The Mitla ruins in Oaxaca won an online competition of best sites in Mexico. (Depositphotos)
Celebrating 60 years of exploration at Teotihuacán
In 1959, Jorge Acosta and Ignacio Bernal designed a plan to excavate and rebuild the archaeological site of Teotihuacán at a scale Mexico had never seen before. Since then, exploration and restoration of the site hasn’t stopped, and remarkable discoveries have happened over the past six decades.
Archaeologists went through a lot of difficulties to unearth the pre-Hispanic buildings. However, after excavating 48 structures in the area, the site was officially inaugurated by President Adolfo López Mateos on Sep. 14, 1964.
View of Teotihuacán site. INAH
These facts and more details on the 60-year history of discovery at Teotihuacán are displayed in the exhibit “Teotihuacán: Proyecto 1962-2022″ at the National Museum of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 7 pm.
“Spirit of 22”: 100 years of muralism in Mexico
Never-before-seen paintings by Diego Rivera and Ramón Alva de la Canal, are now on display along with 246 other works of Mexican muralists at the San Ildefonso school in Mexico City.
The exhibit “Spirit of 22: a century of muralism at San Ildefonso” is a collaboration between the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL) and heirs of the master muralists, collectors and foundations who loaned the exhibited pieces.
Works from the artists Diego Rivera, Fernando Leal, Jean Charlot, Fermín Revueltas, Ramón Alva de la Canal, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros are explored in detail in the exhibition. The display also includes easel work, drawings, sketches, photographs, magazines, and videos.
“Espíritu del 22” will run through June 12 and is open Tuesday to Sunday between 11 am and 5:30 pm.
Significant archaeological findings of 2022
Many discoveries have been unearthed during 2022 from a wide range of archaeological sites in Mexico. However, among the more than 20,000 archaeological pieces registered by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) throughout the year, a few are truly remarkable.
A starfish in an offering unearthed at the Templo Mayor in March 2022. (INAH)
On top of these discoveries, the prestigious Spanish Princess of Asturias award was bestowed on Mexican archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma for his exceptional contribution to the knowledge of pre-Hispanic societies and cultures. Matos Moctezuma directed the site excavation of the Templo Mayor in Mexico City from 1978-82.
But not all is good news. This year closes with an unfortunate event: a group of vandals set a fire in Building 1 of the archaeological site of El Tajín, in Veracruz. The site, declared a World Heritage Site 30 years ago by UNESCO, is being examined by INAH experts..
Updates to the Spanish dictionary
The Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy or RAE), added more than 3,000 words and amendments to its online dictionary this year.
Among the new terms are “micromachismo,” defined as a form of machismo that manifests itself in small acts, gestures or expressions that are usually unconscious; and “conspiranoia,” referring to a tendency to interpret certain events as if they were a conspiracy. Other new additions include “puntocom” to refer to an online business, and “garciamarquiano” as a way to describe something in the style of the great Colombian writer, Gabriel García Márquez.
The update was presented by Santiago Muñoz Machado, director of the RAE and president of the Association of Spanish Language Academies, as well as by Paz Battaner, director of the 24th edition of the RAE dictionary. “We speakers are continually reflecting on the language, not just academics, but people in general…the speakers demand it,” noted Battaner on the accelerating pace of linguistic updates.
Mitla, the legendary ancient Zapotec “City of the Dead” in Oaxaca, was crowned as winner of the INAH “World Cup” after being chosen by voters on social media as the best archaeological site in Mexico.
The competition included 32 Mexican archaeological sites and in the final round, Mitla beat Palenque in Chiapas.
“With this we reaffirm that Oaxaca is the state with the greatest cultural, artistic, historical and architectural mosaic”, said Salomón Jara Cruz, the state’s Governor. “The prize that has been awarded to this archaeological site places it as the most endearing one for Mexicans,” he added.
Oaxaca’s Minister of Culture, Víctor Cata, said that Mitla is known as the City of the Dead because that is where peoples from the region go to talk to their dead loved ones – they believe that is where the underworld begins.
Hominins Were Sailing the Mediterranean Half a Million Years Ago, Study Finds
The Aegean Islands have been isolated for over 450,000 years, yet evidence of activity, possibly by multiple species of early humans, is all over the place
Could hominins predating the very evolution of sapiens, sail? It's been suggested before. Now a new study supports the case that supposedly primitive hominins made short sea journeys around the Mediterranean Sea, and populated the Aegean Islands at least half a million years ago. That is well before the much-vaunted Homo sapiens was even a twinkle in the eye of natural selection.
The question of when humans, or their ancestors, gained the cognitive and technical ability to cross the seas has long been the subject of debate. For a while we thought that Sapiens was the only member of the Homo family to have the ability to sail the oceans, with modern humans first reaching Australia around 50,000 years ago. But that paradigm has been crumbling in recent years in the face of evidence suggesting that early hominins were much more advanced than previously thought and did in fact leave clues that they traveled to lands completely surrounded by water.
There are two problems with figuring out whether hominins really took their first sea trips hundreds of thousands of years ago. Any rafts or canoes made of wood and organic matter have long decomposed. Also, because sea levels were lower during glacial periods, hominins are thought to have reached certain islands when they were connected by land bridges to the mainland. For example, it is believed that humans first reached America by walking over from Asia when the Bering Strait was connected by land (when exactly this crossing happened is a whole other can of worms).
However, there is growing evidence that several areas that were islands for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years were occupied by hominins, who must have braved the waves to get there. This is now argued to be the case with the Aegean Islands, an archipelago of hundreds of islands between Greece and Turkey, including favorite holiday destinations such as Crete, Mikonos and Santorini.
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The Aegean seaCredit: NASA
Cretan stunner
Strong evidence of early hominin habitation first emerged about a decade ago when archaeologists on Crete found thousands of flint tools dated to more than 130,000 years ago, and possibly as old as 700,000 years. These artifacts were made in the Acheulean style, a distinctive stone tool industry first developed in Africa by Homo erectus, the first hominin to leave humanity’s evolutionary cradle and spread across Eurasia starting some 1.9 million years ago.
But how could Acheulean tools, and similar artifacts found on other islands, reach the Aegean? Could it be that during a particularly extreme Ice Age event the sea level was so low that hominins could simply walk across to these lands without getting their feet wet?
No, says the new study published in November in the journal Quaternary International by a team of Greek researchers from the Oceanus Lab at the University of Patras.
The researchers reconstructed the shoreline of the Aegean Islands and surrounding mainland over the last 450,000 years. This was done by combining data from ancient river deltas, which reveal changes in sea levels, with the known subsidence rate, caused by tectonic plate activity, of the Aegean Islands.
During the last half a million years there were five major glacial events and five warmer periods, explains George Ferentinos, emeritus professor of geology at the University of Patras, who led the study. During the coldest periods, the sea was more than 200 meters below its current level, Ferentinos and colleagues report. At these times, the Cyclades, the central group of islands in the Aegean, would be united into a single mega-island, the researchers found. But an island it would still remain.
During the entire 450,000 years, the closest Aegean Islands were still separated by 5 to 7 kilometers of water from the Greek or Turkish mainland in peak Ice Age conditions, Ferentinos says. This distance would increase to 40 kilometers during warmer periods, he says.
The key here is that, throughout the period, the closest islands always remained visible from the mainland, providing a tantalizing incentive to explore new territories.
Illustration of the Aegean 240,000 years ago, during an ice age when the Cyclades became a single mega islandCredit: Elsevier
“The human species likes to explore new places, and we know they had visibility, they could see that perhaps there was a better place to find the resources they needed: food, water and stone,” says Maria Gkioni, the lead archaeologist on the study.
Gkioni compiled archaeological information about prehistoric finds from across the Aegean to map the hominin presence across the islands, and it seems they got pretty much everywhere. No paleolithic human remains have been found in the Aegean, but this is not entirely surprising given that uncovering well-preserved hominin bones anywhere is exceedingly rare, she says.
Prehistoric tools, however, have cropped up all over the region, from Milos and Naxos in the Cycladic Islands to the tiny island of Gavdos, which is south of Crete. The latter is particularly striking because it is separated from Crete by a stretch of 36 kilometers of water which reaches depths of 2.5 kilometers, Gkioni says.
So Gavdos was most definitely an island for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet archaeologists have found there not only Acheulean tools, but also artifacts in the later Mousterian and Levallois styles, usually associated with Neanderthals and Sapiens, suggesting this tiny isolated island was populated multiple times by different hominins.
I can see elephants from my cave
This doesn’t necessary mean they invented the boat just yet. Our distant ancestors (and others) could have island-hopped through the Aegean using primitive rafts or just by clinging to a tree log, Gkioni speculates. But why would they take on such a perilous journey?
One possibility is that they were following their lunch. Some researchers suspect that hominins first dispersed across the world simply because they were tracking herds of large animals – and possibly hunting them into extinction. Now, elephants are pretty good swimmers and it is known that a species of dwarf elephant survived in the Aegean until a few thousand years ago.
But elephants were also one of the favorite meals of prehistoric hominins, so it is possible that, as megafauna herds dwindled on the mainland, the early island-hoppers of the Aegean went looking for new hunting grounds, Gkioni says.
“All this means that these hominins already had advanced cognitive capabilities,” Gkioni tells Haaretz. “To cross over and colonize an island you need to have collaboration, a common language and complex communication.”
Given that different hominins often used the same stone tool technologies it is difficult to determine who exactly the first colonizers of the Aegean Islands were without finding any human remains. However, the most likely candidates would be Erectus or one of his descendants, such as Homo heidelbergensis, which mostly populated Europe, or Nesher Ramla Homo, a recently proposed Middle Pleistocene inhabitant of modern-day Israel and the Levant.
Archaeologists excavating the skeleton of a dwarf elephant on the Aegean island of TilosCredit: Prof. George Theodorou
If Ferentinos and colleagues are correct, these Mediterranean precursors of Ulysses were still not the earliest hominins to sail the seas. In fact, there is evidence that Erectus (or some other hominin) may have colonized the Indonesian island of Flores (also inhabited by a species of dwarf elephants) already some 800,000 years ago, eventually evolving into the diminutive species called Homo floresiensis. And a similar hominin presence in the Philippines may date to more than 700,000 years ago, digs on these Pacific islands have shown.
So the idea that pre-sapiens hominins were sailing to the Aegean Islands half a million years ago is entirely plausible, says Prof. Israel Hershkovitz, a physical anthropologist at Tel Aviv University.
“Humans had to overcome so many obstacles on their way out of Africa and sea barriers were not the most difficult one,” says Hershkovitz, who was not involved in the Greek study. “As some inhabited islands were always surrounded by sea, it seems logical to assume they were reached by boat.”
The elusive maiden voyage
Other colleagues are less convinced. While the new paper is an important contribution to understanding the palaeogeography of the Aegean, “in seeking the maiden voyage of archaic hominins the authors put the cart before the horse,” says Nena Galanidou, professor of prehistoric archaeology at the University of Crete.
“Although I fully endorse the hypothesis that sea crossing was not necessarily a Homo sapiens skill and innovation, but that other large-brained Middle Pleistocence species may also have had it, the data offered in the paper do not provide conclusive evidence to that effect,” Galanidou tells Haaretz. She notes that the oldest known Sapiens fossils date to around 300,000 years ago – not too far from the time frame of 450,000 onwards that was the focus of the new study – so we cannot rule out that those first Aegean inhabitants were just early modern humans.
Ferentinos says his study didn’t go beyond the half a million year mark because we don’t yet have reliable data for how the shorelines of Greece and Turkey looked like before then. However, he and his colleagues are convinced that the evidence for sea voyages by pre-Sapiens hominins in the Aegean is strong and is also indirectly confirmed by the recent discovery of million-year-old prehistoric tools linked to Homo erectus in Spain.
This is earlier than other Erectus finds in Western and Eastern Europe, suggesting that hominins may have reached the Iberian Peninsula first by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, rather than by travelling by land from the east, Ferentinos says.
“Traditionally we think Erectus only left Africa through the Sinai Peninsula and then the Levant, but then we have to ask ourselves how they got to Spain before reaching the rest of Europe,” he says. “The most plausible solution is that they crossed at Gibraltar. I think we need to rethink what we know about human dispersal not just in Greece but around the world.”
Evidence Shows Archaic Humans Sailed to Aegean Islands 450,000 Years Ago
Ample archaeological and geological evidence has now been uncovered that suggests archaic humans were building boats and crossing the Aegean Sea as long as 450,000 years ago, the authors of a new article in Quaternary International report. This is well before modern humans evolved and migrated to Europe from Africa, meaning these ancient sailors from the Middle Pleistocene (Chibanian) period belonged to a different hominin species altogether (most likely Homo erectus , one of the more immediate ancestors of Homo sapiens ).
The study that led to this intriguing conclusion was carried out by a team of Greek scientists from the Oceanus Lab at the University of Patras. Their interest in the question was sparked by the discovery of ancient, prehistoric tools in the Aegean Islands , which span the expanse of the Mediterranean (the Aegean Sea is an arm of the Mediterranean) that separates Europe (Greece) from Asia (Turkey).
These tools belonged to the ancient Acheulean tool industry, which was created by Homo erectus approximately 1.7 million years ago and is most closely associated with that hominin species. Assuming these tools were left by this long extinct cousin of modern humans, it would seem that Homo erectus must have settled on the Aegean Islands hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Islands of the Aegean Sea, in the Mediterranean. (Peter Fitzgerald/ CC BY-SA 4.0 )
But these bodies of land are islands, which means they would have been accessible exclusively by boat or raft. And that means Homo erectus , an allegedly primitive precursor of modern humans that disappeared from the Earth more than 100,000 years ago , must have discovered how to build water-borne craft long before humans would have been around to come up with the idea.
Notably, Acheulean tools linked to Homo erectus sites have been found in Greece and Turkey, dating back to 1.2 million years ago. This would of course be expected if Homo erectus groups indigenous to the region had eventually decided to make their way across the sea to the mysterious islands they’d spotted on distant horizons.
“The human species likes to explore new places, and we know they had visibility, they could see that perhaps there was a better place to find the resources they needed: food, water and stone,” said Maria Gkioni, the lead archaeologist in the new study, in an interview with Haaratz.
In other words, the presence of the islands would have given archaic settlers a strong motivation to develop floating craft that could be guided across the ocean and landed on those virgin shores.
Acheulean tools - Nine Bifaces. Date: 700,000–200,000B. C. Country of origin France. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Public Domain)
There Were No Land Bridges, the Aegean Islands Have Always Been Islands
In response to the discovery of Acheulean tools on many Aegean Islands, some scientists have offered a different explanation of how ancient tool builders arrived there. They posit that people could have reached these destinations on foot during past Ice Ages, when sea levels were much lower and land bridges that connected the islands to the Greek or Turkish mainland may have emerged from the now-uncovered ocean floor.
For the purposes of this study, the Greek scientists from the Oceanus Lab decided to test the viability of this theory. They used geological data taken from ancient river deltas in the region to track changes in sea level over the past 450,000 years (it was impossible to trace them back any further). They also analyzed the long-term subsidence (sinking) rate of the various Aegean Islands, using theories from plate tectonic science to estimate how much higher or lower the islands would have been in the past.
Relying on this methodology, the scientists were able to detect the geological signature of five ancient Ice Ages that alternated with five warmer periods. During the most severe of these glacial periods sea levels in the area dropped by as much as 225 meters (739ft).
But despite this extreme change, over the course of the last 450,000 years the nearest Aegean Islands were never closer than three miles from Greek or Turkish shores. Observers standing on the beaches of those locations would have been able to see the islands across the waters, but they would have had no way to get there—and carry tools and other supplies there—unless they could travel on some type of raft or boat.
The inescapable conclusion of this new study is that Homo erectus must have arrived on the Aegean Islands at least 450,000 years ago, and possibly long before that.
“All this means that these hominins already had advanced cognitive capabilities,” Gkioni stated. “To cross over and colonize an island you need to have collaboration, a common language and complex communication.”
Homo erectus is the most likely candidate for the hominin that traversed the Aegean Sea islands. ( AlienCat/Adobe Stock)
It was notable that artifacts were found throughout the Aegean Islands, and not just on locations closest to the Eurasian land mass.
For example, on the small outer island of Gavdos, which is 22 miles (36 kilometers) south of Crete, and separated from that large island by waters that are up to 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) deep, Acheulean tools were unearthed in abundance. There were even tools found from later cultures associated with modern humans and Neanderthals, showing that hominin species had routinely traveled to the Aegean Islands over a period of hundreds of thousands of years.
The Astonishing Travels of Archaic Hominins, the First Sailors
The archaic sailors who reached the Aegean Islands were not the first of their kind. Evidence collected on islands in the South Pacific seems to show that Homo erectus , and likely other archaic human species as well, traveled by boat to facilitate settlement in that region even before they began spreading across the Aegean.
Fossil discoveries on the Indonesian island of Flores have included specimens connected to an extinct hobbit-like hominin known as Homo floresiensis , which would have evolved from other hominins ( perhaps not Homo erectus ) that arrived in the island at least 800,000 years ago. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, scientists uncovered the fossilized remnants of a previously undiscovered hominin known as Homo luzonensis , which was apparently living there 700,000 years ago. This species also could have evolved from another hominin, like Homo erectus , that came to the islands much earlier.
University of Patras geologist George Ferentinos, who led the geological part of the new study, is intrigued by artifact evidence that shows Homo erectus was living on the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal) one million years ago. Earlier discoveries of Homo erectus tools in Western and Eastern Europe reveal a later arrival in those regions, meaning Homo erectus must have reached Spain from Africa before moving northward and eastward to populate more of the European continent.
This is explainable if these ancient hominins were also ancient mariners, capable of crossing from Northern Africa to Spain by sea.
“Traditionally we think Erectus only left Africa through the Sinai Peninsula and then the Levant, but then we have to ask ourselves how they got to Spain before reaching the rest of Europe,” Ferentinos said. “The most plausible solution is that they crossed at Gibraltar. I think we need to rethink what we know about human dispersal not just in Greece, but around the world.”
Top image: Evidence from several of the Aegean Islands shows archaic humans must have been sailing the seas around 450,000 years ago. Source: Chris/Adobe Stock
ARCHAEOLOGISTS FROM THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORY (INAH) HAVE UNCOVERED A DUAL MAYA STELA AT THE CITY OF UXMAL.
Uxmal was a Maya polity, located in the Puuc region of the eastern Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. The present name seems to derive from Oxmal, meaning “three times built.”
The site is the most important representative of the Puuc architectural style, which flourished in the Late Classic Period around AD 600–900.
Characteristics of the Puuc style include limestone construction, often with smooth wall surfaces; plaster (stucco) finishes; masks and other representations of the rain god Chac (Chaac); and the prevalence of styling along horizontal lines.
According to Maya chronicles, the city was founded around AD 500, emerging as one of the most power Maya polities in the western Yucatán.
The stele was uncovered in a sunken patio in an architectural complex known as El Palomar, meaning “Pigeon-house” or “the Dove Cotes” which is part of a quadrangle complex of four palaces surrounding a courtyard of which only the northern front remained. The name derives from the cresting which reminded early explorers of a pigeon house.
The stele is carved on both sides, depicting a female deity on the north side, holding a quetzal in her left hand, and wearing a pectoral with three rows of pearls, bracelets, and a patterned skirt.
On the south side is an image of a male deity, wearing a wide-brimmed headdress adorned with feathers and what appears to be an owl’s head. The figure is also wearing a loincloth, a cape, and is holding a cane in his left hand.
The researchers believe female and male deities represent the duality of life and demise, since these representations are frequent within the Puuc and Chenes cultural areas, within the south of the state and within the Yucatan peninsula.
