Was it beer, or was it bread? Made for the living or made for the dead?
Discover pulls back the curtain on an archaeological debate over some pits in the ground in Israel – holes that show traces of 13,000-year-old fermentation […]
archaeology
A piece of human brain survived 2,600 years.
Science magazine reveals the secret to cellular survival for a chunk of human brain that didn’t rot for more than two and half millennia after […]
Our oldest art is a picture of a pig.
The Guardian (among other sources) reports on cave paintings on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi that push back the earliest known art made by Homo […]
Salome’s dance floor – where John the Baptist was condemned to death – has been uncovered. We think.
LiveScience brings together sordid incestuous subtext, capital punishment, judicial critique, scripture, Oscar Wilde, and of course archaeology in a single story of an excavation on […]
The mystery of ancient Egyptian head cones has been solved.
National Geographic shares new clues to an age-old puzzle, deciphering what exactly the cone-shaped objects on some people’s heads really were in ancient Egyptian paintings […]
Mastodon tenderizers shift human history in North America wayyy back… again.
Science News reports on a twisty debate on human origins in North America, with a new analysis of stones embedded with microscopic bits of mastodon, […]
Science Art: Kulturbeigaben des Doppelgrabes von Oberkasssel, 1919.
Click to embiggen These are prehistoric bone tools used by prehistoric humans, or “Cultural additions from the double grave of Oberkasssel,” as the title reads […]
New X-rays give an unprecedented look inside mummies.
Scientific Reports has some really remarkable 3D images (and printed replicas) of snakes, birds, and cats that were mummified by ancient Egyptians more than 2,000 […]
Puzzling pair of Polish pigs from 3,500 years ago.
Archaeology wonders about the original purpose of a pair of snub-nosed figurines excavated from a Bronze Age hillfort in northern Europe. Were they religious relics […]
DNA study confirms: “Viking” was a job, not an ethnicity.
Science reveals the results of a massive genetic study of Viking remains across Europe, which found that people from all genetic backgrounds took up the […]
Science Art: Gold plaques (items 9-14 in catalogue), by Ian Richardson, The British Museum, 2012
Click to embiggen Treasure! Literally! A hoard of Roman gold and silver, including jewelry, figurines, and a lot of these votive “leaf” plaques. A votive […]
Supernovas have caused mass extinctions. (As if asteroids weren’t bad enough.)
Science Daily reports on radioactivity research that has found evidence that at least one mass extinction event in Earth’s history was caused not by an […]
Neanderthals were more sensitive to pain.
Nature produces one more clue that if any prehistoric “cave men” were the tough, insensitive brutes, it was our ancestors. Neanderthals, a new gene study […]
Growing Neanderthal brains in the lab (using European stem cells).
CNN covers an odd project, using Svante Paabo’s reconstructed Neanderthal genome and European stem-cell banks to recreate mini-brain cell-clusters that are up to 20% Neanderthal […]
Mapping an invisible Roman city
The Guardian has another radar-archaeology victory, looking underground with Cambridge University scientists mapping Falerii Novi, the first ancient Roman city to be surveyed by ground-penetrating […]