Archaeologists Just Found the Oldest 3D Map in the World
Located within the famed Segognole 3 rock shelter, researchers believe the map shows the local landscape of the Paris Basin.
It's also thought to highlight natural water flows and geomorphic features, as the direction of water flow was of critical importance for the Paleolithic people.
Researchers from the University of Adelaide recently announced the discovery of a 13,000-year-old 3D map, now thought to be the oldest 3D map in the world. The team discovered this remarkable artifact carved into a block of quartz sandstone in the Segognole 3 rock shelter—a site that has long been known for artistic engravings in a Late Paleolithic style.
The map depicts what is now known as France's Paris Basin and the surrounding landscape, with the particulars revealed in a study published by the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. It was found, according to the authors, alongside a 'female sexual configuration associated with a horse engraving, stylistically attributed to the Upper Palaeolithic,' both of which were discovered in the 1980s.
'What we've described is not a map as we understand it today—with distances, directions, and travel times,' Anthony Milnes, co-author of the study, said in a statement, 'but rather a three-dimensional miniature depicting the functioning of a landscape, with runoff from highlands into streams and rivers, the convergence of valleys, and the downstream formation of lakes and swamps.'
'For Paleolithic peoples,' Milnes continued, 'the direction of water flows and the recognition of landscape features were likely more important than modern concepts like distance and time.'
The new find bests the previous oldest-3D-map record-holder—a Bronze Age engraving on a portable slab, which showed a local river network with the surrounding landscape and was likely used for navigation—by about 10,000 years.
The study authors wrote of the newly-discovered map that a network of channels engraved onto the shelter floor form a 'functioning representation of watercourses. The carved motifs and their relationship with natural features in the sandstone of the shelter can be compared with major geomorphological features in the surrounding landscape.'
'Our study demonstrates that human modifications to the hydraulic behavior in and around the shelter extended to modeling natural water flows in the landscape in the region around the rock shelter,' Milnes said. 'These are exceptional findings and clearly show the mental capacity, imagination, and engineering capability of our distant ancestors.'
Medard Thiry, who lead the project, noted that the creators of the map opened fractures in the stone to direct water through the site. He concluded that several fine-scale morphological features in the sandstone could not have formed naturally, showing that Paleolithic humans sculpted the stone to define specific flow paths for rainwater—something that hadn't been recognized previously by archaeologists at the site.
The ancient landscape map was certainly about water, but in a way, we still may not fully grasp the true fullness of its meaning. 'The fittings probably have a much deeper, mythical meaning, related to water,' Thiry said. 'The two hydraulic installations—that of the sexual figuration and that of the miniature landscape—are two to three meters [6.5 to 10 feet] from each other and are sure to relay a profound meaning of conception of life and nature, which will never be accessible to us.'
You Might Also Like
The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape
The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere
Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
3 days ago
- Forbes
Going Wild (Again): Feral Rabbits In Australia Evolve New Morphologies
Is 'feralization' a process of recapitulating what domesticated animals once looked like and once were? How does domestication change wild animals? When domesticated animals return to a wild state, is this 'feralization' a process of recapitulating what these animals once looked like and once were? Even Charles Darwin pondered the effects of domestication in his book, The variation of animals and plants under domestication, initially published in 1869 (ref). But first, let's understand a little better about feralization: what is it? 'Feralization is the process by which domestic animals become established in an environment without purposeful assistance from humans,' explained the study's lead author, evolutionary biologist Emma Sherratt, an Associate Professor at the University of Adelaide, where she specializes in macroevolution and morphometric methods. This study was part of Professor Sherratt's ARC Future Fellowship. To do this study, Professor Sherratt collaborated with a team of international experts to assess the body sizes and skull shapes of domesticated, feral and wild rabbits. Their study revealed that when domesticated rabbit breeds return to the wild and feralize, they do not simply revert to their wild form – instead, they undergo distinct, novel anatomical changes. 'While you might expect that a feral animal would revert to body types seen in wild populations, we found that feral rabbits' body-size and skull-shape range is somewhere between wild and domestic rabbits, but also overlaps with them in large parts,' Professor Sherratt briefly explained. Australia's feral rabbits are descendants of rabbits that newly arriving European colonists brought with them to supply meat and fur. The European rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus, or coney, is originally native to the Iberian Peninsula and southwestern France, but currently has an almost global presence. They live in grasslands and are herbivorous, mainly eating grasses and leaves, though they consume all sorts of things, including a variety of berries and even food crops, making them a persistent and formidable agricultural pest. They dig burrows to live in and produce many litters of blind and helpless offspring, known as kits or kittens, every year. The European rabbit is the only rabbit species that has been widely domesticated for meat, fur, wool, or as a pet, so all domesticated rabbits belong to the same species. Paradoxically, this rabbit species is endangered in its native range, despite being an invasive pest just about everywhere else. The goal of Professor Sherratt and collaborators' study was to measure and characterize the morphological differences of the European rabbit skull in wild, feral and domestic animals sampled globally, and contrast those measurements with other rabbit species. To do this, they sampled 912 rabbit specimens held by natural history museums or collected by invasive species control programs. They included wild individuals collected in their contemporary native range in Spain, Portugal and southwestern France, along with independent feral populations and domestic rabbits collected from 20 different worldwide locations (countries, territories, islands). Professor Sherratt and collaborators used well-established scientific methods to quantify shape and size variation in the skull, and to assess size-related (allometric) shape variations that this species acquired through several hundred years of domestication and feralization. Why focus specifically on these animals' skull shapes and sizes? What do these dimensions tell you? '[W]e focus on skull shape because it tells us how animals interact with their environment, from feeding, sensing and even how they move,' Professor Sherratt replied. Professor Sherratt and collaborators examined whether domestic rabbits have predictable skull proportions – relatively shorter face length and smaller braincase size, which are hypothesized to be part of 'domestication syndrome' – and whether feralization has resulted in a reversion to the original wild form. Finally, they compared their measurements to an existing dataset of 24 rabbit species that included representatives of all 11 modern rabbit genera to provide an evolutionary baseline of morphological changes with which to compare wild, feral and domesticated rabbits. Not surprisingly, Professor Sherratt and collaborators discovered that the 121 domesticated study rabbits showed much more variation in skull shape and size than do wild and feral rabbits, with substantial shape differences (figure 1A,B), which is attributed in part to their greater diversity in body size (figure 1C). Why is there so much variation in feral rabbits' skulls? To answer this, Professor Sherratt and collaborators investigated several hypotheses regarding the feralization process. 'Exposure to different environments and predators in introduced ranges may drive rabbit populations to evolve different traits that help them survive in novel environments, as has been shown in other species,' proposed Professor Sherratt. 'Alternatively, rabbits may be able to express more trait plasticity in environments with fewer evolutionary pressures,' Professor Sherratt continued. 'In particular, relaxed functional demands in habitats that are free of large predators, such as Australia and New Zealand, might drive body size variation, which we know drives cranial shape variation in introduced rabbits.' Does the process of feralization follow a precise, predictable pathway? 'Because the range is so variable and sometimes like neither wild nor domestic, feralization in rabbits is not morphologically predictable if extrapolated from the wild or the domestic stock,' Professor Sherratt replied. What surprised you most about this study's findings? 'That feral rabbits can get so big!" replied Professor Sherratt in email. 'Almost double the mass of one from southern Spain.' Why don't rabbits show as much morphological diversity as dogs or cats? For example, a recent study (ref) found that dogs and cats have both been selected to have short faces, so why isn't this seen in rabbits? 'We think this is because the long face of rabbits is a biomechanical necessity for this species,' explained Professor Sherratt in email. 'Important for herbivores.' Why is this research so important? 'Understanding how animals change when they become feral and invade new habitats helps us to predict what effect other invasive animals will have on our environment, and how we may mitigate their success.' What's next? 'Our next paper will look at the environmental factors that have influenced the diversity of skull shapes in Australia,' Professor Sherratt replied in email. '[For example], we have found that temperatures and precipitation have a lot of influence on the traits we see.' Source: Emma Sherratt, Christine Böhmer, Cécile Callou, Thomas J. Nelson, Rishab Pillai, Irina Ruf, Thomas J. Sanger, Julia Schaar, Kévin Le Verger, Brian Kraatz and Madeleine Geiger (2025). From wild to domestic and in between: how domestication and feralization changed the morphology of rabbits, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 292:20251150 | doi:10.1098/rspb.2025.1150 © Copyright by GrrlScientist | hosted by Forbes | Socials: Bluesky | CounterSocial | LinkedIn | Mastodon Science | Spoutible | SubStack | Threads | Tumblr | Twitter
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Scientists found cut marks on a 850,000-year-old human neck bone. Was it ... cannibalism?
A toddler's neck bone discovered with clear cut-marks dating to about 850,000 years ago may be evidence that an ancient hominin species, Homo antecessor, cannibalized a child, according to archaeologists in Spain. The researchers say the finding, announced July 24, is further indication of Paleolithic cannibalism at Gran Dolina cave in Spain's Sierra de Atapuerca, where signs of ancient humans butchering one another have been found for decades. "This is direct evidence that the child was processed like any other prey," says Palmira Saladié, an archaeologist with the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) and one of the leaders of the excavations where the neck bone was unearthed. Decapitation did not always mean meat from the dead individual was consumed, she says. But in the case of this child, who was between two and four years old, she believes it was almost certain the individual was also eaten. The toddler's vertebra was found along with bones from nine other individuals, in a layer of sediment within the cave dated to about 850,000 years ago. Many of the bones also had cut marks, as well as fractures the researchers say seem to have been made to reach the marrow inside. But not everyone agrees with the team's conclusions. Homo antecessor's cave Gran Dolina and the Atapuerca site near the northern Spanish city of Burgos were uncovered in the 1890s, when a route for a new railway was cut through nearby mountains. Excavations since the 1960s have revealed broadly accepted evidence of cannibalism among the Homo antecessor group that lived there from about 900,000 years ago until their species went extinct, possibly a little more than 100,000 years later. Scientists disagree on whether Homo antecessor was a direct ancestor of anatomically modern humans—Homo sapiens—or if it was a related species that died out. Regardless, evidence from prehistoric archaeological sites—including the Mesolithic Gough's Cave in the west of England and the Neolithic Herxheim site in Germany—indicates that early Homo sapiens, too, were sometimes cannibals. Signs of cannibalism among earlier human species, such as Neanderthals, have been found at archaeological sites all over the world, including some of the earliest evidence from Kenya. In a few cases, what was once thought to be evidence of hominin cannibalism might actually be something else: stripping flesh from bones for a "reburial" perhaps, which has been suggested for Neolithic remains in France. Cannibal controversy Some experts disagree if the newfound cut-marks are evidence the child was cannibalized. "Cannibalism is very rare," says Michael Pante a paleoanthropologist from Colorado State University, who was not involved in the discovery. "It's just not a common thing that we see." He says that although scientists claim to have found evidence of cannibalism from remains at several archaeological sites, and especially at Atapuerca, direct evidence of it is uncommon. "This decapitation doesn't mean they consumed that individual," says Pante. "They were obviously cutting up a child for some reason, but there are a number of reasons they may have done that." A funeral ritual is one possibility. Pante also disagrees with a suggestion made by the researchers that early humans at Atapuerca hunted rival humans as a food resource. "There is not a lot of evidence of that," he says. Cannibalism among humans—even very early humans like these—was unusual for nutritional purposes and may have only occurred in rituals, he adds. Other researchers are more convinced, however. James Cole, an archaeologist and expert in early human cannibalism who was also not involved in the work, says the first evidence for cannibalism at Atapuerca was found almost 30 years ago. "The new find in this respect is perhaps unsurprising,' he says, 'but it is absolutely fascinating and hints at the rich story about our evolutionary past that the site still has to tell.'
National Geographic
3 days ago
- National Geographic
Scientists found cut marks on a 850,000-year-old human neck bone. Was it ... cannibalism?
A toddler's neck bone discovered with clear cut-marks dating to about 850,000 years ago may be evidence that an ancient hominin species, Homo antecessor, cannibalized a child, according to archaeologists in Spain. The vertebra from a Homo antecessor child with cut marks indicating it was likely cannibalized. Photograph by Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA The researchers say the finding, announced July 24, is further indication of Paleolithic cannibalism at Gran Dolina cave in Spain's Sierra de Atapuerca, where signs of ancient humans butchering one another have been found for decades. "This is direct evidence that the child was processed like any other prey," says Palmira Saladié, an archaeologist with the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) and one of the leaders of the excavations where the neck bone was unearthed. Decapitation did not always mean meat from the dead individual was consumed, she says. But in the case of this child, who was between two and four years old, she believes it was almost certain the individual was also eaten. The toddler's vertebra was found along with bones from nine other individuals, in a layer of sediment within the cave dated to about 850,000 years ago. Many of the bones also had cut marks, as well as fractures the researchers say seem to have been made to reach the marrow inside. But not everyone agrees with the team's conclusions. Archaeological excavation work at the Gran Dolina cave site in Atapuerca. Photograph by Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA Gran Dolina and the Atapuerca site near the northern Spanish city of Burgos were uncovered in the 1890s, when a route for a new railway was cut through nearby mountains. Excavations since the 1960s have revealed broadly accepted evidence of cannibalism among the Homo antecessor group that lived there from about 900,000 years ago until their species went extinct, possibly a little more than 100,000 years later. Scientists disagree on whether Homo antecessor was a direct ancestor of anatomically modern humans—Homo sapiens—or if it was a related species that died out. Regardless, evidence from prehistoric archaeological sites—including the Mesolithic Gough's Cave in the west of England and the Neolithic Herxheim site in Germany—indicates that early Homo sapiens, too, were sometimes cannibals. Signs of cannibalism among earlier human species, such as Neanderthals, have been found at archaeological sites all over the world, including some of the earliest evidence from Kenya. In a few cases, what was once thought to be evidence of hominin cannibalism might actually be something else: stripping flesh from bones for a "reburial" perhaps, which has been suggested for Neolithic remains in France. An 850,000-year-old tooth belonging to an ancient human relative called Homo antecessor. Photograph by Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA Some experts disagree if the newfound cut-marks are evidence the child was cannibalized. "Cannibalism is very rare," says Michael Pante a paleoanthropologist from Colorado State University, who was not involved in the discovery. "It's just not a common thing that we see." He says that although scientists claim to have found evidence of cannibalism from remains at several archaeological sites, and especially at Atapuerca, direct evidence of it is uncommon. "This decapitation doesn't mean they consumed that individual," says Pante. "They were obviously cutting up a child for some reason, but there are a number of reasons they may have done that." A funeral ritual is one possibility. Pante also disagrees with a suggestion made by the researchers that early humans at Atapuerca hunted rival humans as a food resource. "There is not a lot of evidence of that," he says. Cannibalism among humans—even very early humans like these—was unusual for nutritional purposes and may have only occurred in rituals, he adds. Other researchers are more convinced, however. James Cole, an archaeologist and expert in early human cannibalism who was also not involved in the work, says the first evidence for cannibalism at Atapuerca was found almost 30 years ago. "The new find in this respect is perhaps unsurprising,' he says, 'but it is absolutely fascinating and hints at the rich story about our evolutionary past that the site still has to tell.' Limited Time: Bonus Issue Offer Subscribe now and gift up to 4 bonus issues—starting at $34/year.
