At www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Ice-Age-iLion-Mani-is-worlds-earliest-f… … straying back on to yesterday's Ice Age art theme we learn here that a piece of mammoth ivory carved into the shape of a human body with the head of a lion goes back somewhat earlier than thought – as way back as 40,000 years ago. We may assume lions were part of the European fauna at that time.
At http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/24857.aspx … the famous Poverty Point mound in Louisana was raised in less than 90 days. A paper in Geoarchaeology suggests, using simulation no doubt, that it must have been quick as archaeologists, cutting a hole down the centre of the mound, did not encounter any evidence of erosion as a result of rain – and it rains a lot in that part of Louisiana. The idea of a rapid raising is something that was found over here in Britain – at Durrington Walls for example, where large numbers of people turned up and dug out the ditches and raised the monuments in a fairly rapid process – in a matter of weeks. The mound appears to have been built around 1200BC, the last project on what is a 700 acre site (see diagram of what is involved). It includes several smaller mounds and a massive series of concentric embankments that rise in parallel formation surrounding a flat plaza zone alongside a river. The river appears to play an important role – as yet unknown. To place it in context in mainstream chronology it was contemporary the LB period in the Old World (Aegean, Egypt and Near East) and the Middle Bronze (in Britain and Ireland).
At http://phys.org/print278851930.html … we learn that the Aztec conquest altered the genetics of the people living in central Mexico. They can't have sacrificed them all and it is being suggested the Aztecs indulged in deportations, moving people from one part of their empire, to another, in order to nobble nationalistic attachments to landscape.