Archaeologists have discovered a trove of rare artifacts used by children at the site of a new development in London.

While preparing for construction, researchers unearthed several marbles, a pencil and a fragment of a reusable slate tablet with letters scratched into the surface.

“We don’t often find archaeological objects we can directly link to children, but here we were delighted to find evidence for both schoolwork and play,” according to a January 12 update from the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), which is leading the dig.

The marbles—some of which are still covered in colorful decorations—are what’s known as “ceramic alleys,” or small, smooth spheres designed to look like they were made from alabaster. They were discovered in a covered, brick-lined drain, which suggests they may have been lost during “a breaktime game,” per MOLA.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/41957701

At a stroke, this extends the human occupation of Malta by over 1000 years. But more importantly, these people were not only alive in the Stone Age; they were also hunter-gatherers, as opposed to people from farming communities with more advanced tools. Archaeologists had often assumed that hunter-gatherers didn’t cross wide spans of ocean. Scerri’s team showed otherwise.

This has already been reported on in this community, but a link to the original article may be desirable too.

Abstract

The Indonesian archipelago is host to some of the earliest known rock art in the world. Previously, secure Pleistocene dates were reported for figurative cave art and stencils of human hands in two areas in Indonesia—the Maros-Pangkep karsts in the southwestern peninsula of the island of Sulawesi and the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat region of eastern Kalimantan, Borneo. Here we describe a series of early dated rock art motifs from the southeastern portion of Sulawesi. Among this assemblage of Pleistocene (and possibly more recent) motifs, laser-ablation U-series (LA-U-series) dating of calcite overlying a hand stencil from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island yielded a U-series date of 71.6 ± 3.8 thousand years ago (ka), providing a minimum-age constraint of 67.8 ka for the underlying motif. The Muna minimum (67.8 ± 3.8 ka) exceeds the published minimum for rock art in Maros-Pangkep by 16.6 thousand years (kyr) (ref. 5) and is 1.1 kyr greater than the published minimum for a hand stencil from Spain attributed to Neanderthals, which until now represented the oldest demonstrated minimum-age constraint for cave art worldwide. Moreover, the presence of this extremely old art in Sulawesi suggests that the initial peopling of Sahul about 65 ka involved maritime journeys between Borneo and Papua, a region that remains poorly explored from an archaeological perspective.

A palm-sized fragment of elephant bone, shaped and used as a precision tool almost half a million years ago, has been identified as the oldest known elephant-bone implement in Europe. Although the artifact was excavated at Boxgrove in West Sussex in the 1990s, new microscopic analysis revealed it was deliberately fashioned and repeatedly used to maintain razor-sharp stone handaxes - offering an unusually intimate glimpse of how early humans worked, planned and conserved valuable materials in Ice Age Britain.

The tool comes from the famous Boxgrove locality near Chichester, a site celebrated for exceptionally preserved evidence of Lower Palaeolithic life, including finely made Acheulean handaxes and butchered animal remains, explains The Independent. Researchers say the 11cm-long bone piece was initially catalogued but only recently re-examined in detail, when 3D scanning and electron microscopy exposed distinctive pitting, scoring and embedded flint fragments consistent with tool use. The finding have just been released in a Science Advances report.