on the island occurred around 4,400 years ago. (Some prior research had suggested human presence as far back as 9,000 years ago, but inconsistencies and poor preservation of the radiocarbon dated material led to doubt being cast on these findings.)
The authors of the latest study came to their conclusions after analyzing mineral formations on the bridge and the elevation of a distinctive coloration band near its top. The cave has passages that are now flooded thanks to rising sea levels.
The mineral formations and the coloration band served as proxies for precisely tracking historical changes in sea level and enabled the researchers to constrain the dates of the bridge's construction.
The findings provide evidence indicating that humans settled on the island earlier than the current scientific consensus suggests.
"This research underscores the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in uncovering historical truths and advancing our understanding of human history," Onac said in the press release.
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References
Onac, B. P., Polyak, V. J., Mitrovica, J. X., Ginés, J., Gràcia, F., Fornós, J. J., Ginés, A., & Asmerom, Y. (2024). Submerged bridge constructed at least 5600 years ago indicates early human arrival in Mallorca, Spain. Communications Earth & Environment, 5(1), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01584-4