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According to an El País report, a team of researchers led by Carlos Odriozola of the University of Seville has studied replica amber beads produced by people living on the Iberian Peninsula between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. More than 2,000 beads crafted to resemble amber have been found at 15 different Bronze Age sites in the region. Odriozola and his colleagues examined these imitation beads with infrared analysis techniques and computerized microtomography, and found that to begin the process, a stone or shell was chosen as a core material. Next, a mixture of pine resin, beeswax, and linseed oil...

The 3.5-kilogram amber nugget is the biggest piece of rumanite ever found. (Buzău County Museum) =========================================================================== They say one's trash is another's treasure, but a chunk of 'rock' used to keep a door open for decades is a treasure by pretty much any metric you might care to use. The 3.5 kilogram (7.7 pound) stone was found in a stream bed in southeast Romania by an elderly woman, who brought it home and put it to use. Her discovery turned out to be one of the biggest intact chunks of amber in the world, according to a report by El...

The wine in the glass urn. Credit: Juan Manuel Román The oldest wine ever discovered, originating from Andalusia, is a white wine over 2,000 years old. A 2019 excavation in Carmona revealed the oldest wine ever discovered, preserved in a man’s tomb for 2,000 years, highlighting significant aspects of Roman funerary rituals and societal gender norms. In 2019, a Roman tomb in Carmona was uncovered, revealing the remains of six individuals—Hispana, Senicio, two other men, and two women, whose names remain unknown. These inhabitants from 2,000 years ago likely never envisioned their funerary rituals gaining significance in the modern era....

A study published in the journal Prehistory Works, indicates that two objects sampled from the Villena Treasure were smithed using meteoric iron...The Villena Treasure is one of the most important Bronze Age hoard finds in the Iberian Peninsula, discovered by José María Soler in 1963 in Villena, Spain. Archaeologists uncovered a collection of bowls, bottles, and bracelets, which were ornately crafted from gold, silver, iron and amber.Iron was considered a precious metal before the advent of iron smelting, where meteoric iron was the only source of iron metal used to make jewellery, tools, and weapons during the Bronze Age.Iron sourced...

AbstractThe occurrence of Baltic amber through Europe has traditionally been associated to the spread of the Bell Beaker culture during the 3rd millennium BC. In Iberia, this phenomenon is particularly noticeable in the southern half. Here we present an amber bead recovered in a Late Neolithic funerary cave (3634–3363 cal BC) from northeastern Iberia where more than 12 individuals had been buried. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy results of four samples revealed their complete resemblance with Baltic succinite reference spectra. Despite being a single bead, this finding provides the earliest evidence for the arrival of Baltic amber to the Mediterranean and...

From 1903 to 1914, the Royal Museums in Berlin and the German Orient Society conducted excavations in Aššur under the direction of Walter Andrae (1875–1956). One of the aims of the excavation was to study the great ziggurat (stepped temple tower). In April 1914, in search of the foundation layers, the excavators widened an existing old tunnel.In doing so, they uncovered several thousand beads of shell, stone, glass and pottery lying directly on the bedrock beneath the first layer of mudbricks. On the basis of find-sharing agreements, parts of the find ended up in the collection of the Vorderasiatisches Museum...

•Actress Amber Heard has appealed the $10million award she was ordered to pay ex-husband Johnny Depp following a defamation trial held earlier this year •Heard's attorneys argued in a 68-page filing that significant evidence was excluded and that the trial was held in the wrong state •The trial was held in Fairfax, Virginia, because that is where The Washington Post website houses its servers •Depp sued Heard in 2019 for $50million over a Washington Post op-ed written under Heard's name in which he was accused of domestic abuse •Depp's attorneys have also filed an appeal of the $2million he was...

She is currently represented by David L. Axelrod and Jay Ward Brown in her appeal of that verdict. The actress has also recently hired Kirk Pasich on her legal team in an attempt to get multiple insurance companies to cover her legal bills, which may surpass $15million, Heard's expenses soared over $8million before the Virginia trial even began. Heard's team appears to want homeowner's insurance to cover those bills The battle concerns Travelers Commercial Insurance Company and New York Marine General Insurance Company. Travelers initially sued New York Marine in July 2021 to gain reimbursement for half of what it...

A missing 3-year-old girl was found in a north Houston motel room with a stranger, and now authorities are trying to figure out what happened to her during the 10 hours she was missing. The stranger accused of taking the girl from her parents' apartment has now been charged. Holman Hernandez, 50, is charged with aggravated kidnapping. It was only thanks to a witness that investigators had any idea who they were looking for. ABC13 was there as police surrounded a motel and arrested the suspect on Sunday. Police said Hernandez -- the suspect at the center of the Amber...

Amber Heard has dumped the attorney who defended her in her unsuccessful defamation trial with Johnny Depp as she now tries to appeal the verdict. Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, who represented the Aquaman actress in the six-week defamation trial, has parted ways with Heard. Attorney's David L. Axelrod and Jay Ward Brown, who represented The New York Times earlier this year in a defamation lawsuit against 2008 vice president nominee Sarah Palin, will take over as the appeal proceeds. The pair work for Ballard Spahr and have covered various cases, including companies and individuals in high-stakes civil litigation, speakers in First...

Missing link feather fossils found in France By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 6:01pm GMT 20/02/2008 Primitive feathers that represent a key missing link in their evolution have been found, fossilised in 100-million-year-old amber from France. The fossils mark a step towards the shape of modern feathers As long as scientists have studied birds, they have puzzled over that most intricate of avian features - the feather. Because it is a marvellous feat of biological engineering, it has been siezed on by creationists trying to find evidence of designs that lie beyond the abilities of evolution. Scientists themselves have...

Restoration of 4000 well preserved bronze age woman from Central Europe. He DNA is closely related to modern Europeans, she likely spoke with protoeuropean language. See picture in the link. The member of the Únětice culture was buried with a unique amber necklace, but her DNA is the real treasure. The woman, estimated to have died at around age 35, came from the upper social strata. Her grave in Mikulovice in Eastern Bohemia is one of the richest in Europe from her era. She had fair skin, brown hair, widely spaced brown eyes, a prominent chin, and a petite figure...

A senior software engineer at Google who signed up to test Google's artificial intelligence tool called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications), has claimed that the AI robot is in fact sentient and has thoughts and feelings. During a series of conversations with LaMDA, 41-year-old Blake Lemoine presented the computer with various of scenarios through which analyses could be made. They included religious themes and whether the artificial intelligence could be goaded into using discriminatory or hateful speech. Lemoine came away with the perception that LaMDA was indeed sentient and was endowed with sensations and thoughts all of its own....

The member of the Únětice culture was buried with a unique amber necklace, but her DNA is the real treasure when it comes to recreating her appearance.You can now see what a woman who lived near the Czech city of Pardubice in the Bronze Age looked like.This image is not an artistic guess. New forms of DNA analysis plus unusually well-preserved personal items allow us to now make a highly accurate picture.The woman, estimated to have died at around age 35, came from the upper social strata. Her grave in Mikulovice in Eastern Bohemia is one of the richest in...

Creatures get trapped in amber all the time, but most prehistoric finds are insects. Amber is a great material for preserving arthropods because of their already tough shells that will hold on even if the insides disintegrate. But what about a lizard? Retinosaurus hkamentiensis is a new extinct species of lizard that was unexpectedly found trapped in Burmese amber. No one expected an entire reptile to be preserved so well, from its scaly skin down to its skeleton.

One particularly important find is a cylinder-shaped seal made from the mineral hematite, with a cuneiform inscription from Mesopotamia (present day Iraq), which the archaeologists were able to decipher.“The text consists of three lines and mentions three names. One is Amurru, a god worshiped in Mesopotamia. The other two are historical kings, father and son, who we recently succeeded in tracking down in other texts on clay tablets from the same period, i.e., the 18th century BC. We are currently trying to determine why the seal ended up in Cyprus more than 1000 kilometres from where it was made.”Among the...

Divers hunting for lost artwork from the legendary Amber Room looted by the Nazis are to begin searching a WWII shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea after photos revealed unidentified paintings and possible artefacts. The 12-man team from the Baltictech diving group will spend 10 days off the coast of Gdansk, Poland, at the end of May at the site where the German steamer Karlsruhe was sank by a Royal Navy submarine in 1945. Tomasz Stachura from Baltictech told MailOnline that initial observations of the wreck had revealed several 'non-military crates' as well as what appears to be...

In 1941, it was looted by Nazi Germany's Army Group North and transported to the former German city of Konigsberg, present-day Kaliningrad, and erected in Konigsberg Castle, where it remained on display until 1944. “Konigsberg was a transfer base for looted cultural objects, which would be stored in the city for further transportation to other parts of Germany,” says Anatoly Valuev, a researcher from the Kaliningrad History and Arts Museum. But as the city was engulfed by fire at the end of World War 2, the room mysteriously vanished. ***** After 23 years of scrupulous work, architects and historians were...

The new fossil flower, named Valviloculus pleristaminis, belongs to the order Laurales, its closest affinities being with the families Monimiaceae and Atherospermataceae. The specimen of Valviloculus pleristaminis has an egg-shaped, hollow floral cup (part of the flower from which the stamens emanate); an outer layer consisting of six petal-like components known as tepals; and two-chamber anthers, with pollen sacs that split open via laterally hinged valves. It became encased in amber on the supercontinent of Gondwana and rafted on a continental plate some 6,450 km (4,000 miles) across the ocean from Australia to Southeast Asia. Geologists have been debating just...

The 99-million-year-old hatchling from the Cretaceous Period is the best preserved of its kind The remains of a baby bird from the time of the dinosaurs have been discovered in a specimen of 99-million-year-old amber, according to scientists writing in the journal Gondwana Research. The hatchling belonged to a major group of birds known as enantiornithes, which went extinct along with dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago. Funded in part by the National Geographic Society's Expeditions Council, this discovery is providing critical new information about these ancient, toothed birds and how they differed...