Arkeo Blusukan

Intact Figurine Unearthed at Neolithic Town in Turkey STANFORD, CALIFORNIA— Ars Technica  reports that an intact female figure carved from marble was recently unearthed at Çatalhöyük by a team of archaeologists led by Ian Hodder of Stanford University. ( Jason Quinlan ) Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced that the statue dates to between 8000 and 5500 B.C., measures about 6.7 inches long, and weighs about two pounds.  (resources: Archaeology Magazine, 13/09/2016 ) ( Ian Hodder, Stanford Univ. )

Genomes Suggest Two Groups of First Farmers in Middle East BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS—Population geneticists Iosif Lazaridis and David Reich of Harvard Medical School suggest that farming was developed by two different populations in the Middle East. They obtained genetic material, which is poorly preserved in hot climates, from the tiny ear bones of 44 people who lived in the Middle East between 3,500 and 14,000 years ago. Nature  reports the researchers found that the Neolithic farmers who lived across the Zagros Mountains of western Iran were more closely related to hunter-gatherers in the region than they were to farmers in the southern Levant. “There has been a school of thought arguing that everything happens first in the southern Levant and everyone learns how to be farmers in from this initial dispersal,” said Roger Matthews of the University of Reading, who is also co-director of the Central Zagros Archaeological Project. “But the archaeological evidence shows very strong ...