Archaeology · Science · Nature · Ethnography
The terms “invasive” and “non-native” carry fatal legal consequences for biological species. These labels, in essence, open the way to measures up to and including the complete destruction of populations. In science this is called eradication. What mostly comes to mind are examples of the total eradication of species
Archaeology · Science
Near Bulford, five kilometres from Stonehenge, traces of a structure some five thousand years old have been found. Two post holes, one might say, and one would hardly have blamed anyone for paying them no attention, yet they were found, 120 metres apart and about a metre deep. But Phil
Archaeology · Faith · Museums
A lead curse tablet, or defixio, written in Ancient Greek and designed in the Egyptian manner, with a group of magical signs meant to carry its request to the powers of the other world. The tablet names two men and two women, who may equally be the cursed or the
Archaeology · Science · Nature
A team of researchers from Oxford, let us call the collective MacLeod and colleagues, has found traces of the plague bacillus about 5,500 years old in the DNA of the hunter-gatherers of the Baikal region. This is the earliest outbreak of plague recorded in archaeological material. The Plague
Archaeology · Geography · Ethnography
The grave, discovered as long ago as 2014 during preparations for the building of a railway, contained the remains of a woman, a newborn infant, the spine of a sheep, and the skull, limbs and hide of a horse. Such attributes belong to a rare ritual practice of the steppe
Archaeology · Science · Nature
It turns out the Etruscans cloned a single grape variety for centuries. And it was white. In Chianti, at the Etruscan-Roman site of Cetamura, researchers studied grape pips from the bottoms of wells cut into the rock. They found that most of the pips in the study date from
Archaeology · Science · Ethnography
A team of researchers at Yale University has established that the earliest populations of Near Oceania interbred with at least three distinct groups related to the Denisovans. The conclusion rests on an analysis of the genomes of 177 people from 12 populations in Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and
Archaeology · Observations · Science
According to the authors of the study, the capacity for language depends most strongly on tiny stretches of the genome, the regulatory regions known as HAQERs, which occupy less than a tenth of one per cent of our DNA yet exert roughly 200 times more influence on linguistic ability than
Coming Up · Archaeology · In the Press · Observations · Science
In essence, the cognitive revolution of 40,000 to 50,000 years ago is one of the textbook stories. Homo sapiens supposedly grew clever all of a sudden, drew a bull on a cave wall and set off to conquer the planet. The trouble is that anatomically modern humans appeared
Archaeology · Science
Vráble in south-western Slovakia, a Linear Pottery culture settlement of 5250-4940 BC, has become the site of a mysterious mass burial. In a ditch at the entrance to one of the quarters lie dozens of skeletons without skulls, among them four pairs and a common grave holding at
Archaeology · Science
Palaeogeneticists from the Autonomous University of Barcelona have studied the genomes of 54 Iron Age infants from the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula. The material was taken from settlements of the Iberians, a pre-Roman people of eastern Spain, within a chronological range of roughly 750 to 250 BC,
Archaeology · The East · Observations · Science · Society · Humour
By right of the first. When political regimes justify their claims to some territory by length of tenure, one can always object that somebody other than them was there first. And somebody other than those first ones. And than them, too. If one is so inclined, one may go all