What little rain that falls on a gravelly desert located in western China’s Tarim Basin evaporates as it hits the blistering turf. Here, in this parched wasteland, lie the ancient…
Category: Archaeology
A technique borrowed from ecology hints at hundreds of lost medieval legends
King Arthur’s lasting renown is one for the books. But a statistical spotlight now shines on medieval European literature’s round table of lost and forgotten stories. An international team used…
Homo sapiens may have reached Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought
Stone Age Homo sapiens began migrating into Europe much longer ago than has typically been assumed. Discoveries at a rock-shelter in southern France put H. sapiens in Europe as early…
‘Origin’ explores the controversial science of the first Americans
OriginJennifer RaffTwelve, $30 Scientific understanding of the peopling of the Americas is as unsettled as the Western Hemisphere once was. Skeletal remains, cultural artifacts such as stone tools and, increasingly,…
A taste for wild cereal sowed farming’s spread in ancient Europe
People living along southeastern Europe’s Danube River around 11,500 years ago never planted a crop but still laid the foundation for the rise of farming in that region some 3,000…
Gold and silver tubes in a Russian museum are the oldest known drinking straws
Eight silver and gold tubes held in a Russian museum have long been thought to have been either ceremonial staffs or canopy supports. In reality, the long tubes are the…
Part donkey, part wild ass, the kunga is the oldest known hybrid bred by humans
From mules to ligers, the list of human-made hybrid animals is long. And, it turns out, ancient. Meet the kunga, the earliest known hybrid animal bred by people. The ancient…
Clovis hunters’ reputation as mammoth killers takes a hit
An amateur archaeologist exploring a dried-out, ancient stream channel called Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico, made a startling discovery in 1929. He came across chiseled stone points strewn among…
Arctic hunter-gatherers were advanced ironworkers more than 2,000 years ago
Hunter-gatherers who lived more than 2,000 years ago near the top of the world appear to have run ironworking operations as advanced as those of farming societies far to the…
Neandertals were the first hominids to turn forest into grassland 125,000 years ago
Neandertals took Stone Age landscaping to a previously unrecognized level. Around 125,000 years ago, these close human relatives transformed a largely forested area bordering two central European lakes into a…
