Agriculture in Cyprus dates back 11,000 years ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The oldest agricultural settlement ever found on a Mediterranean island, Klimonas, first inhabited around 11,000 years ago, has been discovered in Cyprus by a French team. Farming, which first emerged around 11,500 years ago in the Middle East, only took a few centuries to reach the island. The discovery of the village provides evidence that the first Neolithic farming societies rapidly migrated from the Middle East, bringing with them wheat as well as domestic animals including dogs and cats. This suggests that the first sedentary Cypriots had already mastered maritime navigation. At the site, the archeologists discovered the remains of a mud brick building that was probably used for communal activities and surrounded by dwellings. They also discovered a large number of objects such as flint chips, stone tools and shell adornments, and found that the hunting of wild boar was the villagers’ only source of meat. New light shed on a mysterious Pharaoh Apart from his name, mentioned in three Egyptian documents dating from after his reign, nothing was known about Pharaoh Senakhtenre. This is no longer the case. Archeologists in Karnak have unearthed a limestone door jamb and lintel fragment bearing the hieroglyphic names: “Horus“, “King of Upper and Lower Egypt”, and “Son of Re”, which revealed the identity of Senakhtenre, in whose name the structure was built. Also known as Ahmes, Senakhtenre can now take his rightful place in the lineage of the Pharaohs of the Seventeenth dynasty (approx. 1634-1543 BC). 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 2012 online Human-related greenhouse gas emissions go back to ancient times Ice cores from Greenland show that human activity has generated methane emissions since ancient times, mainly due to wildland fires caused by deforestation and the use of wood for heating and metallurgy. Emissions from these fires fell during the decline of the Roman Empire and the Han dynasty in China, but increased in the Middle Ages. Between the first century BC and the sixteenth century AD, wildland fires started by humans caused 20-30% of total methane emissions. Nature October 2012 online Excavating the remains of a communal mud brick building ten meters in diameter, at the Klimonas site, Ayios Tychonas, on the island of Cyprus. These objects were found in archeological layers in Border Cave, South Africa. Ancient hunter-gatherers surprisingly modern The discovery in Border Cave, South Africa, of tools, hunting weapons, adornments and organic compounds astonishingly similar to those still used today by San hunter-gatherers (also known as Bushmen) has enabled an international team to observe the cultural and technological transition that took place between the Middle Stone Age and the Late Stone Age. Dating and analyses show that this transition began 44,000 years ago, rather than 20,000 years ago as previously believed. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences July 2012 online 2012 A year at CNRS
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