Portrait of a woman in Russian dress with a pearl necklace
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Etruscan fresco from the François Tomb at Vulci showing Achilles sacrificing Trojan captives
A celebrated Etruscan fresco of the late fourth century BC from the François Tomb at Vulci depicts a cruel ritual of the Trojan War. The central scene of the composition is the sacrifice of Trojan prisoners, which the Greek hero Achilles performs in honour of his fallen friend Patroclus. The
Diachenko and Groneborn link ornament diversity on ancient pottery to population size
Alexandr Diachenko of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Detlef Gronenborn of the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology in Mainz have built a mathematical model that links the diversity of pottery ornament to population size, the organisation of pottery production and the exchange of information. They compared the pottery
A Macaque Tooth About 310,000 Years Old Found at Schöningen, the Northernmost Evidence in Europe
Some news on migration. At Schöningen in Lower Saxony, a milk tooth of a macaque some 310,000 years old has been found. The tooth was recovered as long ago as 2004, but has been studied only now. Scientists from Leiden University and the Senckenberg Centre at the University of
Mutations in rice and maize needed for domestication arose long before farming
When ancient farmers domesticated plants, they relied on variation that already existed in wild species. Useful mutations were rare in the wild ancestors of cultivated plants, but people spent millennia selecting plants with the desired traits, and the frequency of those mutations rose. The chief trait of domesticated rice is