The oldest-known oil painting, the earliest evidence for shoes and a handful of desiccated human turds are among the ten greatest archaeological finds of 2008, according to a leading journal.

While acknowledging that for many people this year’s big archaeological experience was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, the editors of Archaeology, published by the Archaeological Institute of America, point out the impact of less fictional finds.

Oil paints, the medium of choice for some of the world’s greatest artists, were thought to have been invented in medieval Europe in the 12th century AD, but examples five centuries older have been found in Afghanistan. They were used in Buddhist murals in a cave complex at Bamiyan, near the two huge rock-cut Buddha statues dynamited by the Taleban in 2001.

The paintings depicted mainly the Buddha himself and attendant bodhisattvas and female devotees, although one scene, perhaps not surprising at this crossroads of Asia, showed Mithras, a Persian deity widely venerated in the Roman Empire, driving a chariot drawn by four winged horses. Paint samples from 12 of the caves showed the use of drying oils, key elements of oil-based paints in medieval and later Europe. The oils at Bamiyan were most likely walnut and poppy-seed oils: a local origin seems likely, given the abundance of poppies as a crop in Afghanistan.

Evidence for shoes having been invented more than 40,000 years ago came from a cave at Tianyuan in China, where a skeleton examined by Professor Erik Trinkaus proved to have much more delicate toe bones than those of earlier humans. When walking barefoot, the middle toes curl into the ground to give traction, but when wearing shoes the big toe is used for thrust instead: the bones of the middle toes are less developed because the muscles attached to them are smaller. Development of these bones happens early on, suggesting that the Tianyuan Cave individual had worn shoes as a baby as well as in adult life.

Few mundane finds have aroused more controversy than the dried-out human faeces excavated at Paisley Cave in Oregon, which earlier this year were dated to more than 14,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dating and the identification of human DNA suggested that people had entered the Americas centuries earlier than the “Clovis people”, whose artefacts mark the first widespread occupation around 13,000 years ago.

At the same time, Archaeology reports, a study of Native American mitochondrial DNA variability suggests that the first entry was probably around 18,500 years ago. They spread out rapidly south of the ice sheets that covered most of Canada.

Another discovery in the top ten is a jawbone from the oldest European yet known, found this summer at Atapuerca, near Burgos in northern Spain. At the Sima del Elefante, a limestone cave exposed by a railway cutting a century ago, part of the left lower jaw of a species known as Homo antecessor was found together with stone tools and the bones of bison which had been butchered for food. The deposit has been dated to 1.2 million years ago, almost doubling the known length of human history in Europe and making Boxgrove Man, at around 400,000 years, a relative newcomer.

At the other end of the human timescale, the first unlooted Portuguese nau, a 16th-century cargo ship plying the dangerous route around the Cape of Good Hope to India, was found on April 1 off the coast of Namibia during diamond-mining operations, and several massive marble heads of Roman emperors were uncovered at Sagalassos in Turkey. One of these, of Hadrian, was rushed to London this summer to confront visitors entering the British Museum’s blockbuster exhibition.

Archaeology Vol 62 No 1: 20-27