Heritage · Science · Palaeontology · Nature
Sophia is a juvenile, that is, an individual incapable of reproduction at the time of death. Her skull, about two metres long from snout to frill, was recovered five years ago from the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota. The same site yielded the skull of a pachycephalosaurus, recently bought
Science · Palaeontology · Nature · Humour
Next time, before you kill a centipede at home, remember that its ancestors came ashore 80 million years before the vertebrates. The first myriapods appeared some 460 million years ago. That is 35 million years earlier than the oldest known myriapod fossils. In the world onto which they crawled, or
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
University of Iowa researchers suggest that the regulatory "volume knobs" in DNA were already present in Neanderthals. 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
Observations · Science · People · Humour
Vasily Belokurov, one of the 2026 Kavli Prize laureates in astrophysics, is a galactic archaeologist. I have read his article about intruders and learnt that the constancy of the starry sky, to which people have prayed from the Palaeolithic to our own day, is an optical illusion the length of
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
Science · Palaeontology · Nature
The first animals are thought to have appeared in the Ediacaran, some 635 to 539 million years ago, but then came millions of years of calm, until a sudden diversity burst forth. A study from Cambridge, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, tries to answer the question of where this
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
Archive · Observations · Science
Saw this photograph of the stallion Belyi from the 1880s and became curious about the "salted paper" or "salt paper" technique in which it was made. Salted paper is the earliest method of positive photographic printing on paper, invented by William Henry Fox Talbot at the