Newsdesk Archive
Finland's river crystals hold clues about the formation of 'Scandinavia's' oldest bedrock 3.75 billion years ago. The analysis revealed that part of the crust is about 250 million years older than scientists previously thought, and that it likely originated in Greenland, according to a University of Copenhagen statement released March 21. See the study here.
South Africa's Cape south coast offers many hints about how our human ancestors lived some 35,000 to 400,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch. These clues are captured in the dunes they once traversed, today cemented and preserved in a rock type known as aeolianite. See the study here.
A burial monument with human remains thought to be about 4,500 years old has been discovered in East Yorkshire.
Scientists studying rocks in South Africa report evidence for the earliest known earthquake triggered by plate tectonics. The temblor struck more than 3 billion years ago.
These particles are like celestial time capsules, providing a snapshot into the life of their parent star,” says Dr Nicole Nevill, lead author of a study published today in the Astrophysical Journal.
Ötzi the Iceman's many tattoos were made by "hand-poking" — a manual version of the tattooing technique usually used today — and not by cutting his skin as some researchers have suggested, according to a new study.
The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a powerful jet erupting from a natal envelope of gas and dust that represents a newly born star announcing itself to the cosmos.
Archaeologists from Tel Aviv University have uncovered the mystery surrounding extensive Paleolithic stone quarrying and tool-making sites: Why did Homo erectus repeatedly revisit the very same locations for hundreds of thousands of years? The answer lies in the migration routes of elephants, which they hunted and dismembered using flint tools crafted at these quarrying sites. See the study here.
Neanderthals had big brains, language and sophisticated tools. They made art and jewellery. They were smart, suggesting a curious possibility. Maybe the crucial differences weren’t at the individual level, but in our societies.
Some physicists have long suspected that mysterious 'ghost' particles in the world around us could greatly advance our understanding of the true nature of the Universe.
Centuries-old codices from what is now Mexico hold a wealth of knowledge about the Aztecs in their native language, including details about the founding of their capital, their conquests and their fall to the Spanish, according to Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).
In their project, reported in the journal Scientific Reports, the group studied petroglyphs made between 3,000 and 9,000 years ago.
New research, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, shows that Aboriginal people repeatedly lived on portions of this coastal plateau. We have worked closely with coastal Thalanyji Traditional Owners on this island work and also on their sites from the mainland.
A new study combining genetic, paleoecological, and archaeological evidence has unveiled the Persian Plateau as a pivotal geographic location serving as a hub for Homo sapiens during the early stages of their migration out of Africa.
A recent study published in Science Advances sheds light on why certain rhythms make us want to dance more than others. By analyzing brain activity and the sensation known as ‘groove,’ researchers discovered that a rhythm of moderate complexity triggers the highest desire to move.
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a 4,300-year-old tomb with remarkable wall paintings illustrating everyday life. The tomb is located at Dahshur, a site with royal pyramids and a vast necropolis that's about 20 miles (33 kilometers) south of Cairo. When the team returns to the field, they plan to excavate the burial shafts to see if any mummies remain.
The civilization of Indus River Valley is considered one of the three earliest civilizations in world history, along with Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Scientists have discovered the fossilised skull of a giant river dolphin, from a species thought to have fled the ocean and sought refuge in Peru’s Amazonian rivers 16m years ago. The extinct species would have measured up to 3.5 metres long, making it the largest river dolphin ever found. See the study here.
A new study published in Nature, suggests that humans also may have dispersed during arid intervals along "blue highways" created by seasonal rivers. Researchers also found evidence of cooking and stone tools that represent the oldest evidence of archery.
The excavation site is located at an industrial park near Magdeburg, the capital of the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. It includes a pair of 6,000-year-old "monumental mounds" that contain multiple burials, according to a statement from the State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology of Saxony-Anhalt.
A team of researchers led by archeologist Juan Gibaja of the Spanish National Research Council has described a quintet of canoes dredged up from a Neolithic lakeshore village near Rome, Italy, that reveal the sophisticated boat-building techniques of seafaring communities in the region. The study has been published in PLOS ONE.
Brazilian archaeologists have discovered a vast number of 2,000-year-old rock carvings that depict human footprints, celestial-body-like figures, and representations of animals, such as deer and wild pigs.
A major report on the remains of a stilt village that was engulfed in flames almost 3,000 years ago reveals in unprecedented detail the daily lives of England's prehistoric fenlanders.
A new study has cataloged human brains that have been found on the archaeological record around the world and discovered that this remarkable organ resists decomposition far more than we thought – even when the rest of the body's soft tissues have completely melted away.
A project to identify and map rock art sites in a long section of the River Murray in South Australia has resulted in an immediate call for greater understanding and protection of the region’s ancient Aboriginal heritage.
A recent study examined the role of patient expectations in influencing the outcomes of treatments with psilocybin, a psychedelic substance, compared to escitalopram, a widely prescribed antidepressant. Contrary to what some might expect, the study did not find a significant link between patients’ expectations and their actual responses to psilocybin therapy.
This year, the March equinox takes place on 20 March at 03:06 GMT. This means that in certain westward time zones, the equinox will actually fall on 19 March local time.
Archaeologists in France have excavated a Neolithic site containing 63 burials and hundreds of structures and artifacts from a human occupation spanning roughly 4,000 years.
According to the results of a genomics study published last year, modern humanity's ancestors were reduced to a breeding population of barely 1,300 individuals in a devastating bottleneck that brought us to the very brink of annihilation. Now, a new study has found that a mass migration of humans out of Africa occurred at the same time.
Sometimes, it takes the smallest thing to undertake a mammoth task. That’s what researchers behind the attempts to de-extinct the woolly mammoth are hoping as they announced what they believe to be a step forward in their efforts.
Four years ago, the state decriminalized all drugs. Now it’s trying to course-correct — and might make a mistake in the process.
A recent study published in Scientific Reports reveals new insights into how psilocybin-assisted therapy modifies brain function in people with alcohol use disorder (AUD). These changes suggest a potential mechanism behind the therapy’s success and could point toward new avenues for treatment.
Sound waves fossilized in the maps of galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest. This research was published in The Astrophysical Journal.
A groundbreaking announcement for the recovery of lost ancient literature was recently made. Using a non-invasive method that harnesses machine learning, an international trio of scholars retrieved 15 columns of ancient Greek text from within a carbonized papyrus from Herculaneum, a seaside Roman town eight kilometers southeast of Naples, Italy.
The debate occurred at a packed session featuring Hairuo Fu, a graduate student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is a member of the team that found the fragments...Many scientists have said they don’t want to spend much time analysing and refuting these claims.
In a new study published in JAMA Psychiatry, researchers led by Otto Simonsson of Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Clinical Neuroscience have cast new light on the controversial topic of psychedelic drug use among adolescents.
Findings from the team, published in The Journal of Coastal and Island Archaeology, place human occupation of Curaçao, an island in the southern Caribbean, as far back as 5735–5600 BCE—up to 850 years earlier than previously thought.
A pair of planetary scientists... have found evidence that the exodus of hominins out of Africa approximately 1 million years ago may have been driven by the first major glaciation of the Pleistocene. See the study here.
Found in the graves of a Neolithic settlement in south-east Tu?rkiye, they could represent the earliest convincing examples of body piercing. The study has been published in Antiquity.
Indigenous Australians have been using fire to shape the country’s northern ecosystems for at least 11,000 years, according to charcoal preserved in the sediment of a sinkhole. The study was published on 11 March in Nature Geoscience.
A comet that is larger than Mount Everest could become visible to the naked eye in the coming weeks as it continues its first visit to the inner solar system in more than 70 years, say astronomers.
Researchers think a sacred language inscribed in cuneiform on the tablet suggest the Hittite king visited or lived where the tablet was found in Turkey.
A slow cosmic dance between Earth and Mars has a hidden effect on cycles in the deep ocean. According to a new analysis of the deep-sea geological record, the gravitational interaction between the two planets results in cyclic changes in deep ocean currents that recur every 2.4 million years.
Scientists have found what they believe to be the world's earliest known fossilised forest in cliffs on the coast of South West England. The researchers say the fossil forest is about four million years older than the previous record holder in New York State.
The oldest firmly dated evidence of human ancestors in Europe has been found at a 1.4-million-year-old site in Ukraine. The findings are detailed in a study published in Nature.
Astronomers have observed a distant planet that could be entirely covered in a deep water ocean, in findings that advance the search for habitable conditions beyond Earth.
Starting about 7,000 years ago, ancient humans in what is now northeastern Spain buried their dead deep in a cave, creating a necropolis of sorts that spans about four millennia and now contains more than 7,000 bones, according to archaeologists. And there are signs it may have been used for tens of thousands of years before that.
Asian elephants bury their calves with their legs poking out of the ground, researchers have observed. The calves were 1 year old or less and were transported to premade burials of sorts — irrigation drains on tea estates in India — by herd members, before being placed in holes and covered in soil. See the study here.
A new study from the Nihewan basin of China has revealed that hominins who possessed advanced knapping abilities equivalent to Mode 2 technological features occupied East Asia as early as 1.1 million years ago (Ma), which is 0.3 Ma earlier than the date associated with the first handaxes found in East Asia. This suggests that Mode 2 hominins dispersed into East Asia much earlier than previously thought.
Mainstream science has done its best to debunk the notion, but a belief in a world-changing series of prehistoric impacts continues to gain momentum.
In the largest ever modern whole-genome analysis from South Asia...The study also turns up a surprise: an unexpectedly rich diversity of genes from Neanderthals and their close evolutionary cousins, the Denisovans. Because no fossils of these ancient human relatives have been found in India, researchers are speculating about how these genes got there—and why they stuck around.
Psilocybe mushrooms appear to have started producing psilocybin roughly 67 million years ago, right around the dinosaurs’ demise, new research shows.
Fossilized trees discovered by chance in southwest England belong to Earth's earliest-known forest, new research has found. The 390 million-year-old fossils supplant the Gilboa fossil forest in New York state, which dates back 386 million years, as the world's oldest known forest.
A recent study sheds light on the relationship between moral values and political affiliations, revealing that the standards of morality people apply in political contexts may differ significantly from those in personal spheres.
Nestled within the photosynthetic, or light-eating, tissue of the boreal trees – and within the bountiful cloud-like lichens and feathery mosses that carpet the ground between them – are fungi. These fungi are endophytes, meaning they live within plants, often in a mutually beneficial arrangement. See the research here.
Archaeologists have identified evidence of a Jewish-Islamic scientific collaboration having taken place a thousand years ago, thanks to an archaic star chart once thought to be a forgery. Gigante’s analysis is published in the journal Nuncius.
An investigation into the genomes of 10 people who lived between 6350 and 4810 B.C. revealed few biological links among these small communities, according to a study published Feb. 26 in the journal PNAS.
Roughly 128 million years ago, snakes suddenly burst into an abundant existence on Earth, eventually diversifying into the 4,000 or so species we see today. See the research in Science.
Late last year, astronomers discovered a fascinating star system only 100 light-years away from us. Its six sub-Neptune planets circle very close to their host star in mathematically perfect orbits, piquing the interest of scientists searching for alien technology or technosignatures, which they argue would offer compelling evidence of advanced life beyond Earth.
Studies at MIT and elsewhere are producing mounting evidence that light flickering and sound clicking at the gamma brain rhythm frequency of 40 Hz can reduce Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression and treat symptoms in human volunteers as well as lab mice. See the new study in Nature.
Our understanding of the human past is changing rapidly, and this does not come from new evidence alone. We are seeing an increasing diversity of perspectives among archaeologists, and they are asking new and important questions. But the field still has a long way to go.
Image by: Downtowngal (Wiki Commons)
New research published in Journal of Psychopharmacology provides evidence that the drug MDMA may have the unique ability to enhance emotional responses to positive (but not negative) social interactions. This insight sheds light on the potential of MDMA to influence social perception, opening new avenues for understanding and potentially treating conditions characterized by impaired social processing.
Now, the team has unlocked the life history of this ill-fated man, combining modern and traditional archeological methods to read the story written in his bones. The research was published in PLOS ONE.
A new solution to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity suggests hypothetical gravitational stars that look like black holes could be nested within one another.
Even small doses of LSD could have therapeutic benefits for mental health and task performance, a new study shows.
The German parliament has backed a new law to allow the recreational use of cannabis. Under the law, over-18s in Germany will be allowed to possess substantial amounts of cannabis, but strict rules will make it difficult to buy the drug.
The dismissal of a concept that has already been recognised in UN declarations and is a fundamental belief of many Indigenous communities was described by critics as shameful, contradictory and undemocratic.
Two studies of ayahuasca ceremony participants found that at least 50% of these individuals had an ayahuasca-induced personal death experience. These experiences were associated with an increased sense that consciousness will continue after death and increased concerns for the environment. The paper was published in the Frontiers in Psychiatry.
The discovery, led by now-retired head of conservation at the National Archeological Museum Spain, Salvador Rovira-Llorens, suggests that metalworking technology and techniques were far more advanced than we thought in Iberia more than 3,000 years ago.
Words of wisdom from Hopi elder Paul Sifki.
Neanderthals created stone tools held together by a multi-component adhesive, a team of scientists has discovered. Its findings, which are the earliest evidence of a complex adhesive in Europe, suggest these predecessors to modern humans had a higher level of cognition and cultural development than previously thought. See the study here.
Traits common to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), such as distractibility or impulsivity, might have been an evolutionary advantage for our ancestors by improving their tactics when foraging for food. See the study here.
First ever documented evidence of a fungus, suspected to be a Mycena species, growing on the body of a seemingly healthy frog
In a new study published Tuesday (Feb. 20) in the journal Antiquity, researchers revealed that the inscription is the oldest and longest ever found in a Vasconic language, a group of languages that includes modern Basque.
A mathematical historian at Trinity Wester University in Canada, has found use of a decimal point by a Venetian merchant 150 years before its first known use by German mathematician Christopher Clavius. In his paper published in the journal Historia Mathematica, Glen Van Brummelen describes how he found the evidence of decimal use in a volume called "Tabulae," and its significance to the history of mathematics.
A new study by researchers at UC San Francisco provides new insight into how the brain processes musical melodies. Through precise mapping of the cerebral cortex, the study uncovered that our brains process music by not only discerning pitch and the direction of pitch changes but also by predicting the sequence of upcoming notes, each task managed by distinct sets of neurons.
The former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson has urged Joe Biden to follow through on his commitment to “correct our country’s failed approach to marijuana” and give clemency to the thousands of nonviolent cannabis offenders still languishing in federal lockups.
There are dissenting opinions among researchers about whether cannabis is a ‘gateway drug’ that leads people to use other, more dangerous drugs. New research by the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada, examined whether using cannabis to manage cravings changed a person’s use of illicit stimulants. The study was published in the journal Addictive Behaviors.
Image by: elsaolofsson (Wiki Commons)
New research published in Molecular Psychiatry provides insight into how psilocybin, a compound found in psychedelic “magic” mushrooms, influences the brain and behavior. By observing the effects of psilocybin on larval zebrafish, scientists uncovered that it not only stimulates exploratory behavior but also buffers against stress-induced changes in activity patterns.
The invisible substance called dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology. Perhaps, a new study suggests, this strange substance arises from a 'dark mirror universe' that's been linked to ours since the dawn of time.
The evidence suggests it was constructed by Paleolithic people between 11,700 and 9,900 years ago, probably as an aid for hunting reindeer...The archaeologists investigating the Bay of Mecklenburg used a range of submarine equipment, sampling methods and modeling techniques to reconstruct the ancient lake bed and its surrounding landscape.
A Stone Age skeleton found in a peat bog in northwest Denmark has been analysed to flesh out in stunning detail the ancient person’s life and death. New analysis of the remains is published in the journal PLOS ONE.
An international team of scientists reports that cave art at a site in Patagonia is the oldest of its type ever found in South America. In their study, published in the journal Science Advances, the group conducted radiocarbon dating of the material used to create the art thousands of years ago.
After coming to what is now Serranía de la Lindosa, an archaeological site on the northern edge of the Colombian Amazon, these early Americans lived in rock shelters, fashioned stone tools, hunted and gathered and created massive displays of rock art, according to a new study, published in the March issue of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
It's called Tridentinosaurus antiquus, excavated in 1931, and considered a truly remarkable find. Dating to 280 million years ago, before the dinosaurs, it was thought to represent one of the oldest lizard fossils ever found...Well, now we know why we've never found another fossil like it: that soft tissue, according to a new, painstaking analysis, is not soft tissue at all. It's paint. The research has been published in Palaeontology.
A team of philologists, chemists, environmental physicists and engineers affiliated with several institutions across Europe has found evidence of an undeciphered script on wooden tablets created on Easter Island that represents an independent writing system. Their paper is published in the journal Scientific Reports.
A concentrated cannabis extract has shown "remarkable" potential to kill off the most dangerous type of skin cancer. The study was published in Cells.
Following the arrival of the first farmers in Scandinavia 5,900 years ago, the hunter-gatherer population was wiped out within a few generations, according to a new study from Lund University in Sweden, among others
University of Wyoming archaeology Professor Todd Surovell and his team of collaborators have discovered a tube-shaped bead made of bone that is about 12,940 years old. See the study here.
The wall may be among the oldest hunting structures on Earth and one of the largest Stone Age structures ever found in Europe. The study about the discovery was published Monday (Feb. 12) in the journal PNAS.
An ancient bone dating back thousands of years is the first solid evidence that humans in Europe were collecting and storing a powerful and dangerous drug. The research has been published in Antiquity.
A study published in Nature Communications has challenged this narrative, that a dramatic and sudden "revolution" called the Middle-Upper Paleolithic cultural transition occurred instead implying that this “revolution” was more of a gradual and complex process.
I wasn’t open to experiences and possibilities outside the realm of what was considered “normal,” but that was all about to change.
"Our research examines the relationship between humans and their environments in the seasonal tropics. One crucial aspect is the exploration of the social structure of these prehistoric communities, as well as explaining their connections with other pre-Neolithic, Neolithic and post-Neolithic groups in this region".
The idea that two different human species, Homo sapiens (us) and Neanderthals, co-existed in western Eurasia 50–40,000 years ago has long captured the imagination of academics and the public alike.
Could LSD, Ketamine and ayahuasca revolutionise mental health treatment? The Brave New World podcast speaks to experts David Nutt and Amanda Feilding about the psychedelic renaissance. (10 min clip).
Image from: Justin Cooke (Wiki Commons)
A unique species of flying reptile, or pterosaur, that lived 168-166 million years ago has been discovered on the Isle of Skye...Scientists were surprised to find a pterosaur from this period off Scotland's west coast - they were thought to mostly live in China.
Scholars of antiquity believe they are on the brink of a new era of understanding after researchers armed with artificial intelligence read the hidden text of a charred scroll that was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago.
The evidence comes from a chemical analysis of more than 100 tiny pieces of rock entrained within the White Continent’s ice, researchers report in the Feb. 1 Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
Recent research...points to rapid development in the Middle East, in the region known as the Fertile Crescent. The innovations that came about there subsequently spread, and were adopted by hunter gatherer communities in the Anatolian peninsula (present day Turkey).