Archaeology

Vampires, ghouls, zombies, they have become part of Western burial imagery even though they originated elsewhere. Yet concern about the dead rising from their graves was evident long before tales arrived from Romania or Haiti. From the 11th to 14th centuries AD, medieval people in England likely believed strongly enough in animated corpses they actually took measures to prevent it. The bones come from the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy, North Yorkshire, a site managed by English Heritage. There were a total of 137 bones representing the mixed remains of at least ten individuals.…

The Dead Sea scrolls used to be revered as holding some special insight, perhaps we were only now mature enough to understand it. More recently, it's clear these were errors and cast-offs that were given a proper burial, but have no real benefit. To archaeologists, it's instead just science, another way to understand the past. A new cave has been found, though scientists didn't get their first, they were clearly looted in the middle of the 20th Century, but the scholars still suggest the cave should be numbered as Cave 12, along with the 11 caves previously known to have housed hidden…

Researchers from the University of York have helped to solve an archaeological dispute - confirming that Neanderthals were responsible for producing tools and artifacts previously argued by some to be exclusively in the realm of modern human cognitive abilities. Using ancient protein analysis, the team took part in an international research project to confirm the disputed origins of bone fragments in Châtelperron, France. Led by the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, researchers set out to settle the debate as to whether hominin remains in the Grotte du Renne…

The Grolier Codex, an ancient document that is among the rarest books in the world, has been regarded with skepticism since it was reportedly unearthed by looters from a cave in Chiapas, Mexico, in the 1960s, but a new study claims it is both genuine and likely the most ancient of all surviving manuscripts from ancient America. For years, academics and specialists have argued about the legitimacy of the Grolier Codex, a legacy the authors trace in the paper. Some asserted that it must have been a forgery, speculating that modern forgers had enough knowledge of Maya writing and materials to…

You shouldn't believe everything you read. The CDC insists salt is a problem, and the FDA asked for voluntary warning labels after the sue-and-settle lawyer group Center for Science in the Public Interest kept harassing them. Yet the evidence shows salt in a normal diet is no problem. And no quote on Facebook that has a picture of Einstein included is any more accurate. The US government promotes a prediabetes designation that has the rest of the world scratching their heads. Even textbooks are often wrong. That is the problem with voting on science.  If you ask the public how early…

If "Lucy" wasn't alone, and since there is no evidence of spontaneous generation she was not alone, who else was in her neighborhood? Fossil evidence indicates that multiple early human ancestor species lived at the same time more than 3 million years ago, at least four identified hominin species that co-existed between 3.8 and 3.3 million years ago during the middle Pliocene.  The 1974 discovery of Australopithecus afarensis, which lived from 3.8 to 2.9 million years ago, was a major milestone in paleontology. It pushed the record of hominins earlier than 3 million years ago and…

Underwater divers recently discovered paved floors, courtyards and colonnades, evidence of a long-forgotten civilization that must have perished when tidal waves hit the shores of the Greek holiday island Zakynthos. The bizarre discovery, found close to Alikanas Bay, was carefully examined in situ by the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of Greece. After the preliminary mineralogical and chemical analyses, a research team was mobilized to study the ancient underwater remains - only to declare them a naturally occurring phenomenon created by a natural geological phenomenon that took place in…

A lost Nazi gold train was discovered in Poland. At least, that’s what a couple of treasure hunters told the world last year. Like all lost treasures, the search for this one had been going on for many years, usually without success. But many still believe in these far-fetched yarns and some even search for them. Every now and then a lost treasure is really found, providing just enough stimulus to keep all the other legends living on. In March this year, divers recovered sunken treasure from a 500 year old shipwreck off the coast of Oman, giving hope to all the other hunters out there. Armed…

People of the Neolithic age around 6,000 years ago were closely connected both in life and death. This became evident in a detailed archaeological and anthropological of a collective grave containing 50 bodies near Burgos, northern Spain. In the pioneering study, researchers used a whole array of modern methods to examine the way of life in the region at that time. The collective graves of the Neolithic period were made mostly of stone and were large enough to hold many bodies in a communal space. The megalithic tomb in Alto de Reinoso, Burgos differs from this in only one respect: the burial…

The Romans created a clear line between Iron Age and modern sanitation and hygiene. They built public multi-seat latrines with washing facilities and sewerage systems, they piped drinking water from aqueducts and heated public baths for washing. To augment that, they developed laws designed to keep their towns free of excrement and rubbish. But it may not have helped when it came to putting a stop to intestinal parasites such as whipworm, roundworm and Entamoeba histolytica dysentery, according to a journal in the journal Parasitology. Roman latrines from Lepcis Magna in…