March/April 2020 Issue

CHINA: Around 200 new terracotta warriors have joined the ranks of the 2,000 that had been previously excavated. The life-size sculptures were unearthed during the latest round of excavations at the 3rd-century B.C. tomb of Qin Shihuangdi in Xi’an. The recently uncovered figures represent two different types of soldiers, those who held long poles as weapons and those who carried bows. It is estimated that around 8,000 clay warriors were buried around the mausoleum to protect China’s first emperor in the afterlife.

INDONESIA: Homo erectus, believed to have been a direct ancestor of modern humans, walked out of Africa almost 2 million years ago and spread across Asia before beginning to disappear around 400,000 years ago. New research has shown that the last place the hominins survived was on the island of Java. A team used new technology on previously excavated remains to confirm that 12 H. erectus skulls from Ngandong were between 117,000 and 108,000 years old, making them the last known members of their species.

RUSSIA: A tiny, 1.6-inch-long sculpted cave lion found in western Siberia’s Denisova Cave is believed to be one of the world’s oldest carved animal figurines. Made from a woolly mammoth tusk, the partially intact carving was originally painted with red ochre and further decorated with a series of incised lines. Experts believe the figurine dates to between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago, but they do not yet know whether it was made by early Homo sapiens or by an extinct human species.