Ancient news stories

The Picts of Scotland who have long intrigued and have been ascribed exotic origins in fact descended from indigenous Iron Age society and were genetically most similar to people living today in Scotland, Wales, North Ireland and Northumbria. See the research here.

Believed to be more than 5,000 years old, it is on the brink of replacing Methuselah, a 4,850-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine found in California in the United States, as the oldest tree on the planet.

Archaeologists in Spain have unearthed five life-size busts of human figures that could be the first-known human depictions of the Tartessos, a people who formed an ancient civilization that disappeared more than 2,500 years ago.

The ancients certainly divided humanity into different groups and recognised differences of colour. But they did not categorise people in racial terms as we do, nor attribute the same social meanings to human differences. Whether we are talking of Cleopatra or Aristotle, to portray them as “white” is to project a contemporary racial sensibility into the past.

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered several tombs and chapels dating back around 3,300 years in an ancient cemetery at the site of Saqqara.

Bubbles of radiation billowing from the galactic center may have started as a stream of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, new observations suggest.

Botanists and paleontologists, led by researchers from CU Boulder, have identified a fossil chili pepper that may rewrite the geography and evolutionary timeline of the tomato plant family. See the research here.

A cycle featured in Maya calendars has been a mystery pretty much since it was rediscovered, and its deciphering began in the 1940s. Covering a period of 819 days, the cycle is referred to simply as the 819-day count. The problem is that researchers couldn’t match that 819 days up to anything. See the paper here.

Hydrogen released during large impacts might have boosted Mars’s surface temperature above freezing for thousands or even millions of years, enabling liquid water to flow over the Red Planet. See research here.

What are the most successful organisms on the planet? Some people might think of apex predators like lions and great white sharks. For others, insects or bacteria might come to mind. But few would mention a family of plants that we see around us every day: grasses.

Historical records have long suggested that medieval Norse colonists on Greenland (AD 985–1450) relied on imported material such as iron and wood. Until now, it has not been fully recognized where these imports of wood came from. See the study here.

As wooly mammoths grazed frigid Siberian steppes for more than half a million years, they evolved increasingly fluffy fur, large fat deposits, and smaller ears, according to a new study.

A popular and easy method for validating whether or not a chunk of rock is a meteorite, and what kind of meteorite it is, has been inadvertently erasing invaluable information locked inside. See the research here.

Pre-colonial African history is alive with tales of civilizations rising and falling and of different cultures intermingling across the continent. We have now shed more light on some of these societies using the science of genetics. See the study here.

A study of lithic hunting heads found in the Solutrean levels was conducted using an infrared (IR) microscopy analysis, indicating that Palaeolithic hunters used a mixture of pine resin and beeswax as an adhesive to fasten the heads to arrow shafts.

Image from: Rogers Fund, 1925 (Wiki Commons)

Traces of the past remain hidden in rivers, lakes and seas. But we rarely look underwater and, as they say, out of sight is out of mind. In his inaugural lecture Martijn Manders will explain why underwater archaeology is so important to understanding our history.