A sacrificed spider monkey is shedding new light on an ancient Mesoamerican relationship. The remains of a 1,700-year-old monkey found in the ancient city of Teotihuacan outside modern-day Mexico City…
Category: Archaeology
Carvings on Australia’s boab trees reveal a generation’s lost history
Brenda Garstone is on the hunt for her heritage. Parts of her cultural inheritance are scattered across the Tanami desert in northwestern Australia, where dozens of ancient boab trees are…
Some Maya rulers may have taken generations to attract subjects
Commoners may have played an unappreciated part in the rise of an ancient Maya royal dynasty. Self-described “divine lords” at a Maya site called Tamarindito in what’s now Guatemala left…
50 years ago, Stonehenge’s purpose mystified scientists. It still does
Stonehenge: A calendar or just a crematorium — Science News, November 11, 1972 The monument consisted of a circle of immense, finely tooled stone archways surrounded by a range of…
This ancient Canaanite comb is engraved with a plea against lice
Engraved into the side of a nearly 4,000-year-old ivory comb is a simple wish: Get these lice out of my hair. This faint inscription, written in the early language of…
King Tut’s tomb still has secrets to reveal 100 years after its discovery
One hundred years ago, archaeologist Howard Carter stumbled across the tomb of ancient Egypt’s King Tutankhamun. Carter’s life was never the same. Neither was the young pharaoh’s afterlife. Newspapers around…
Black Death immunity came at a cost to modern-day health
A genetic variant that appears to have boosted medieval Europeans’ ability to survive the Black Death centuries ago may contribute — albeit in a small way — to an inflammatory…
Drone photos reveal an early Mesopotamian city made of marsh islands
A ground-penetrating eye in the sky has helped to rehydrate an ancient southern Mesopotamian city, tagging it as what amounted to a Venice of the Fertile Crescent. Identifying the watery…
How mythology could help demystify dog domestication
In Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Edison discovers that dogs are intellectually superior beings. They’re so smart, in fact, that the canines found the…
Indigenous Americans ruled democratically long before the U.S. did
On sunny summer days, powerboats pulling water-skiers zip across Georgia’s Lake Oconee, a reservoir located about an hour-and-a-half drive east of Atlanta. For those without a need for speed, fishing…
