1 . Lingjiatan Ancient Cultural Site

Lingjiatan site is located in Lingjiatan village, Hanshan County, Anhui Province.

·With a history of about 5,600 years, it is the largest and best preserved Neolithic settlement site found in Chaohu Lake Basin in the lower reaches of the Changjiang River.

·The unearthed area is 2,200 square meters, including 1 altar in the late Neolithic age, 66 tombs, 1 relic built with large-area red pottery blocks, 1 house site, and 1,300 precious cultural relics such as delicate jade ritual vessels, stone tools and pottery, of which jade accounted for more than half.

·The “Stonehenge” unearthed at the site is the only site found so far that there are Stonehenge remains in the Neolithic period in China, and its construction age is about 1,000 years earlier than that of Stonehenge in Britain.

·Unearthed “jade dragon”, the flat round jade dragon connected end to end is called “the first dragon in China”.

·The unearthed stone drill is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the Neolithic Age in China in the 20th century.

·Studying urban elements

Lingjiatan site is the first settlement site in China with hierarchical architecture based on terrain. It plays a noticeable role in studying the evolution of Chinese ancient society and the exchange and collision of East, West, North and South cultures.

·Moving the history of Chinese cities forward for more than 1,000 years.

·Did the Youchao people master the metal smelting technology at that time? Have they produced the most primitive text symbols?

·After the discovery of Lingjiatan site, does Youchao’s birthplace lie in Chaohu Lake Basin?

3 . On 2 November 1974, Dr. Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist (古人类学家), with his student Tom Gray, was there, in Hadar in Ethiopia, a volcanic region home to ancient humans. The pair had been out exploring and had decided to walk back to their car via a valley. As they walked, they noticed an elbow bone sticking out. Nearby, they found pieces of a skull, ribs, a thigh bone, a pelvis and a jaw. It took weeks of careful work to recover all the pieces, and they found almost half of a skeleton.

On the night of this incredible discovery, Johanson and the team listened to The Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds on their tape deck (录音机). Inspiration struck, and that’s how this famous fossil got her name.

Lucy was a member of a species called Australopithecus afarensis (阿法南猿), and she lived more than 3 million years ago. The wear on her wisdom teeth shows that she was fully mature when she died, but she would have grown up quickly. She was probably only around 12 years old and weighed just 29 kilograms (64 pounds), barely half as much as a human female. Her brain was only one-third of the size of ours, and her face was ape-like, with a powerful jaw. She had curved fingers, and marks on her upper arm bone show that her muscles were strong, both showing that she was a competent climber.

How did Lucy die? Anthropologist (人类学家) John Kappelman and his colleagues think that she might have fallen from a tree. There are cracks in her bones and according to Kappelman’s reconstruction, Lucy fell from a height of 15 metres (50 feet) and hit the ground feet first. She broke both her ankles and knees.

The trouble with this theory is that it’s hard to prove. According to other researchers, the damage to her bones could also have occurred after she died.

4 . Macaques don’t use the sharp flakes they create for anything, Luncz adds, noting that the monkeys have sharp teeth and don’t need cutting tools. The similar ancient stone tools collected from some of the earliest known sites, however, show evidence of being used for cutting tasks. For example, in Oldowan, a site dating between 3.3 million and 1.5 million years ago, researchers analyzed use-wear patterns on the tools and found that some of the flakes showed damage along their edges, indicating that they had been used for cutting. Cut marks on some fossils revealed that hominins had used stone tools for butchering the animals, making it clear that the sharp stone tools were anything but unintentional by-products of other pounding activities.

For 4,500 years, the Great Pyramid, or the Pyramid of Khufu,     1    （keep）watching over the Egyptian desert.

In that time, it has suffered the indignities（侮辱）of tomb raiders and archaeologists（考古学家）with gunpowder.     2     the latest survey of the pyramid's mysteries is far more complicated and     3    （take）a page from particle（粒子）physics. The fact     4     the particles interact differently with stone from with empty space led the scientists     5    （discover）a previously unknown 100-foot-long void（空间）,     6    （sit）somewhere above the pyramid's Grand Gallery.

“The good news is that the void is there, and the other good news is that this void is very big.”

Now what is it?

“We need the help of other people,” Mehdi Tayoubi, a researcher said. Maybe Egyptologists and     7    （expert）in ancient Egyptian architecture will provide us     8     some assumptions we can use for imitation（模仿）and to compare with the data we have to find some sort of architectural     9    （explain）for this void. Until then, the newly discovered space will be just one of many     10    （constantly）mysteries of this great wonder of the world.

8 . Archeologists said on Wednesday they have unearthed the oldest wooden structure ever discovered, dating from nearly half a million years ago, which suggests that our ancestors may have been more advanced than previously thought.

The exceptionally well-preserved wooden structure was found at Kalambo Falls in the north of Zambia near the border with Tanzania. It dates back at least 476,000 years, well before the evolution of Homo sapiens (智人), according to a study describing the find in the journal Nature.

The wood bears cut-marks showing that stone tools were used to join two large logs to make the structure, which is believed to be a platform, walkway or raised dwelling to keep our ancestors above the water. A collection of wooden tools, including a wedge and a digging stick, was also discovered at the site. The ancestors of humans were already known to use wood at this time, but for limited purposes such as starting a fire or hunting.

Larry Barham, an archeologist at the U. K.’s University of Liverpool and the study’s lead author, said the structure was a “chance discovery” made in 2019 while excavating the site located on the banks of the Kalambo River, above a 235-meter waterfall.

Discoveries involving such ancient wood are rare, because it tends to rot leaving behind little trace for the historical record. But the high level of water at Kalambo Falls is believed to have preserved the structure over the centuries.

Excavations at the Kalambo site in the 1950s and 1960s unearthed some wood, but it was not able to be accurately dated. However, this time around, the researchers used a new method called luminescence dating, which determines age by measuring the last time certain minerals were exposed to sufficient heat or sunlight. This revealed that the structure was much older than the researchers had thought, dating back at least 476,000 years.

The discovery of the wooden structure “changed how I thought about these people”, Barham added. “They transformed their surroundings to make life easier, even if it was only by making a platform to sit on by the river to do their daily chores,” he said. “They used their intelligence, imagination and skills to create something they’d never seen before, something that had never previously existed.”