Human behaviour is influenced by many things, most of which remain unconscious to us. One of these is a phenomenon known among perception psychologists as "pseudo-neglect". This refers to the observation that healthy people prefer their left visual field to their right and therefore devide a line regularly left of centre.
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Aerial photo of the excavation area of an Early Neolithic settlement near Vrable in Slovakia [Credit: © Nils Muller-Scheeßel] |
Archaeologist Dr. Nils Muller-Scheeßel, who coordinated the study within the CRC, says: "Researchers have long assumed that early Neolithic houses stood for about a generation, i.e. 30 to 40 years, and that new houses had to be built next to existing ones at regular intervals. By means of age determination using the radiocarbon method, we can now show that the new construction was associated with a barely perceptible rotation of the house axis counterclockwise. We see "Pseudoneglect" as the most likely cause of this."
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Magnetic plan of an early Neolithic settlement. Each two of the dark lines with a length of 20 to 30 meters represent the part of a house [Credit: © Nils Muller-Scheeßel] |
"In recent years, we have discovered hundreds of Early Neolithic houses in our field of work in southwestern Slovakia using geophysical prospection methods. Excavating all these houses is neither possible nor desirable for reasons of monument conservation. The possibility of using "Pseudoneglect" to bring the houses into a relative sequence without excavation and thus to break down the settlement activity of an entire small region raises our research to a completely new level", says Mister Muller-Scheeßel enthusiastically. "Absolute dating using scientific methods must of course confirm the basic trend in every case".
Source: Kiel University [January 10, 2020]
* This article was originally published here
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