Human remains at Iron Age broch

14 July 2011 Last updated at 14:12 GMT Archaeologists and volunteers have been digging at the ruins of an ancient roundhouse Human remains including parts of a skull and leg bones have been found during an archaeological dig at an Iron Age site in Caithness.

The police and procurator fiscal service have been notified of the finds at Thrumster, near Wick, as normal procedure by archaeologists.

The remains have still to be radiocarbon dated to determine how old they are.

Ancient human remains have previously been uncovered in Caithness.

AOC Archaeology and Yarrows Heritage Trust have been leading teams of 12 to 15 volunteers on the dig.

Dr Andy Heald, of AOC Archaeology, said they had established the site held the ruins of a broch, a massive stone wall Iron Age roundhouse.

He said the bones found could be those of a man.

'Even puppies'

Dr Heald said: "At the moment we have no idea on a date. They could be 50 years old, or 3,000 years old."

If analysis finds that the remains were ancient then they could have been placed as part of a ritual honouring the dead.

Dr Heald said: "When skulls were found in the 19th Century people thought it had to do with cannibalism, or were war trophies.

"Cannibalism is just nonsense."

He added: "At another Caithness site at Whitegate human remains, horses and even puppies were placed at a broch 300 years after it was abandoned.

"It was done in some sort of memory ritual, or for it to be a monument on the landscape."

Caithness has more brochs per square mile than any other part of Scotland, according to Highland Council.

Examples of the ancient buildings are also found on Orkney.

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Remains found of early Europeans

20 June 2011 Last updated at 23:22 GMT By Jennifer Carpenter Science reporter, BBC News Teeth were among the ancient human remains found at the cave site Ancient remains uncovered in Ukraine represent some of the oldest evidence of modern people in Europe, experts have claimed.

Archaeologists found human bones and teeth, tools, ivory ornaments and animal remains at the Buran-Kaya cave site.

The 32,000-year-old fossils bear cut marks suggesting they were defleshed as part of a post-mortem ritual.

Details have been published in the journal PLoS One.

Archaeologist Dr Alexander Yanevich from the National Ukrainian Academy of Science in Kiev discovered the four Buran-Kaya caves in the Crimean mountains in 1991.

Since then, roughly two hundred human bone fragments have been unearthed at the site.

Among the shards of human bones and teeth, archaeologists have found ornaments fashioned from ivory, along with the abundant remains of animals.

The artefacts made by humans at the site allowed archaeologists to tie the ancient people to a cultural tradition known as the Gravettian.

This culture came to span the entire European continent and is named after the site of La Gravette in France, where this stone age culture was first studied.

Researchers were able to directly date the human fossils using radiocarbon techniques. The shape and form of the remains told the scientists they were dealing with modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens).

Eastern promise

One thing that intrigued researchers was the scarcity of human long bones (bones from the limbs) in the caves.

The site yielded countless limb bones from antelope, foxes and hares.

Remains at the site bear cut marks where stone tools were used to remove flesh

But the human remains consisted of vertebrae, teeth and skull bones no larger than 12cm.

What is more, the positions of cut marks found on the human fragments were distinct from those found on the animal bones.

And while the bone marrow had been removed from butchered animals, it had been left alone in the case of the human remains at the site, explained co-author Sandrine Prat from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.

She suspects this demonstrates that human bones were processed differently from those of animals. Human flesh was removed as part of ritual "cleaning", not to be eaten.

Defining culture Continue reading the main story

These people had knives, lightweight tools, open air camps, they used mammoth bones to make tents”

End Quote Professor Clive Finlayson Director, Gibraltar Museum The finds offer anthropologists a glimpse into a very early and important human culture, said Professor Clive Finlayson, an evolutionary ecologist and director of the Gibraltar Museum.

"Gravettian culture is the culture that defines modern humans.

"These people had knives, lightweight tools, open air camps, they used mammoth bones to make tents," he said, adding that this was the earliest example of the Gravettian cultural tradition.

Professor Finlayson said that uncovering evidence of this culture in Ukraine gave weight to the idea that early modern people spread into Europe from the Russian plains, not north through the Balkans from the Middle East.

"What has excited me is that we have found evidence of humans where I would expect them to be, exploiting foods that I would expect them to be exploiting," Professor Finlayson told BBC News.

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Mars 'remains in embryonic state'

27 May 2011 Last updated at 13:35 GMT By Jennifer Carpenter Science reporter, BBC News Mars collided with relatively few rocky masses, hence its "embryonic" state, says researchers Mars formed in record time, growing to its present size in a mere three million years, much quicker than scientists previously thought.

Its rapid formation could explain why the Red Planet is about one tenth the mass of Earth.

The study supports a 20-year-old theory that Mars remained small because it avoided collisions with planetary building material.

The new finding is published in the journal Nature.

In our early Solar System, well before planets had formed, a frisbee-shaped cloud of gas and dust encircled the Sun.

Scientists believe that the planets grew from material pulled together by electrostatic charges - the same force that's behind the "dust bunnies" under your bed.

These proto-planetary dust balls grew and grew until they formed what scientists term "embryo" planets.

These rocky masses were large enough to exert a considerable gravitational force on surrounding material, including other nascent planets.

Nudging each other with their gravitational fields, the embryos were often thrown from their regular orbits, sometimes into the path of another large rocky mass.

If collisions occurred, these nascent planets were either expelled from the Solar System or shattered into pieces. These pieces were often combined to form a larger planet. In fact, the Earth's Moon is thought to be the result of an embryo planet colliding with our own planet.

By modelling this process, astro-physicists can determine the size of planets they expect to form at a given distance from the Sun. Mars is an outlier; it should have grown to around the size of the Earth, but remains about one-tenth its size.

Because of Mars' small size, many scientists have long suspected that the Red Planet avoided the collisions that allowed other neighbouring planets to increase their girth.

Red Runt

By studying the chemical composition of meteorites, geochemist Dr Nicholas Dauphas of the University of Chicago in Illinois and Dr Ali Pourmand of the University of Miami in Florida joined forces to try to confirm this.

By measuring the concentration of elements Thorium and Hafnium in 44 space-rocks Dr Pourmand and Dauphas have come up with the most precise estimate of the time it took Mars to form.

Between 2 and 3 million years they suspect; short compared to the Earth, which is thought to have taken tens of millions of years to grow to its current size.

"We were pleasantly surprised because now we have precise evidence in support of the idea… that Mars is a stranded planetary embryo", Dr Pourmand told BBC News.

He thinks that Mars was around more or less in its current size when the Earth was beginning to form.

Given this, Mars could not have experienced the same type of growth as the Earth and Venus, says Dr Pourmand.

It's likely that Mars remains small because it deftly avoided colliding with other planets.

"The fact that Mars appears to have been left unscathed could just be down to luck," says astrophysicist Dr Duncan Forgan of the University of Edinburgh, UK.

He explains that while it is unlikely that a planet could escape collisions for such long periods, statistically one expects it to happen from time to time.

When modelling planetary dynamics, researchers find it easier to predict what happens in general, he says, but it is much more difficult to determine what happens in specific solar systems, or in specific cases like Mars.

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