Feature Channels: Archaeology and Anthropology

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Ribe was an important trading town in the Viking Age. At the beginning of the 8th century, a trading place was established on the north side of the river Ribe, to which traders and craftsmen flocked from far and wide to manufacture and sell goods such as brooches, suit buckles, combs and coloured glass beads.

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The latest dinosaur discoveries in the Dinosaurs channel on Newswise.

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The American Physiological Society (APS) congratulates geneticist Svante Pääbo, PhD, recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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Archaeologists from the University of Bristol have suggested that mysterious stone spheres found at various ancient settlements across the Aegean and Mediterranean could be playing pieces from one of the earliest ever board games.

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With the help of geomagnetic surface surveys and subsequent hands-on digging, an excavation team from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has revealed new insights into the area in which the caliph's palace of Khirbat al-Minya was built on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

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Three distinct phases of climate variability in eastern Africa coincided with shifts in hominin evolution and dispersal over the last 620,000 years, an analysis of environmental proxies from a lake sediment record has revealed.

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Almost three hundred years after the Romans left, scholars like Bede wrote about the Angles and the Saxons and their migrations to the British Isles.

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Ancient Palmyra has gripped public imagination since its picturesque ruins were “rediscovered” in the seventeenth century by western travellers.

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Faculty and students from ISU joined an international team of archaeologists this summer to begin excavating one of Teotihuacan’s suburbs. The four-year project could help unlock clues about the ancient city’s mysterious collapse and what happened in the hundreds of years before Spanish conquistadors arrived in central America.

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Cornell University archaeologist Sturt Manning hopes to settle one of modern archaeology’s longstanding disputes: the date of a volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Santorini, traditionally known as Thera.

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An interdisciplinary team of researchers led by Queen’s University Belfast have launched a new project ‘Explaining Atheism’, to test popular and academic theories about why some people are atheists and why some are not.

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A new research conducted by two paleontologists at the University of Malaga has just revealed that human evolution uniquely combines an increase in brain size with the acquisition of an increasingly juvenile cranial shape.

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Brain organoids provide insights into the evolution of the human brain.

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A study of wild geladas provides the first evidence of clear and significant maternal effects on the gut microbiome both before and after weaning in a wild mammal. This study suggests the impact of mothers on the offspring gut microbiome community extends far beyond when the infant has stopped nursing.

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A new report from Cornell-led Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) has compiled decades of high-resolution satellite imagery to document the complete destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan beginning in the late 1990s.

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How frequent was violence in prehistoric human societies? One way to measure this is to look for trauma in prehistoric human remains. For example, a recent review of pre-Columbian remains found evidence of trauma from violence in 21% of males.

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Along with implications for the future, the findings illuminate important moments in our past, including human migration into the Americas, the variable human use of coastal and interior habitats and the extinction of the flightless duck Chendytes.

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Researchers discover humans conducted surgical amputation for over 30,000 years.

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A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, has uncovered intriguing new insights into the diet of people living in Neolithic Britain and found evidence that cereals, including wheat, were cooked in pots.

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For decades now, archaeologists wielded the tools of their trade to unearth clues about past peoples, while ecologists have sought to understand current ecosystems.

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In 2004, construction workers in Norwich, UK, unearthed human skeletal remains that led to a historical mystery—at least 17 bodies at the bottom of a medieval well.

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Research conducted with the help of a University at Albany anthropologist has revealed the cascading effects that humans have had on mammal declines and their food webs over the last 130,000 years, a new study in the journal Science shows.

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In a trio of papers, published simultaneously in the journal Science, Ron Pinhasi from the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and Human Evolution and Archaeological Sciences (HEAS) at the University of Vienna and Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg from the University of Vienna and Harvard University, Iosif Lazaridis and David Reich at Harvard University—together with 202 co-authors—report a massive effort of genome-wide sequencing from 727 distinct ancient individuals with which it was possible to test longstanding archaeological, genetic and linguistic hypotheses. They present a systematic picture of the interlinked histories of peoples across the Southern Arc Region from the origins of agriculture, to late medieval times.

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A modern scientific analysis of ancient stone tools is challenging long-held beliefs about what caused radical change on the island of Crete, where the first European state flourished during the Bronze Age: the ‘Minoan civilization.’

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A new analysis of remains from medieval Cambridge shows that local Augustinian friars were almost twice as likely as the city’s general population to be infected by intestinal parasites.

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Prolonged drought likely helped to fuel civil conflict and the eventual political collapse of Mayapan, the ancient capital city of the Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula, suggests a new study that was published with the help of a University at Albany archeologist.

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The reconstructed megadolon (Otodus megalodon) was 16 meters long and weighed over 61 tons. It was estimated that it could swim at around 1.4 meters per second, require over 98,000 kilo calories every day and have stomach volume of almost 10,000 liters.

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Now, researchers say ubiquitous evidence for ongoing geological carbon sequestration in mantle rocks in the creeping sections of the SAF is one underlying cause of aseismic creep along a roughly 150 kilometer-long SAF segment between San Juan Bautista and Parkfield, California, and along several other fault segments.

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A new study into the multipurpose uses of boomerangs has highlighted the hardwood objects were used to shape the edges of stone tools used by Australian Indigenous communities.

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Idaho National Laboratory researchers recently imaged several fossils using a powerful X-ray microscope. The 3D images will be used to create exhibits for Wyoming’s Fossil Butte National Monument and help experts gain insight into the origins of these and other relics.

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In new paper, UNLV-led anthropology team balks at a widely held belief that modern humans experienced an evolutionary decrease in brain size.

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What is an artifact, anyways? Who gets to decide? An anthropologist and a philosopher dig into the meaning of data artifacts in scientific research.

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Irvine, Calif., Aug. 4, 2022 — A cross-disciplinary team of engineering, biological sciences, public health and anthropology graduate students from the University of California, Irvine took first place in Phase 1 of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice Video Challenge for Students for their “Unearthing Lead: The Power of Historical Maps” entry, which reveals the dangerous levels of lead in soils in Santa Ana.

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Butchering marks on the remains of two mammoths discovered in New Mexico show that humans lived in North America much earlier than previously thought. Credit: National Park Service.

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When most of us think of social networks, we think of connecting digitally with others through sites like Facebook, TikTok or Twitter. A new book by Dr. Kathleen Sheppard, an associate professor of history at Missouri University of Science and Technology, discusses a different type of social network – a physical network of archaeologists, Egyptologists, tourists and other travelers who were drawn to Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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An archaeological study has determined that cowrie-shell artifacts found throughout the Mariana Islands were lures used for hunting octopuses and that the devices, similar versions of which have been found on islands across the Pacific, are the oldest known artifacts of their kind in the world.

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Ancient genomes from the herpes virus that commonly causes lip sores – and currently infects some 3.7 billion people globally – have been uncovered and sequenced for the first time by an international team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge.

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An abandoned Caribbean colony unearthed centuries after it had been forgotten and a case of mistaken identity in the archaeological record have conspired to rewrite the history of a barrier island off the Virginia and Maryland coasts.

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A single horse tooth from Haiti reveals that popular folklore that the Spanish shipwrecked horses off the coast of the U.S. is likely true.

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Prehistoric people in Europe were consuming milk thousands of years before humans evolved the genetic trait allowing us to digest the milk sugar lactose as adults, finds a new study.

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A look into how environmental variables accelerate, slow or even reverse the aging process is the focus of a University of Oregon anthropologist whose research was recently funded by the National Institutes of Health.