“Curse of the dancer” reveals backstage backstabbing goes back at least 1,500 years.
LiveScience looks at a lead tablet, translated by a Roman history professor, that consists of a dancer’s curse against a rival: The curse calls upon […]
archaeology
Tree-coffin burial for a Celtic Swiss lady of prominence.
LiveScience relates how impressed archaeologists are at the classiness of an Iron Age Celtic burial in what’s now Switzerland: After studying the 2,200-year-old burial, archaeologists […]
Ancient stoners used wooden bowls. (Not the kind on pipes, either.)
Science News traces the history of highs to a Chinese site where 2,500-year-old tombside remains indicate that smoldering cannabis was stacked in wooden bowls for […]
Unearthing a secret chamber beneath Nero’s palace.
LiveScience reports on archaeologists excavating Emperor Nero’s “golden house” – his sprawling, palatial complex underneath hills near the Colosseum – who stumbled upon a vault […]
New species of human discovered in the Philippines
Nature introduces Homo luzonensis, who was hanging out – possibly with other human species – in a cave in the Philippines 50,000 years ago: The […]
Farming gave our languages “f” and “v” – because it altered the way we bite.
Science News has a fricative breakthrough – biting off a bit of linguistic evolution that took place when we started growing our own food rather […]
Herodotus proved right about Egyptian boats – more than 2,000 years after the fact.
The Guardian explains how a newly discovered shipwreck finally gives proof that the Greek historian wasn’t making up what he wrote about an unknown type […]
Science Art: Hypocaustum excavated behind the old city of Rottenburg am Neckar , by Eduard von Kallee.
Click to embiggen An ancient Roman central heating system – hot water would be flooded through the basement, and the floors would warm up. “Hypocaust” […]
2,000-year-old tattoo needles (made from cactus spines) found in an old drawer.
Science News reports on the historic find of skin-art tools from the American West … a discovery made by looking through some excavated artifacts that […]
She might’ve been Plague Victim Zero.
Science News unearths the 5,000-year-old remains of a Scandinavian woman who seems to have been the oldest known victim of the Black Death: DNA extracted […]
Neanderthals were pretty chill.
Nature explodes the myth of brutal, violent cavemen with a skull study that shows they were about as mellow as modern humans: Writing in Nature, […]
The world’s oldest animal picture is on a cave wall in Borneo.
The Indonesian jungle does not seem like the best environment to preserve works of art, but, as The New York Times reports, for more than […]
We were consuming chocolate 5,300 years ago.
Nature pushes the date of the very first hot cocoa back by a millennium, with evidence of the dawn of chocolate in 3,300 BCE: Until […]
Neanderthal kid got chomped by a giant bird
It’s not quite caveman versus dinosaur, but LiveScience has new research on a Neanderthal child’s bones from Poland’s Ciemna Cave that got digested by a […]
A hero emerges: 8-year-old girl *named Saga* pulls ancient Viking sword from Swedish lake.
And her dad’s a Minnesota Vikings fan, too. Sweden’s The Local reports on young Saga Vanecek, whose family moved from Minneapolis to Sweden to get […]