Easter Island statues made farms more fertile
Science News investigates the benefits of carving monumental heads and burying their bottom halves in the ground. It seems like they might have had a […]
archaeology
“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 […]
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 […]