Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew.  Just like clockwork, we have for you the latest batch of four top news stories from this past week of Archaeologica.  Send us feedback on The Archaeology Channel Facebook page or post a message on our social networking site, ArchaeoSeek!

Using declassified military satellite imagery, researchers have found thousands of ancient irrigation canals in southern Mesopotamia dating back three thousand and more years.  A new and very comprehensive DNA study shows that the Celtic languages originated in Central Europe and spread across the continent through migration.  A newly published paper describes five 2400-year-old ceramic figurines with dramatic facial expressions found atop a pyramid in El Salvador.  And Spanish researchers working in east Africa’s Olduvai Gorge have found the oldest known bone tools, dating back 1.5 million years.

Thanks to everyone for supporting our subscription platform, Heritage Broadcasting Service, available at heritagetac.org.  We now have hundreds of titles you can binge upon on Roku, including our recent video about finding the lost aircraft of Amelia Earhart.  Please help us spread the word!  Again, that link is heritagetac.org.

Our tour program, TAC Tours, will continue in September 2025 with our tour of Brittany  and its many spectacular megalithic sites.  Please join us for that!  The link to our tour program is at archaeologychannel.org/tours.

And now, here’s Laura Kennedy with the Audio News from Archaeologica!  We hope you find this to be a valuable part of your day!

Welcome to the Audio News from Archaeologica!  I’m Laura Kennedy, and these are the headlines in archaeological and historical news for the week of March 2nd through the 8th, 2025.

We begin this week near the ancient Mesopotamian city of Eridu, one of the world’s oldest cities, where researchers have uncovered and mapped a sophisticated and extensive irrigation system.  This network of canals is one of the best-preserved irrigation systems in the region.

As reported by Greek Reporter, based on a study published by the journal Antiquity, archaeologists used satellite images, drone footage and on-the-ground photography to map the canals.  The satellite images included some declassified military photos from the 1960s.  These combined techniques allowed the researchers to identify man-made canals and distinguish them from natural waterways.

The research confirms that people in southern Mesopotamia created an extremely organized water distribution system that helped support agricultural and urban development.  Most ancient irrigation systems have been buried under sediment or later civilizations altered the landscape.  Until now, this has made it difficult to study early agricultural practices in southern Iraq. 

Typically, river changes in other Mesopotamian sites damaged the irrigation systems.  The Eridu region is a notable exception, people moved away from this locale after a dramatic shift in the course of the Euphrates River.  This allowed the researchers the opportunity to map an irrigation system that dates back at least to the first millennium BC and was begun thousands of years earlier.  They uncovered a system of over 200 major canals.  Some of the canals stretched up to 9 kilometers in length and were over 5 meters wide.   They were also directly connected to an ancient course of the Euphrates and guaranteed a study water supply.  

Researchers also uncovered 4,000 smaller canals that were engineered to send water to the farmlands.  Approximately 700 farms benefitted from this irrigation system and varied in size from 500 to 20,000 square meters.  An irrigation system of this size and precision took a lot of planning.  

Obviously, this was a coordinated effort that required engineering expertise and a high level of social organization.  Tracing the origins of this sophisticated water system is another example of how early civilizations adapted and even thrived in their environment.  

Now, researchers are working to establish a more accurate timeline for the construction of the canals.  This will help them understand the changes in the irrigation system and how it affected farming over the years.  Part of the plan includes excavating critical sites and analyzing the soil for sediment dating.  For a broader perspective of Mesopotamia, researchers will compare the documents of the time with the dimensions and characteristics of the farms and canals.  

For our next story, we turn to a genetic study that appears to show that the spread of the Celtic languages started in Central Europe.  This challenges prior proposals that the Celtic languages originated with earlier cultures in Western Europe.  

As reported by Greek Reporter, researchers studying DNA now propose that these languages spread through migrations from Central Europe during the Late Bronze and Iron ages.  Celtic languages include Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton and are still spoken in parts of Western Europe.  

Thousands of years ago, ancient people spoke these and related languages in a much wider area.  This includes the Iberian Peninsula all the way to modern-day Turkey.  The spread of the Celtic languages is still debated with three main hypotheses leading the discussion.  

The first idea suggests that the Celtic languages spread along the Atlantic coast with the migration of the Late Neolithic Bell Beaker Culture about 4500 years ago.  The second concept suggests that the languages dispersed from southern France or Iberia during the Bronze Age, after 4500 years ago, into the British Isles.  The third and latest proposal argues that Celtic languages spread from eastern Central Europe during the Bronze Age through the migration of the Urnfield, Hallstatt and La Tène cultures.  

The first two hypotheses don’t support the demographic movement of the Celtic languages, but the third concept does.  Researchers analyzed the DNA of over 750 ancient individuals in regions that included France, Germany, Austria, and the British Isles.  The results showed a major population shift during the Bronze and Iron Ages.  

The British Isles had two significant moments of genetic transition.  The first moment occurred with the Bell Beaker people arriving in Britain about 4,500 years ago. The second significant moment happened between 3,200 and 2,800 years ago.  This is when Britain experienced the arrival of groups from Central Europe, related to the Urnfield and Hallstatt cultures.  

The genetic traces from France and the Czech Republic suggest that local populations there interacted with incoming populations from Hungary and Serbia.  The genetic markers from Anatolia also increased during the Iron Age.  This is evidence of a cultural exchange that heavily influenced Europe’s linguistic pattern.  

Although the Bell Beaker culture significantly contributed to the genetic makeup of Western Europe, this most recent evidence suggests that the Celtic languages arrived later, with the Urnfield culture migration.  

This study shows how much human movement has influenced Europe’s linguistic and cultural landscape.  This genetic study has given researchers a clearer picture of how Celtic languages started and spread.  The migrations of certain ancient populations in this case are what influenced Europe’s linguistic pattern, not language adoption resulting from cultural influences.  

This DNA study appeared in bioRxiv [pronounced BIO-ARCHIVE]/

Our third story takes us to San Isidro, El Salvador, in Central America, where archaeologists uncovered five 2,400-year-old ceramic puppets. This is just the second time that archaeologists have found ceramic figurines like these in their original location. 

As reported by LiveScience and published in the journal Antiquity, archaeologists uncovered these figurines on top of a pyramidal structure in 2022.  Analysis of these figurines suggests that the ancient people living in this region had connections to other parts of Central America.  

According to lead author Jan Szymański, an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw, this challenges the thought that ancient people in this region lived in isolation.  Other artifacts found at this site are similar to those found at archaeological sites in modern-day Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.  This includes jade pendants.  This indicates that a cultural and trade connection existed between ancient El Salvador and its neighbors.  

One of the most distinctive qualities of the puppets is their facial expressions.  Depending on the angle, their expressions change.  At eye level, the puppets look angry.  From above, they appear to be grinning, and from below, they look scared.  This appears to be a deliberate and conscious design feature.  It’s possible that this allowed the puppets to be used in a variety of ritual performances.  

Three of the five puppets are nearly 30 centimeters tall.  The other two are 18 and 10 centimeters in height.  The larger puppets are naked and have no hair.  They also have movable heads and open mouths.  The two smaller puppets have locks of hair on their foreheads and earspools in their earlobes.  These puppets could have been used in a theatrical scene or tableau to convey a message.  

Not much is known about the people who established these ancient settlements in El Salvador.  Because of the destruction from a volcano between AD 400 and 500 and the high population density today that has disturbed the landscape, finding evidence of ancient settlements in this area prior to the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century is very challenging.   

This lack of evidence is what led some to believe that El Salvador didn’t share the same beliefs as neighboring places.  These puppets reveal that this area had active communities that were far-reaching in their exchange of ideas and customs. 

Our last story takes us to Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, where researchers have learned that bone tool technology existed a surprising 1.5 million years ago.  Human ancestors there were using bones to make tools more than a million years earlier than expected.  

As reported by Phys.org and published in the journal Nature, researchers didn’t have any known evidence of anyone shaping bones into tools more than 500,000 years ago.  The latest finding has dramatically changed this picture.  A Spanish-led team of researchers uncovered 27 tools made out of the leg and arm bones of mostly hippos and elephants.  

Someone not familiar with early hominin bone technology would think the tools were random pieces of bone.  For researchers, however, the bones are proof that early humans were problem-solvers with amazing cognitive ability.  They understood how to choose the appropriate material and fashion it into the tool they needed.

According to Francesco d'Errico, an archaeologist at France's Bordeaux University and study co-author, it’s obvious that early humans wanted to take the heavy bones and turn them into heavy, long tools using hammerstones to shape them.  Some of the tools could weigh up to a kilo and be as long as 15 inches.  Some tools were even designed with a notch in the middle for better handling.  

The Olduvai site has very few large stone tools.  It could be that the quartz found at this site wasn’t suited for the hard job of cutting animal remains into parts.

Acheulean Culture was also emerging at this time, represented by bifacially flaked tools known as hand axes.  This was a major advance in human history and gave early humans the ability to slice or skin their prey more efficiently.  

The researchers in the new study hypothesize that the bone-cutting at Olduvai is an original invention during a transition to bifaces.  The idea is that the bone techniques developed at Olduvai disappeared from the planet for a million years.  These cutting techniques might have continued throughout the years but haven’t been properly identified in other archaeological sites.  Humans evolved, and so possibly did the sophistication of their tools that they carved out of bone.  

That wraps up the news for this week!

For more stories and daily news updates, visit Archaeologica on the World Wide Web at www.archaeologica.org where all the news is history! Also, be sure to check out our growing subscription platform, Heritage Broadcasting Service, at heritagetac.org!

I’m Laura Kennedy and I’ll see you next week!