Archaeology

Tarantulas are among the most notorious spiders, due in part to their size, vibrant colors and prevalence throughout the world. But one thing most people don't know is that tarantulas are homebodies. Females and their young rarely leave…

Scientists at Goethe University and University of Bristol (UK) find traces of beeswax in prehistoric pottery of the West African Nok cultureCredit: Peter Breunig, Goethe University Frankfurt Honey is humankind's oldest sweetener -…

Research team led by University of Göttingen reconstructs late medieval trade routes digitallyCredit: www.viabundus.eu The Hanseatic League was a confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Northwestern and Central Europe,…

Grave goods, such as stone tools, have revealed that Neolithic farmers had different work-related activities for men and women. Researchers at the University of York analysed 400 stone objects found in graves at cemetery sites across…

Credit: Illustration by L.P. Repiso A new investigation of stone tools buried in graves provides evidence supporting the existence of a division of different types of labor between people of male and female biological sex at the start…

Credit: Goethe University A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, with colleagues from Goethe University, Frankfurt, has found the first evidence for ancient honey hunting, locked inside pottery fragments from…

Scientists also find two new, nearly 2-million-year-old specimens--likely the earliest pieces of the H. erectus skeleton yet discoveredCredit: A. Hammond/© AMNH A new study verifies the age and origin of one of the oldest…

Credit: Joe Angeles / Washington University Whatever ultimately caused inhabitants to abandon Cahokia, it was not because they cut down too many trees, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis. Archaeologists…

Dog bones dated between circa 4200 and 4000 BCE discoveredCredit: Royal Commission of Al-Ula A team of archaeologists in north-west the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has uncovered the earliest evidence of dog domestication by the…

Credit: M. Ponce de León and Ch. Zollikofer, UZH Modern humans are fundamentally different from our closest living relatives, the great apes: We live on the ground, walk on two legs and have much larger brains. The first…

PULLMAN, Wash. - Humans cannot live on protein alone - even for the ancient indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest where salmon was once thought to make up as much as 90% of their diet. In a new paper led by Washington State…

Bishop Peder Winstrup died in 1679, and is one of the most well-preserved human bodies from the 1600s. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden may now have solved the mystery of why a foetus was hidden in his coffin in Lund Cathedral.…

Credit: Ettore Mazza Along the Tian Shan and Alay mountain ranges of Central Asia, sheep and other domestic livestock form the core economy of contemporary life. Although it was here that the movements of their ancient predecessors…

The fossil skull of a woman in Czechia has provided the oldest modern human genome yet reconstructed, representing a population that formed before the ancestors of present-day Europeans and Asians split apartCredit: Martin Frouz …

Credit: Connor McDermott WASHINGTON, April 5, 2021 -- For centuries, people in Baltic nations have used ancient amber for medicinal purposes. Even today, infants are given amber necklaces that they chew to relieve teething pain,…

Archaeological evidence in a rockshelter at the edge of the Kalahari Desert, South Africa, is challenging the idea that the origins of our species were linked to coastal environmentsCredit: Jayne Wilkins "Our findings from this…

Credit: Calogero Santoro, Universidad de Tarapacá, and José Capriles, Penn State Ancient Egyptians mummified cats, dogs, ibises and other animals, but closer to home in the South American Atacama desert, parrot mummies…

Ruling in the Late Cretaceous, Llukalkan aliocranianus could be as long as an elephant, had extremely powerful bites, very sharp teeth, and huge claws in their feetCredit: Jorge Blanco and Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology …

Credit: Zainolla Samashev Because of their interactions and conflicts with the major contemporaneous civilizations of Eurasia, the Scythians enjoy a legendary status in historiography and popular culture. The Scythians had…

A new study published in the journal Climatic Change examines the cultural impacts of climate change in Italy during the first millennium ADCredit: Filippo Lippi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Until now, historians have…