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Greece will ban bottom trawling in all of its marine protected areas by 2030, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced on Tuesday making the the country the first in Europe to announce such a ban. Speaking at the Our Ocean Conference in Athens, he said the country would become the first to bring an end to the damaging fishing practice in these protected areas. It will be banned in Greece’s three national marine parks – one of which is the largest in the East Mediterranean Sea – by 2026 with the rest following before the end of the decade. Bottom...

A Roman ship found with a lead pipe piercing its hull has mystified archaeologists. Italian researchers now suggest that the pipe was part of an ingenious pumping system, designed to feed on-board fish tanks with a continuous supply of oxygenated water. Their analysis has been published online in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. Historians have assumed that in ancient times fresh fish were eaten close to where they were caught, because without refrigeration they would have rotted during transportation. But if the latest theory is correct, Roman ships could have carried live fish to buyers across the Mediterranean Sea....

Romans in Okinawa - Japan? | 5:58 | Dr Raoul McLaughlin | 10.4K subscribers | 11,457 views | January 7, 2019The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean | Raoul McLaughlin | full text PDF | Shiver Me Timbers!

Abstract -- Cinnamon (Cinnamomum zeylanicum, and Cinnamon cassia), the eternal tree of tropical medicine, belongs to the Lauraceae family. Cinnamon is one of the most important spices used daily by people all over the world. Cinnamon primarily contains vital oils and other derivatives, such as cinnamaldehyde, cinnamic acid, and cinnamate. In addition to being an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antidiabetic, antimicrobial, anticancer, lipid-lowering, and cardiovascular-disease-lowering compound, cinnamon has also been reported to have activities against neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. This review illustrates the pharmacological prospective of cinnamon and its use in daily life.

Overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, a French port city stands on the grounds of Roman history.The site of the first Roman colony outside of Italy, Narbonne holds the secrets to the empire's past — and what it did with its stuff.During an excavation along the outskirts of the city, archaeologists discovered stone walls more than 2,000 years old, likely part of an ancient warehouse district, according to a March 22 news release from INRAP, the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research.The city, called Colonia Narbo Martius, was founded in 118 B.C. during the early expansion of the Roman Empire, the...

At the start of the week of the Summer Solstice, many will once again marvel at the magnificent structures built across Ireland thousands of years ago, including Newgrange in Co Meath. The structures were built by the descendants of the first peoples that landed on the island in what is believed to be two migratory waves from around 10,000 years ago. Until recently it was argued that much of the population of Ireland was descended from this group of people, mainly from what is now Spain and southern France, with the arrival of the Celts around 500 BC adding what...

The glass used to create beads discovered at a prehistoric settlement dubbed "Britain's Pompeii" was probably made in Iran, analysis has revealed.The finds were among a wealth of well-preserved items unearthed at a burnt-out 3,000-year-old village at a quarry in Whittlesey, near Peterborough.Amber, shale, siltstone, faience and tin beads were also discovered...The remains of a settlement of about 10 circular wooden houses on stilts built above a river was discovered by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit between 2015 and 2016.Believed to be home to 50 to 60 people, the cause of the fire that destroyed it in 850BC is unknown. The...

After two years of underwater searches around the islands, which lie west of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea, experts last year found a bronze helmet and some amphorae from about 241 BC, the date of the decisive Roman victory over the Carthage fleet. At around the same time, a team of Italy's famed art police busted a collector who had a ship's bronze battering ram from the same period on display in his home. It turned out the relic had been illegally looted using nets from the same area... The Battle of the Aegates Islands was the final naval battle...

Archaeological excavations off the coast of Rome in the Mediterranean Sea reveal that Stone Age people living over 7,000 years ago utilized sophisticated manufacturing techniques and advanced nautical technology in the construction and operation of their seafaring vessels.According to an analysis published in the journal PLOS ONE, the ancient seafaring vessels discovered at the site are the oldest ever found in the Mediterranean, which may offer "invaluable insights" into the technological sophistication employed by Neolithic navigators...According to the researchers, they found five dugout canoes in the ancient lakeshore village of La Marmotta near the coast of Rome, Italy, dating from...

Marine archaeologists have identified 10 shipwrecks, including one from the Roman era, in the waters around a Greek island in the Mediterranean. The finds came to light during a multiyear project carried out by a team in collaboration with Greece's National Hellenic Research Foundation and the country's Ministry of Culture. The project has been surveying an area around the island of Kasos, which lies in the Aegean Sea, a portion of the Mediterranean between the Greek peninsula to the west and Turkey's Anatolia peninsula to the east. "This research was conducted to shed light on the maritime history of the...

A team of anthropologists at Université Bordeaux has found evidence of nine distinct cultures living in what is now Europe during the Gravettian period. In their study, reported in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the group analyzed personal adornments worn by people living in the region between 24,000 and 34,000 years ago...Prior research has shown that humans have been adorning themselves for thousands of years. In this new effort, the researchers looked at the types of adornments that were worn by people living in Europe during the Gravettian period—a time during the Paleolithic when a culture known as the Gravettian...

A wooden tablet discovered on Easter Island may pre-date European colonization of the region, researchers revealed in early February. Less than 30 wooden tablets containing an undeciphered script called “Rongorongo” were found on the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), four of which were removed in 1869 by Catholic Missionaries, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Those wooden tablets were analyzed using radiocarbon dating, and one of them was found to pre-date European settlement on the island, the study said. Easter Island was “discovered” by Europeans in the 1720s, and absolutely decimated in the years following, the...

The Buddha statue depicts Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in South Asia around 2,550 years ago. Born a prince, he would later renounce his worldly wealth and seek out enlightenment, eventually becoming the Buddha, a Sanskrit-derived word that means "the enlightened one," according to Buddhist tradition...The newfound statue dates to between A.D. 90 and 140, said Steven Sidebotham, a history professor at the University of Delaware who is co-director of the Berenike Project, told Live Science in an email.The 28-inch-tall (71 centimeters) statue shows the Buddha standing and holding parts of his robes in his left hand, representatives from the Egyptian...

Late last year, a map that could revolutionize our understanding of the origins of modern mapmaking was rediscovered. Created in the aftermath of the Black Death, this map is the fourth oldest surviving complete portolan chart of Europe.This 14th century chart was just rediscovered...it changes map making history8:51 | Geography Geek | 256K subscribers | 89,502 views | December 18, 2023

To solve the mystery of where Punt was, a team of scientists is turning to two mummified baboons in the British Museum... One was found at Thebes and the other in the Valley of the Kings. The team is conducting oxygen isotope tests on the preserved hairs of the baboons. Oxygen isotopes act as a 'signal' that can tell scientists where an animal is from... To aid in narrowing down the location of Punt the team is also performing oxygen isotope tests on samples of modern day baboons from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, Uganda and Mozambique. If the oxygen isotope...

Throughout their history the ancient Egyptians recorded making voyages to a place called the 'Land of Punt'. To the Egyptians it was a far-off source of exotic animals and valuable goods. From there they brought back perfumes, panther skins, electrum, and, yes, live baboons to keep as pets. The voyages started as early as the Old Kingdom, ca. 4,500 years ago, and continued until just after the collapse of the New Kingdom 3,000 years ago. Egyptologists have long argued about the location of Punt. The presence of perfumes suggests that it was located somewhere in Arabia, such as Yemen. However...

Divers off the coast of Naples, Italy have recovered a large chunk of chiseled obsidian that likely went down in a Stone Age shipwreck more than 5,000 years ago.Divers from Naples, Italy have recovered a block of obsidian from the remains of what is likely a Neolithic, or New Stone Age shipwreck near the island of Capri.The natural-glass block is about the size of a very large book and weighs almost 17.6 pounds (8 kilograms). There are visible signs of chiseling on its surface, and archaeologists think it was an obsidian "core" that would have been used to make sharp-edged...

The mystery of how the pyramids were built may have finally been solved thanks to the discovery of an ancient branch of the Nile that once flowed through Giza. Hundreds of meters wide, the enormous waterway has long since dried up, but could have provided transportation for the colossal amounts of material and workers needed to construct the iconic landmarks thousands of years ago.

Alejandra Perotti, an invertebrate biologist at the University of Reading who specializes in lice, says the work is intriguing, but she wants to see the researchers expand and diversify their sample. For instance, only a single louse in the study came from Africa and relatively few came from South America, she notes, limiting the authors’ ability to infer how lice from around world relate to one another. She adds that sequencing the insects’ whole genomes—a project Perotti herself is working on—will offer scientists even more reliable means for pinning down the relatedness between lice groups, as well as matching those...

Researchers exploring the waters off the Greek Island of Kefallinia have unearthed one of the largest Roman-era shipwrecks ever found.As Julia Buckley reports for CNN, a team from Greece's University of Patras located the remains of the ship, as well as its cargo of 6,000 amphorae—ceramic jugs used for shipping—while conducting a sonar scan of the area. The 110-foot-long vessel, newly detailed in the Journal of Archaeological Science, was situated at a depth of 197 feet.According to the paper, the "Fiscardo" wreck (named after a nearby fishing port) was one of several identified during cultural heritage surveys undertaken in the...