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The secrets of ancient Japanese tombs revealed thanks to satellite images

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A research group at the Politecnico di Milano analysed the orientation of ancient Japanese tombs – the so-called Kofun.

This study has never been carried out before, due to the very large number of monuments and the fact that access to these areas is usually forbidden. For these reasons, high-res satellite imagery was used.

The results show that these tombs are oriented towards the arc of the rising sun, the Goddess Amaterasu that the Japanese emperors linked to the mythical origin of their dynasty. [Read more…] about The secrets of ancient Japanese tombs revealed thanks to satellite images

Milk enabled massive steppe migration

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From the Xiongnu to the Mongols, the pastoralist populations of the Eurasian steppe have long been a source of fascination.

Amongst the earliest herding groups in this region were the Yamnaya, Bronze Age pastoralists who began expanding out of the Pontic-Caspian steppe more than 5,000 years ago.

These Bronze Age migrations resulted in gene flow across vast areas, ultimately linking pastoralist populations in Scandinavia with groups that expanded into Siberia. [Read more…] about Milk enabled massive steppe migration

In Guatemala, archaeologist helps to uncover hidden neighborhood in ancient Maya city

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Scientists have been excavating the ruins of Tikal, an ancient Maya city in modern-day Guatemala, since the 1950s – and thanks to those many decades spent documenting details of every structure and cataloguing each excavated item, Tikal has become one of the best understood and most thoroughly studied archaeological sites in the world.

But a startling recent discovery by the Pacunam Lidar Initiative, a research consortium involving a Brown University anthropologist, has ancient Mesoamerican scholars across the globe wondering whether they know Tikal as well as they think.

Using light detection and ranging software, or lidar, Stephen Houston, a professor of anthropology at Brown University, and Thomas Garrison, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered that what was long assumed to be an area of natural hills a short walk away from Tikal’s center was actually a neighborhood of ruined buildings that had been designed to look like those in Teotihuacan, the largest and most powerful city in the ancient Americas. [Read more…] about In Guatemala, archaeologist helps to uncover hidden neighborhood in ancient Maya city

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  • Did the ancient Maya have parks?
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    Did the ancient Maya have parks?The ancient Maya city of Tikal was a bustling metropolis and home to tens of thousands of people. The city comprised roads, paved plazas, towering pyramids, temples and palaces and thousands of homes for its residents, all supported by agriculture. Now researchers at the University of Cincinnati say Tikal's reservoirs…
    Tags: ancient, city, tikal, maya, features, archaeology

Researchers identify record number of ancient elephant bone tools

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Ancient humans could do some impressive things with elephant bones.

In a new study, University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist Paola Villa and her colleagues surveyed tools excavated from a site in Italy where large numbers of elephants had died.

The team discovered that humans at this site roughly 400,000 years ago appropriated those carcasses to produce an unprecedented array of bone tools – some crafted with sophisticated methods that wouldn’t become common for another 100,000 years.

“We see other sites with bone tools at this time,” said Villa, an adjoint curator at the CU Boulder Museum of Natural History. “But there isn’t this variety of well-defined shapes.” [Read more…] about Researchers identify record number of ancient elephant bone tools

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  • Neanderthal ancestry identifies oldest modern human genome
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    Neanderthal ancestry identifies oldest modern human genomeAncient DNA from Neandertals and early modern humans has recently shown that the groups likely interbred somewhere in the Near East after modern humans left Africa some 50,000 years ago. As a result, all people outside Africa carry around 2% to 3% Neandertal DNA. In modern human genomes, those Neandertal…
    Tags: years, humans, ago, europe, study, age, researchers, ancient, news, archaeology

Is it cheaper to be bigger? Lessons from the extreme weapons of giraffe weevil warriors

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Nepalese craftsman, Chandra Bahadur Dangi, holds the record as the world’s shortest adult, at 54.6 cm (1 ft 9 ½ inches). The tallest human is Sultan Kösen, a Turkish farmer, almost five times taller at 2.52 meters (8 feet 3 ¼ inches).

In nature, size differences among males of a single species are not uncommon, but in a new paper, a team from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), The University of Auckland and the University of Arizona, discovered a case of male beetles that are not only extremely different in size, but also provide an answer to long-standing puzzle in evolutionary biology: how can larger animals afford the energetic cost of making and maintaining disproportionately large weapons?

Almost one in every four species in the world is a beetle: about 350,000 beetle species have been identified so far. Male New Zealand giraffe weevils, Lasiorhynchus barbicornis, were known to be the longest beetles in the world, but when researchers measured the differences in the weight of the smallest and largest beetles, they were in for a surprise. [Read more…] about Is it cheaper to be bigger? Lessons from the extreme weapons of giraffe weevil warriors

Study takes unprecedented peek into life of 17,000-year-old mammoth

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An international research team has retraced the astonishing lifetime journey of an Arctic woolly mammoth, which covered enough of the Alaska landscape during its 28 years to almost circle the Earth twice.

Scientists gathered unprecedented details of its life through analysis of a 17,000-year-old fossil from the University of Alaska Museum of the North. By generating and studying isotopic data in the mammoth’s tusk, they were able to match its movements and diet with isotopic maps of the region.

Few details have been known about the lives and movements of woolly mammoths, and the study offers the first evidence that they traveled vast distances. An outline of the mammoth’s life is detailed in the new issue of the journal Science. [Read more…] about Study takes unprecedented peek into life of 17,000-year-old mammoth

Ancient Islamic tombs cluster like galaxies

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Sudanese Islamic burial sites are distributed according to large-scale environmental factors and small-scale social factors, creating a galaxy-like distribution pattern, according to a study published July 7, 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Stefano Costanzo of the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in Italy and colleagues.

The Kassala region of eastern Sudan is home to a vast array of funerary monuments, from the Islamic tombs of modern Beja people to ancient burial mounds thousands of years old.

Archaeologists don’t expect these monuments are randomly placed; their distribution is likely influenced by geological and social factors. Unraveling the patterns of the funerary landscape can provide insight into ancient cultural practices of the people who built them. [Read more…] about Ancient Islamic tombs cluster like galaxies

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  • Population dynamics and the rise of empires in Inner Asia
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    Population dynamics and the rise of empires in Inner AsiaFrom the late Bronze Age until the Middle Ages, the eastern Eurasian Steppe was home to a series of organized and highly influential nomadic empires. The Xiongnu (209 BCE - 98 CE) and Mongol (916-1125 CE) empires that bookend this period had especially large impacts on the demographics and geopolitics…
    Tags: eastern, ancient, study, region, university, features
  • Ancient DNA reveals the world’s oldest family tree
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    Ancient DNA reveals the world’s oldest family treeAnalysis of ancient DNA from one of the best-preserved Neolithic tombs in Britain has revealed that most of the people buried there were from five continuous generations of a single extended family. By analysing DNA extracted from the bones and teeth of 35 individuals entombed at Hazleton North long cairn…
    Tags: university, ancient, family, archaeologists, study, team, tombs, years, analysis, areas

Dinosaurs were in decline before the end, according to new study

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The death of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was caused by the impact of a huge asteroid on the Earth. However, palaeontologists have continued to debate whether they were already in decline or not before the impact.

In a new study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, an international team of scientists, which includes the University of Bristol, show that they were already in decline for as much as ten million years before the final death blow.

Lead author, Fabien Condamine, a CNRS researcher from the Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution de Montpellier (France), said: “We looked at the six most abundant dinosaur families through the whole of the Cretaceous, spanning from 150 to 66 million years ago, and found that they were all evolving and expanding and clearly being successful. [Read more…] about Dinosaurs were in decline before the end, according to new study

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  • Early Earth was bombarded by series of city-sized asteroids
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    Early Earth was bombarded by series of city-sized asteroidsScientists know that the Earth was bombarded by huge impactors in distant time, but a new analysis suggest that the number of these impacts may have been x10 higher than previously thought. This translates into a barrage of collisions, similar in scale to that of the asteroid strike which wiped…
    Tags: impact, earth, years, ago, life, huge, time, features
  • When humans disturb marine mammals, it’s hard to know the long-term impact
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    When humans disturb marine mammals, it’s hard to know the long-term impactFrom seismic surveys and Navy sonar to fisheries and shipping, many human activities in the ocean environment cause short-term changes in the behaviors of marine mammals. A longstanding challenge for scientists and regulatory agencies alike has been to understand the biological significance of those changes in terms of their overall…
    Tags: species, models, life, impact, mammals, conditions, study, features, looked, huge

New fossil discovery from Israel points to complicated evolutionary process

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Analysis of recently discovered fossils found in Israel suggest that interactions between different human species were more complex than previously believed, according to a team of researchers including Binghamton University anthropology professor Rolf Quam.

The research team, led by Israel Hershkovitz from Tel Aviv University, published their findings in Science, describing recently discovered fossils from the site of Nesher Ramla in Israel. The Nesher Ramla site dates to about 120,000-140,000 years ago, towards the very end of the Middle Pleistocene time period.

The human fossils were found by Dr. Zaidner of the Hebrew University during salvage excavations at the Nesher Ramla prehistoric site, near the city of Ramla. [Read more…] about New fossil discovery from Israel points to complicated evolutionary process

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  • New study identifies Neanderthal ancestry in African populations and describes its origin
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    New study identifies Neanderthal ancestry in African populations and describes its originWhen the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, using DNA collected from ancient bones, it was accompanied by the discovery that modern humans in Asia, Europe and America inherited approximately 2 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals – proving humans and Neanderthals had interbred after humans left Africa. Since that study,…
    Tags: researchers, human, features, archaeology
  • Fossil trees on Peru's Central Andean Plateau tell a tale of dramatic environmental change
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    Fossil trees on Peru's Central Andean Plateau tell a tale of dramatic environmental changeOn an expedition to the Central Andean Plateau, researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and colleagues were astounded to find a huge fossil-tree buried in the cold, grassy plain. The plant fossil record from this high-altitude site in southern Peru contains dramatic reminders that the environment in the…
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  • Hidden mangrove forest in the Yucatan peninsula reveals ancient sea levels
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    Hidden mangrove forest in the Yucatan peninsula reveals ancient sea levelsDeep in the heart of the Yucatan Peninsula, an ancient mangrove ecosystem flourishes more than 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the nearest ocean. This is unusual because mangroves – salt-tolerant trees, shrubs, and palms – are typically found along tropical and subtropical coastlines. A new study led by researchers across…
    Tags: researchers, species, region, period, features

Did the ancient Maya have parks?

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The ancient Maya city of Tikal was a bustling metropolis and home to tens of thousands of people.

The city comprised roads, paved plazas, towering pyramids, temples and palaces and thousands of homes for its residents, all supported by agriculture.

Now researchers at the University of Cincinnati say Tikal’s reservoirs – critical sources of city drinking water – were lined with trees and wild vegetation that would have provided scenic natural beauty in the heart of the busy city. [Read more…] about Did the ancient Maya have parks?

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  • In Guatemala, archaeologist helps to uncover hidden neighborhood in ancient Maya city
    35
    In Guatemala, archaeologist helps to uncover hidden neighborhood in ancient Maya cityScientists have been excavating the ruins of Tikal, an ancient Maya city in modern-day Guatemala, since the 1950s – and thanks to those many decades spent documenting details of every structure and cataloguing each excavated item, Tikal has become one of the best understood and most thoroughly studied archaeological sites…
    Tags: tikal, maya, city, archaeology, features, ancient
  • Ancient Maya built sophisticated water filters
    31
    Ancient Maya built sophisticated water filtersAncient Maya in the once-bustling city of Tikal built sophisticated water filters using natural materials they imported from miles away, according to the University of Cincinnati. UC researchers discovered evidence of a filter system at the Corriental reservoir, an important source of drinking water for the ancient Maya in what…
    Tags: water, ancient, maya, uc, archaeology