Enlarge / Rosvland used modern down feathers like these for comparison when he identified the species that contributed to the ancient pillow stuffing. (credit: Berglund and Rosvald 2021) Archaeologists have found the remains of downy pillows in the graves of two high-ranking Iron Age warriors in Sweden, dating to the 600s and 700s CE. Both […]
Enlarge / This painted vessel, which depicts a bird, is one of two found in the ambassador’s grave. (credit: Cambridge University Press) The bones of a Maya ambassador suggest a life of privilege but not necessarily comfort and ease, even though he was a high-ranking official born into a powerful family. His skeleton also finishes […]
Enlarge / “Exploded” view of the new computer model of the Antikythera mechanism, showing how it might have worked. (credit: Tony Freeth) Scientists have long struggled to solve the puzzle of the gearing system on the front of the so-called Antikythera mechanism—a fragmentary ancient Greek astronomical calculator, perhaps the earliest example of a geared device. […]
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 (credit: University of Copenhagen) Egyptologists have recently translated the oldest-known mummification manual. Translating it required solving a literal puzzle; the medical text that includes the manual is currently in pieces, with half of what remains in the Louvre Museum in France and half at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. A few sections are […]
Enlarge / A four-wheeled ceremonial chariot discovered by archaeologists near the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. (credit: Archaeological Park of Pompeii) Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed an elaborately decorated, intact four-wheeled ceremonial chariot near the ruins of the Roman city of Pompeii, famously destroyed when Mt. Vesuvius catastrophically erupted in 79 AD, BBC News reports. […]
Enlarge (credit: Saleem and Hawass 2021) CT scans of a mummified Egyptian pharaoh, once suspected to be the victim of a palace assassination, suggest that he was actually executed after being captured in battle in the mid-16th century BCE. Pharaoh Seqenenre led his army from Upper Egypt in the 1550s BCE to face the Hyksos, […]
Enlarge (credit: Blinkhorn et al. 2021) The entangled history of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals in the Levant (the area around the eastern end of the Mediterranean) just got even more complicated. Paleoanthropologists recently identified a tooth from Shukbah Cave, 28km (17.5 miles) northwest of Jerusalem, as a Neanderthal molar. That makes Shukbah the southernmost trace […]
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 […]
Enlarge / El Salt is an open-air rock shelter nestled against the base of a limestone cliff. Archaeological evidence tells us that Neanderthals lived here from around 60,700 to 45,200 years ago. (credit: Candela et al. 2021) Biologist Marco Candela and his colleagues recently sequenced ancient microbial DNA from 50,000-year-old Neanderthal feces found at the […]