![]() The poison and other artifacts from Border Cave, on the other hand, are the earliest that can be directly connected to an extant culture. ![]() Those types of artifacts, however, seem to disappear from the archaeological record at later times, indicating that those cultures may have died out. Earlier evidence of such behavior has been uncovered in South Africa at sites such as Blombos Cave and Pinnacle Point, where beads, pigments, and artifacts related to fishing that date to more than 100,000 years ago have been found. The findings also clarify why it is thought that modern human behavior-loosely defined as making objects that show symbolic thinking or complex hunting methods-may have begun in Africa. D’Errico’s team believes the artifacts indicate that San culture emerged about 44,000 years ago, making these artifacts the earliest link to a culture of modern humans. The poison applicator is just one of several artifacts, some dating to as early as 44,000 years ago, that resemble objects used by the San. Others include a digging stick, ostrich eggshell beads, carved pig tusks, bone arrowheads, and a lump of beeswax. According to d’Errico, poison is an important part of traditional San hunting methods because their bone-tipped arrows usually don’t cause enough damage to kill large prey on their own. The stick may have been used to apply poison to arrowheads just as a culture of modern-day hunter-gatherers called the San does today in southern Africa. The artifact was found in the 1970s, but new chemical analyses conducted by a research team led by Francesco d’Errico of Bordeaux University in France revealed trace amounts of substances from poisonous castor beans. It may all seem macabre to us, but to the Aztecs, this charnel house was, according to Barrera, “where the earthly and heavenly realms communicated with each other.”Ī notched wooden stick from South Africa’s Border Cave dating to 24,000 years ago contains the earliest evidence of humans using poison. The victims may have died on the sacrifice stone, but the holes were probably for mounting their skulls on a stake known as a tzompantli. Barrera’s team excavated a volcanic slab used for human sacrifices, beneath which they found five more skulls with gaping perforations. Because the bones are so crowded together, he says, they must have “been buried elsewhere, exhumed, and reburied here.” But not all of them. Raúl Barrera of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History says the larger cache was probably a “closure deposit” buried as a kind of consecration after an important building phase around 1479. She was surrounded by more bones, including at least 10 skulls, plus ceramic and charcoal offerings. There was only one complete, undisturbed skeleton, in a separate cache-a woman, lying face down, her left hand resting enigmatically on her back and her right on her abdomen. In a grisly discovery, they excavated more than 1,000 tightly packed human bones, among them 45 skulls and 250 jawbones. In 2012, archaeologists learned more about its importance for civic death. Mexico’s Templo Mayor was a center of Aztec civic life before the Spanish conquest. According to Hardy, they could be used to provide direct evidence of hominin diets going back millions of years. The same analyses used in this study have the potential to be used on almost any tooth. ![]() “They had to have a body of knowledge about plants to select yarrow and chamomile,” says Hardy. The analyses showed that the Neanderthals inhaled wood smoke, probably from a campfire, and that they had eaten cooked plant foods as well as the bitter-tasting medicinal plants chamomile and yarrow. Karen Hardy of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Spain and Stephen Buckley of the University of York in the United Kingdom used a variety of chemical analyses that helped uncover the first evidence that Neanderthals consumed medicinal plants. The team examined the chemicals embedded in the calcified plaque on the teeth of five Neanderthals dated to between 50,600 and 47,300 years ago from El Sidrón Cave in Spain. Rather, it is the gunk that stuck to their teeth. The latest frontier in Neanderthal research is not the artifacts they left behind or remnants of their DNA.
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