Ancient Roman Glue Sticks Around

Roman warriors repaired their battle accessories with a superglue that is still sticking around after 2,000 years, according to new findings on display at the Rheinischen Landes Museum in Bonn, Germany.

Running until Feb. 16, 2008, the exhibition "Behind the Silver Mask" presents evidence that the ancient adhesive was used to mount silver laurel leaves on legionnaires' battle helmets.

"It's a sensational find and a complete stroke of luck that we were still able to find traces of the substance after 2000 years," Frank Willer, the museum's chief restorer, told Discovery News.

Willer found traces of the superglue while examining a helmet unearthed in 1986 near the German town of Xanten, on what was once the bed of the Rhine.

"The helmet, which dates from the 1st century B.C., was given to the museum for restoration. I discovered the glue accidentally, while removing a tiny sample of metal from the helmet with a fine saw. The heat from the tool caused the silver laurel leaves on the helmet to peel off, leaving thread-like traces of the glue behind," Willer said.

Willer was amazed to discover that despite such a long exposure to water, time and air, the superglue did not lose its bonding properties.

He said that other Roman battle accessories kept by the museum have traces of silver decorations which most likely had been glued to the iron with the same adhesive and technique. Unfortunately, the objects are too deteriorated to find traces of the superglue.

However, the helmet unearthed at Xanten featured enough material to determine how the adhesive was made.

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Ancient Toolkit Gives Glimpse of Prehistoric Life

Toolkit Contents

Before the end of the last ice age, a hunter-gatherer left a bag of tools near the wall of a roundhouse residence, where archaeologists have now found the collection 14,000 years later.

The tool set -- one of the most complete and well preserved of its kind -- provides an intriguing glimpse of the daily life of a prehistoric hunter-gatherer.

The contents, as described to Discovery News by Phillip Edwards, a senior lecturer in the Archaeology Program at Melbourne's La Trobe University, show the owner of the bag was well equipped for obtaining meat and edible plants in the wild.

"There was a sickle for harvesting wild wheat or barley, a cluster of flint spearheads, a flint core for making more spearheads, some smooth stones (maybe slingshots), a large stone (maybe for striking flint pieces off the flint core), a cluster of gazelle toe bones which were used to make beads, and part of a second bone tool," he said.

Edwards outlines the finds, attributed to the Natufian culture from a site called Wadi Hammeh 27 in Jordan, in the latest issue of Antiquity.

He believes the tools were enclosed in a hide or wickerwork bag with a strap that would have been worn over the shoulder. Such bags rarely had compartments, so the owner probably protected valuable items by wrapping them in rolls of bark or leather before placing them at the bottom of the bag.

The sickle, constructed out of two carefully grooved horn pieces, was fitted with color-matched tan and grey bladelets. It would have been a marvel of form and function for its day and is the only tool of its kind ever linked to the Natufian people.

The rest of the items were designed to immobilize and then kill game such as aurochs, red deer, hares, storks, partridges, owls, tortoises and the major source of meat -- gazelles.

"A lone hunter or a group of hunters might wait for gazelles to cross their path while waiting behind a low 'hide' made of twigs and brush," Edwards explained.

"They might have worked on making bone beads to wile away the time. Then a hunter could get off a shot while the animals were off their guard. A first shot might wound, but not kill, and then a hunter or a group of them will track the wounded animal."

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Captain Kidd's Ship Located Off Dominican Island

Shallow Discovery

- A U.S. underwater archaeology team announced Thursday it has likely discovered the shattered remnants of a ship once captained by the notorious buccaneer William Kidd off a tiny Dominican Republic island.

The barnacled cannons and anchors found stacked beneath just 10 feet of crystalline coastal waters off Catalina Island are believed to be the wreckage of the Quedagh Merchant, a ship abandoned by the Scottish privateer in 1699, Indiana University researchers say.

"When I first looked down and saw it, I couldn't believe everybody missed it for 300 years," said Charles Beeker, a scuba-diving archaeologist who teaches at Indiana University. "I've been on thousands of wrecks and this is one of the first where it's been untouched by looters."

Beeker said the wreckage has been aggressively sought by treasure hunters, including a group with a permit from the Dominican government to scour Catalina for remnants of the ship, which historians believe was scavenged of treasure and burned shortly after Kidd abandoned it.

The Dominican government has licensed the U.S. university to study the wreckage and convert the sea floor where the cannons and anchors are marooned into an underwater preserve, where it will be accessible to divers and snorkelers.

"We believe this is a living museum," said Beeker, who has previously helped the Dominican government open underwater parks that feature cannons, jar fragments and other items recovered from early 18th-century shipwrecks. "The treasure in this case is the wreck itself."

The scattered cannons and anchors, partially hidden by swirling sand, were first spotted by a local man who reported his discovery to the Dominican government, according to Francis Soto, director of the National Office of Subaquatic Heritage and Culture.

Ice Skating Born of Necessity?

The Original Ice Skate

Ice skating, now a winter tradition around the world, may have been invented in Scandinavia 5,000 years ago, new research suggests.

According to Federico Formenti and Alberto Minetti from the University of Oxford, there is substantial evidence that ice skating began in southern Finland, where the concentration of lakes is the highest in the world.

"The peculiar shape and distribution" of lakes in that area can be credited for the advent of the "human-powered" means of transportation, the researchers wrote in the January issue of the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society of London.

"In this geographical region characterized by a harsh climate, especially in winter, our ancestors had to face the dilemma of walking around several frozen lakes --- an energetically demanding option -- or crossing them, which could prove to be more convenient in terms of distance traveled, metabolic cost, and/or speed," said the researchers.

Archaeological evidence suggests humans started skating on ice approximately in the second millennium B.C. The oldest known ice skates, found throughout Scandinavia, were made mostly of horse and cow bones, pierced at one end and bound to the foot with leather straps.

Bones lack the edge necessary for the modern skating stride, so forward propulsion came from the person's upper limbs: a stick was pushed backward between the legs, which were kept almost straight.

"Compared to walking, these bone skates actually do not offer any advantage in terms of speed," Formenti told Discovery News. "I asked myself, what was the meaning of building such a tool?"

Neanderthals Stitched Too Little Too Late

Keeping Warm

Neanderthals probably froze to death in the last ice age because rapid climate change caught them by surprise without the tools needed to make warm clothes, finds new research.

Ian Gilligan, a postgraduate researcher from the Australian National University argues his case in the current issue of the journal World Archaeology. By the time some Neanderthals developed sewing tools it was too little too late, said Gilligan.

Neanderthals began to die out just before the last glacial maximum, 35,000 to 30,000 years ago and were replaced by modern humans. Previous studies have argued that one of the key reasons for this is that modern humans had better hunting tools, providing them with the extra food they needed to survive the cold.

But Gilligan disagrees that the development of hunting tools was so important to modern humans' survival over the Neanderthals.

For a start, he argues, Neanderthals were already successful hunters, surviving in Europe and Eurasia for over 100,000 years. Most of the tools supposed to have given modern humans the edge over Neanderthals were actually more useful for making warm clothes.

The important tools developed by modern humans included stone blades, bone points and eventually needles, which could cut and pierce hides to sew them together into multi-layered clothes including underwear, said Gilligan.

"They're not related to hunting, they're related to clothing," he said. "These tools are related to tailored, fitted clothing, what I call complex clothing."

Modern humans were more vulnerable to the cold than Neanderthals and developed these tools as far back as 90,000 years ago to cope with cooler parts of Africa, before the peak of the ice age.

Earliest Shoe-Wearers Revealed by Toe Bones

Shod? Look at the Toes

- People started wearing shoes around 40,000 years ago, according to a study on recently excavated small toe bones that belonged to an individual from China who apparently loved shoes.

Most footwear erodes over time. The earliest known shoes, rope sandals that attached to the feet with string, date to only around 10,000 B.C. For the new study, the clues were in middle toe bones that change during an individual's lifetime if the person wears shoes a lot.

"When you walk barefoot, your middle toes curl into the ground to give you traction as you push off," explained co-author Erik Trinkaus, who worked on the study with Hong Shang.

"If you regularly wear Nikes, moccasins or any other type of shoe, you actually wind up pushing off with your big toe, with less force going through the middle toes," added Trinkaus, a Washington University anthropologist who is one of the world's leading experts on early human evolution.

Small toe bones are rare in the archaeological record, so Trinkaus and Hong jumped at the chance to study the 40,000-year-old skeleton, which was found in Tianyuan Cave near Zhoukoudian, China.

They also analyzed a recently found 27,500-year-old Russian skeleton with middle toe bones, as well as Neanderthal and modern Puebloan and Inuit skeletons, also with such bones.

The findings have been accepted for publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The researchers determined that both the Chinese and Russian individuals had more lightly built middle toe bones relative to their body size. The Russian skeleton was also found with other individuals who had an abundance of ivory beads around their ankles and feet, suggesting these individuals likely wore some fairly flashy shoes.

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The Neanderthal-Human Split: (Very) Ancient History

Distant Relative

Neanderthals and humans once shared a common ancestor, but we split from the stocky, hairy hominid group as long as 400,000 to 350,000 years ago, concludes a new study.

That estimate matches prior DNA studies, putting a date to the time when human beings first emerged on the planet. But would these first humans have been anatomically just like us? Probably not, suggests lead author Timothy Weaver, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis.

"Early fossils along this lineage are quite different from later ones," he told Discovery News.

Fast evolution, in fact, probably drove the initial Neanderthal/human divergence, which likely began as genetic drift -- random changes in DNA. As the two groups parted ways, their changing environments likely drove more substantial changes in body shape and size, in response to differing needs.

Weaver and colleagues Charles Roseman and Chris Stringer created a model to determine how long it would have taken genetic drift to create the cranial differences observed between Neanderthal and modern human skeletons.

The model used prior information on how microsatellites, aka "junk DNA," can change, or drift, over time in a species. Over time, those changes can accumulate enough for an entirely new species to evolve.

The researchers applied the model to 37 cranial measurements collected on 2,524 modern and 20 Neanderthal specimens. Their findings are published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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