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 / Anachronistic baroque painting of the pivotal Battle of Actium by Laureys a Castro, 1672. (credit: Public domain) Historians widely consider the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE to be the decisive event that led to Octavian defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The couple committed suicide—Antony by stabbing himself in the stomach, and Cleopatra […]
Enlarge (credit: Archaeological Park of Pompeii) The nearby volcano blackened the sky and swallowed the city in clouds of ash; centuries later, robot dogs now prowl the ruins, guarding the city’s dead against the ravages of time. That’s not a movie plot. It’s what’s actually happening at the 2, 000-year-old Roman ruins of Pompeii, in […]
Enlarge / This imprint preserves details of the internal structure of the starfish, as well as its overall shape. It’s one of 164 starfish recently unearthed at the Templo Mayor site in Mexico City. (credit: INAH) Aztec priests at Tenochtitlán offered a whole galaxy of starfish to the war god Huitzilopochtli 700 years ago, along […]
Enlarge / A new theory holds that Stonehenge served as an ancient solar calendar. (credit: Timothy Darvill/Bournemouth University) Scholars have long speculated that the famed prehistoric monument Stonehenge might have served as some kind of calendar that helped local people predict eclipses, summer and winter solstices, the equinox, and other relevant celestial events. Now, a […]
Enlarge / This chert bladelet still has a remnant of its bone haft attached. (credit: Wang et al. 2022) We know the oldest human cultures only from their most durable parts: mostly stone tools, sometimes bone. Show an experienced Pleistocene archaeologist a chert blade, and they can probably tell you which hominin species made it, […]
Enlarge / The burial mask of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen recovered from the boy king’s tomb. (credit: Hannes Magerstaedt/Getty Images) Among the many items recovered from King Tut’s tomb was a dagger made of iron, which is a material that was rarely used during Egypt’s 18th dynasty. That iron likely came from a meteorite, and a […]
Enlarge (credit: Slimak et al. 2022) According to a recent study, a child’s tooth unearthed from an old layer of a cave floor in Southern France belonged to a member of our species. If so, the tooth is now the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens living in Europe, and its presence means that our species […]