Ancient news stories

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.

A study of an ancient bone from Spain with a strange pattern of notches hints that it was used by early Homo sapiens in Europe as a punch board for making holes in leather

What do medieval monks and volcanic eruptions have in common? According to a team of researchers led by the University of Geneva, quite a bit because chronicles from the 12th and 13th century are helping volcanologists to precisely date ancient eruptions based on descriptions of lunar eclipses. See the research here.

Image from: .scopex (Wiki Commons)

In the depths of a network of underwater caves, Julien Louys has been on the trail of some rather unusual animals. Despite the sunken setting, these creatures weren’t forms of marine life — they were giant marsupials, and they became extinct tens of thousands of years ago.

It’s being described as the most detailed ever map of the influence of dark matter through cosmic history. A telescope in Chile has traced the distribution of this mysterious stuff on a quarter of the sky and across almost 14 billion years of time.

New research into ancient populations that resided on the Tibetan Plateau has found that dairy pastoralism was being practiced far earlier than previously thought and may have been key to long-term settlement of the region’s extreme environment.