Ancient tracks found in New Mexico are believed to be between 21,000 and 23,000 years old, study says
New scientific research conducted by archaeologists has uncovered what they believe are the oldest known human footprints in North America.
Research done at the White Sands national park in New Mexico discovered the ancient footprints, with researchers estimating that the tracks were between 21,000 and 23,000 years old, reported Science.
Continue reading...Tools and bones in Moroccan cave could be some of earliest evidence of the hallmark human behaviour
From the medieval fashion for pointy shoes to Victorian waist-squeezing corsets and modern furry onesies, what we wear is a window to our past.
Now researchers say they have found some of the earliest evidence of humans using clothing in a cave in Morocco, with the discovery of bone tools and bones from skinned animals suggesting the practice dates back at least 120,000 years.
Continue reading...House in southern France yielded find of outstanding wall paintings dating from 1st century BC
On the right bank of the Rhône in the Provençal town of Arles, the Roman-built House of the Harpist is being hailed as a remarkable record of ancient architecture and interior decoration.
Now, experts have opened their workshop to reveal their painstaking attempts to piece together the vast jigsaw of magnificent and never before seen frescoes discovered in the property thought to date back more than two millennia.
Continue reading...Skeleton of hunter-gatherer found in Leang Panninge cave sheds light on ancient human migration
Archaeologists have discovered ancient DNA in the remains of a woman who died 7,200 years ago in Indonesia, a find that challenges what was previously known about migration of early humans.
The remains, belonging to a teenager nicknamed Bessé, were discovered in the Leang Panninge cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Initial excavations were undertaken in 2015.
Continue reading...Former slave who rose through the social ranks was interred at necropolis of Porta Sarno before AD79
The partially mummified remains, including hair and bones, of a former slave who rose through the social ranks have been found in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.
The remains of Marcus Venerius Secundio were found in a tomb at the necropolis of Porta Sarno, which was one of the main entrance gates into the city. The tomb is believed to date back to the decades before Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.
Continue reading...DNA suggests body buried in feminine attire with swords had Klinefelter syndrome, researchers say
Modern analysis of a 1,000-year-old grave in Finland challenges long-held beliefs about gender roles in ancient societies, and may suggest non-binary people were not only accepted but respected members of their communities, researchers have said.
According to a peer-reviewed study in the European Journal of Archaeology, DNA analysis of remains in a late iron age grave at Suontaka Vesitorninmäki in Hattula, southern Finland, may have belonged to a high-status non-binary person.
Continue reading...Exhibition at Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to tell story of little known civilization that flourished from eighth to third century BC
Wisdom, as Bob Marley put it, is better than gold. From next month however, the precious metal is central to a major new historical exhibition in Cambridge using loaned artefacts telling the story of an ancient civilization little known beyond Kazakhstan.
Golden objects unearthed from ancient burial mounds built by the Saka warrior people of central Asia – a culture which flourished from around the eighth century BC to the third century BC – will go on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Continue reading...Items smuggled out after 2003 invasion include 3,500-year-old Gilgamesh clay tablet
The United States is returning more than 17,000 ancient artefacts that were looted and smuggled out of Iraq after the 2003 US invasion, including a 3,500-year-old clay tablet that bears part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Iraq has said.
Tens of thousands of antiquities disappeared from Iraq after the invasion that toppled its leader, Saddam Hussein. Many more were smuggled out or destroyed by Islamic State (Isis), which held a third of Iraq between 2014 and 2017 before it was defeated by Iraqi and international forces.
Continue reading...Study says pigments on cave stalagmites were applied through ‘splattering and blowing’ more than 60,000 years ago
Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday.
The issue had roiled the world of paleoarchaeology ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva de Ardales to our extinct “cousin” species.
Continue reading...‘Incredible’ discoveries at submerged ancient city off coast of Egypt have lain untouched
Wicker baskets filled with fruit that have survived from the 4th century BC and hundreds of ancient ceramic artefacts and bronze treasures have been discovered in the submerged ruins of the near-legendary city of Thonis-Heracleion off the coast of Egypt.
They have lain untouched since the city disappeared beneath the waves in the second century BC, then sunk further in the eight century AD, following cataclysmic natural disasters, including an earthquake and tidal waves.
Continue reading...The land mass that linked Britain to continental Europe was rich in early human life until it flooded
The idea of a “lost Atlantis” under the North Sea connecting Britain by land to continental Europe had been imagined by HG Wells in the late 19th century, with evidence of human inhabitation of the forgotten world following in 1931 when the trawler Colinda dredged up a lump of peat containing a spear point.
But it is only now, after a decade of pioneering research and the extraordinary finds of an army of amateur archaeologists scouring the Dutch coastline for artefacts and fossils, that a major exhibition is able to offer a window into Doggerland, a vast expanse of territory submerged following a tsunami 8,000 years ago, cutting the British Isles off from modern Belgium, the Netherlands and southern Scandinavia.
Continue reading...The bodies of 19 people exhumed from an Oklahoma cemetery during a search for victims of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre were reburied in a closed ceremony on Friday, despite objections from protesters outside the cemetery.
Continue reading...An ancient Roman ship carrying a cargo load of wine jars, or amphorae, has been found underwater in the Mediterranean Sea off the Italian island of Sicily. The vessel was discovered during an underwater reconnaissance expedition by the island's Regional Agency for Environment Protection. The findings will shed light on Rome’s trade activity in the Mediterranean, where the Romans traded spices, wine, olives and other products in north Africa, Spain, France and the Middle East
Continue reading...Find could prove there were human settlements in area centuries before city was founded
The discovery of the remains of a Roman road and dock submerged in the Venice lagoon could prove there were permanent human settlements in the area centuries before Venice was founded, researchers say.
Scuba divers discovered what appeared to be paving stones beneath the lagoon in the 1980s, but only after more recent research were the relics confirmed to have formed part of a road system.
Continue reading...Mayfield Park will be watered using wells discovered while archaeologists were on site
Manchester’s first public park for more than a century will use recently uncovered wells from the Victorian era to provide a sustainable source of water.
The 2.6-hectare (6.5-acre) Mayfield Park will sit behind Piccadilly station and provide play areas and floodable meadows. The £1.4bn development’s greenery will be watered using three Victorian wells that were discovered while archaeologists were on site to catalogue historical features of the site.
Continue reading...Remains with combination of Neanderthal and early human features date back 100,000 years
Fossilised bones recovered from an ancient sinkhole in Israel may belong to a previously unknown group of extinct humans that lived in the Levant more than 100,000 years ago.
Researchers unearthed the bones alongside stone tools and the remains of horses, fallow deer and wild ox during excavations at the Nesher Ramla prehistoric site near the city of Ramla in central Israel.
Continue reading...They may be vine-smothered ruins today, but the lost cities of the ancient tropics still have a lot to teach us about how to live alongside nature
Visions of “lost cities” in the jungle have consumed western imaginations since Europeans first visited the tropics of Asia, Africa and the Americas. From the Lost City of Z to El Dorado, a thirst for finding ancient civilisations and their treasures in perilous tropical forest settings has driven innumerable ill-fated expeditions. This obsession has seeped into western societies’ popular ideas of tropical forest cities, with overgrown ruins acting as the backdrop for fear, discovery and life-threatening challenges in countless films, novels and video games.
Throughout these depictions runs the idea that all ancient cities and states in tropical forests were doomed to fail. That the most resilient occupants of tropical forests are small villages of poison dart-blowing hunter-gatherers. And that vicious vines and towering trees – or, in the case of The Jungle Book, a boisterous army of monkeys – will inevitably claw any significant human achievement back into the suffocating green whence it came. This idea has been boosted by books and films that focus on the collapse of particularly enigmatic societies such as the Classic Maya. The decaying stone walls, the empty grand structures and the deserted streets of these tropical urban leftovers act as a tragic warning that our own way of life is not as secure as we would like to assume.
Continue reading...Ancient Roman building with ‘magnificent frescoed walls’ appears to have been survived a fire
An ancient Roman building has been found during excavations at a former cinema in the northern Italian city of Verona in what has been described as a “miniature Pompeii”.
The discovery was made during excavations in the basement of Astra cinema, which is undergoing renovation after lying abandoned for more than 20 years.
Continue reading...Installation of new pathway and lift has been criticised by archaeologists and called ‘a scandal’
When seen through the eyes of Manolis Korres, the architect who has long presided over the restoration of the Parthenon, the Acropolis needs no improvement at all.
In the face of such architectural mastery, he thinks of himself more as a maestro of order, making a monument that has survived explosions, fire, looting and earthquakes more understandable to the public.
Continue reading...‘Internationally significant’ discovery of male with burial chains in Rutland is first of its kind
His ankles secured with heavy, locked iron fetters, the enslaved man appears to have been thrown in a ditch – a final act of indignity in death.
Now the discovery of the shackled male skeleton by workers in Rutland – thought to have been aged in his late 20s or early 30s – has been identified as rare and important evidence of slavery in Roman Britain and “an internationally significant find”.
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