Enlarge (credit: Italian Culture Ministry) Archaeologists in Italy recently unearthed the remains of at least nine Neanderthals in Guattari Cave, near the Tyrrhenian Sea about 100 km southeast of Rome. While excavating a previously unexplored section of the cave, archaeologists from the Archaeological Superintendency of Latina and the University of Tor Vergata recently unearthed broken skulls, […]
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 / Julie Schablitsky searches for artifacts at the site. (credit: Tim Pratt, MDOT) In the years before the American Civil War, Harriet Tubman led dozens of enslaved people to freedom through the network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the war, she scouted, spied, and led military raids against Confederate forces. […]
Enlarge Chemical traces of 3,500-year-old beeswax on central Nigerian potsherds shed light on an often invisible aspect of ancient diets—and a bit about what fueled the culture that launched Africa’s Iron Age. These farmers were super into metal Terms like “Iron Age” only have meaning if you’re talking about a particular place, since periods of […]
Enlarge / A Yemeni khamsiyat (top left), a Spanish real (top right), and an English shilling (bottom) from the 17th century. (credit: Associated Press) According to historian and metal-detector enthusiast Jim Bailey, the handful of 17th-century Arabic coins unearthed at sites across New England could be remnants of an infamous pirate’s last big score—or, to […]
Enlarge / Egyptian archaeologists have discovered a 3400-year-old city just outside Luxor, dating back to the reign of Amenhotop III, grandfather to King Tut. (credit: Zahi Hawass) A team of Egyptian archaeologists has unearthed what some describe as an industrial royal metropolis just north of modern-day Luxor, which incorporates what was once the ancient Egyptian […]
Enlarge (credit: Hajdinjak et al. 2020) DNA from the earliest Homo sapiens in Europe adds more detail to the story of our species’ expansion into Eurasia—and our complicated 5,000-year relationship with Neanderthals. The earliest traces of our species in Eurasia are a lower molar and a few fragments of bone from Bacho Kiro Cave in […]
Enlarge / X-ray image of the mysterious fetus found in the coffin of the 17th-century Swedish Bishop Peder Winstrup. (credit: Gunnar Menander) When Swedish archaeologists in 2015 X-rayed the remains of a 17th-century bishop, they were shocked when the images revealed that the bishop shared his coffin with the remains of a stillborn premature baby. Now, […]
Enlarge Between 125,000 and 70,000 years ago, people began to do some very modern things: collecting small objects for no practical reason, decorating things with pigments, and storing water and possibly even food in containers. The oldest known sites with evidence of those behaviors are along the coastline of southern Africa. Today, most of those […]
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 […]