Enlarge / Conservation efforts for the shoe included careful reshaping and freeze-drying. (credit: Secrets of the Ice ) Sometime between 200 and 500 CE, someone crossing a high mountain pass in Norway discarded a shoe. More than 1, 500 years later, an unusually warm summer melted centuries of accumulated snow and ice , revealing the […]
(credit: Sican National Museum) Archaeologists recently unearthed an unusual tomb in a temple complex at the Huaca Las Ventanas archaeological site near Lambaeque, in northern Peru. The site belonged to the Sican culture, one of the several complex societies that flourished prior to the rise of the Inca Empire (around 1400 CE) in northern Peru. […]
Enlarge (credit: Salazar et al. 2022) A recent study of geological deposits and archaeological remains has identified a massive earthquake and tsunami that wiped out communities along the coastline of Chile’s Atacama Desert around 3,800 years ago. Studying the ancient disaster—and people’s responses to it—could help with modern hazard planning along the seismically active coast. […]
Enlarge (credit: Wagner et al. 2022) With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world’s oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially […]
Enlarge (credit: Wagner et al. 2022) With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world’s oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially […]
Enlarge (credit: Gimranov et al. 2021) During the last Ice Age, more than 100 cave bears died in Imanay Cave, a 100-meter-long corridor of stone in Russia’s southern Ural Mountains. The dead bears, along with a cave lion and a few other Pleistocene mammals, left behind nearly 10,000 bones, which have mostly worn down to […]
Enlarge (credit: Mohammad Javad Shoaee) 78,000 years ago, a child died two to three years into their life in the coastal highlands of what is now Kenya. Archaeological evidence suggests that survivors wrapped the small body tightly before laying it, curled on one side with the tiny head resting on a pillow, in a carefully […]
Enlarge / Scarlet macaws (credit: Abul Az Abu Jamil) Centuries ago, indigenous South Americans brought live parrots hundreds of kilometers across the Andes Mountains, then raised them in captivity in the Atacama Desert, according to a recent study. The Atacama is one of the last places you’d look for tropical parrots. It’s the world’s driest […]
Enlarge Archaeologists working near the small Croatian village of Potočani made a grim discovery in 2007. In a shallow pit, just a meter deep and two meters wide, they found the jumbled bones of at least 41 people. Radiocarbon dating on several of the bones revealed that they’d been in the pit for around 6,200 […]
Enlarge / Archaeologists in 1931 found the conch shell near the entrance of Marsoulas Cave. This is a reconstruction of where and how the shell might have been played. (credit: G. Tosello) After 18,000 years of silence, an ancient musical instrument played its first notes. The last time anyone heard a sound from the conch […]