In the East Asian RUSSIA found ancient TEXTILES
Not everyone knows that one of the best-studied sites of ancient man - a cave in the Primorsky Krai, near Dal#39;negorsk. The cave Devil Gate in 1973, Soviet scientists among a large number of fragments of stone artifacts, pottery, bones and shells found charred pieces of fabric. As published in the June issue of the journal Antiquty Russian-American study, they were woven 9,000 years ago, that is, they are two thousand years older than previously thought.
New dating does `` oldest seaside mats textile pattern in East Asia and among the first in the whole of Eurasia, told the publication Gazeta.ru study leader Yaroslav Kuzmin, a senior researcher at the Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Mineralogy SB RAS.
According to scientists, the mats and nets, fragments of which were found in a Ferris gate is from 8800 to 9200 years. The oldest is now considered artifacts from Nahal caves near the Dead Sea Hema - radiocarbon analysis allowed us to estimate their age at 11,000 years. However, the radiocarbon method is not reliable in the study of microscopic tissue samples.
For such purposes requires accelerating the mass spectrometer, which analyzes fragments, a thousand times smaller than conventional radiocarbon dating. Abroad, there are several dozen laboratories equipped with such a device, but in Russia, until recently, there was not one.
`The oldest textiles in Asia`
As a result of cooperation between the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, Russian Academy of Sciences with the experts from the Laboratory of accelerator mass spectrometry U.S. National Science Foundation at the University of Arizona, Russian scientists were able to use foreign spectrometer for the dating of fragments of tissue. The results of their analysis were surprised: `The finds from the caves of Devil#39;s Gate is the oldest preserved textiles in Asia, as well as one of the earliest in Eurasia! #39;- Says Kuzmin.
New dating back several thousand postpones the time of appearance of textiles in the Far East, and suggests that advanced inventions, among which in ancient times were treated articles of vegetable fiber, could appear not only in the developed of farmers and pastoralists in the Middle East, but also in seemingly ` `primitive hunter-gatherers of Siberia.
In the future, the latest scientific equipment will be available to Russian scientists at home. `Now at the Center for collective use of` `Quaternary Geochronology of the Novosibirsk Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences was created and debugging runs Russia#39;s first accelerator mass spectrometer #39;, - concludes Kuzmin.
