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Phys.org reports that Mohammad Reza Eghdami of the University of Guilan and his colleagues examined the poorly preserved remains of a man unearthed in northwestern Iran at the Liyarsangbon Cemetery site. The 77 Parthian burials there have been dated to between 247 B.C. and A.D. 224. The Parthians were known by the Romans for their skills in mounted warfare, archery, and metalworking, including the manufacturing of high-quality weapons. This man had been buried on his left side with his legs bent. A poorly-made pot containing the remains of a bird and traces of smoke was also discovered in the grave....

Chile mummies possibly done in by arsenic Thursday, November 24, 2005; Posted: 10:58 a.m. EST (15:58 GMT) SAN MIGUEL DE AZAPA, Chile (Reuters) -- Living in the harsh desert of northern Chile's Pacific coast more than 7,000 years ago, the Chinchorro fishing tribe mysteriously began mummifying dead babies -- removing internal organs, cleaning bones, stuffing and sewing up the skin, putting wigs and clay masks on them. The Chinchorro mummies are the oldest known artificially preserved dead, dating thousands of years before Egyptian mummies, and the life quest of the archeologists who study them is to discover why this early...

Much of a Pre-Columbian population in ancient Chile was poisoned by arsenic, say researchers. According to a recent study conducted by Jaime Swift of the Australian National University and colleagues from several other institutions in Australia and Chile, a significant part of a pre-Columbian population in northern Chile suffered from slow poisoning due to the intake of arsenic from water sources. The researchers performed plasma mass spectrometry trace element analysis of human bone and tooth samples from 21 burials excavated at the site of Caleta Vitor on the Pacific coast of northern Chile, a part of the ultra-dry Atacama Desert...

Alkalescent Fluid Keeps 2,000-year-old Corpse Intact: Expert Alkalescent fluid seems to have kept a 2,000-year-old female corpse intact, though it is widely believed that bacteria grow and reproduce faster in an alkaline environment, say experts. The well-preserved corpse, which is believed to date from the Western Han Dynasty (BC 206 - AD 24), was unearthed on July 8 at a construction site in Lianyungang, eastern Jiangsu Province. Earlier reports said the corpse still had elastic muscle tissue after being immersed in a special fluid in her coffin. The fluid had a PH scale of 7.55, said Bai Ling, a...

2,000-year-old corpse found intact in mystery fluid BEIJING - The corpse of a woman who died more than 2,000 years ago has been found well preserved in a mystery fluid in eastern China, state media reported on Saturday. The body of the woman, who was believed to have lived during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC - AD 24), still had some of her skin, muscle tissue and veins, according to the Xinhua news agency. Workers at a building site in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, discovered the corpse, which was in a coffin, on July 8. 'The female corpse, estimated to...

Because of Southeast Asia’s harsh climatic and soil conditions, human remains decay quickly and rarely survive. It was a great shock, then, when archaeologists excavating the Thung Binh 1 cave near Hoa Lu unearthed the bones of an individual who lived around 12,000 years ago, Science News Today reports. Further inspection of the surviving skeletal fragments revealed an even bigger surprise. The 35-year-old man, known as TBH1, may have been the victim of an assault that ultimately cost him his life. Researchers noticed a fractured rib near his neck, and alongside it a tiny flake of sharpened quartz lodged in...

Researchers have now studied the remains of an infant unearthed during emergency excavations in 2006 at the sacristy of the Siervas de Jesus convent in northwestern Spain, Phys.org reports. What made the initial discovery so unusual was that the infant was actually buried within a building belonging to the former Roman fort of Legio VI Victrix, making it the only child burial ever found in a military context in Iberia. During his reign from 27 b.c. to a.d. 14, the emperor Augustus passed a series of laws that strictly forbade Roman soldiers from marrying during their service time, although these...

A decade ago, archaeologists made a grisly discovery when they unearthed two Neolithic mass graves at the sites of Bergheim and Achenheim in northeastern France. The pits contained severed limbs and human skeletons, evidence of excessive violence and mutilation that did not match normal Neolithic patterns. Some deceased individuals buried in other nearby graves, however, showed no signs of brutality. A new study has recently analyzed the chilling remains to try and reconstruct the identities of the individuals and determine why some were treated so cruelly, according to a statement released by the University of Oxford. Researchers conducted multi-isotopic analysis...

Viking warriors filed deep grooves in their teeth, and they likely had to smile broadly to show them off, according to new finds in four major Viking Age cemeteries in Sweden. Caroline Arcini of Sweden's National Heritage Board analyzed 557 skeletons of men, women and children from between 800 and 1050 A.D. They discovered that 22 of the men bore deep, horizontal grooves across the upper front teeth. "The marks are traces of deliberate dental modifications ... they are so well-made that most likely they were filed by a person of great skill," Arcini wrote in the current issue of...

During the last Ice Age, modern humans had ongoing encounters with more than one variety of now-extinct Pleistocene-era hominin.Those encounters, according to new research, not only resulted in interbreeding between homo sapiens and other types of archaic humans -- they may have helped some of the earliest arrivals in North America survive...The earliest arrival of anatomically modern humans in North America has been a subject of intense debate for several decades. Increasingly with time, discoveries by archaeologists have continued to push back the time scales on when those arrivals began, with initial estimates of early human dispersals into North America...

In a groundbreaking discovery, scientists have found chemical traces of betel nut chewing in 4,000-year-old teeth from a Bronze Age burial in Thailand -- the earliest direct evidence of psychoactive plant use in Southeast Asia.By analyzing hardened dental plaque, researchers uncovered compounds linked to betel nut, a stimulant that boosts alertness and euphoria...One common side effect of regular chewing is teeth stained a deep reddish-brown or black.However, the absence of these stains does not necessarily mean the habit was avoided. A recent investigation by an international team used a cutting-edge technique to study ancient dental plaque from Bronze Age Thailand,...

...archaeological evidence at one site called Madjedbebe in the far north of Australia's Northern Territory suggests the area may have been occupied much earlier -- at least 65,000 years ago.Archaeologists recovered human-made artifacts, including stone tools and ocher "crayons," from the Madjedbebe rock shelter and published their findings in a 2017 study. One difficulty in dating the artifacts, however, was the copious amount of sand on the floor of the rock shelter, which can move easily and cause artifacts to fall farther down, making them look older than they are.Although the research team took steps to counteract this issue and...

For centuries, its origins were shrouded in mystery. But a forgotten cemetery near Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan has revealed stunning new evidence. In this documentary-style deep dive, we explore how 800-year-old graves, ancient inscriptions, and cutting-edge DNA analysis led scientists to pinpoint the true birthplace of the plague that killed tens of millions across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Learn how a single strain of Yersinia pestis, preserved in the teeth of medieval plague victims, was identified as the ancestral source of the Black Death. Discover how trade routes, climate change, and human mobility allowed a microscopic killer to...

When the well-preserved body of the famous Ötzi the Iceman was recovered from the ice in the Austrian-Italian Alps in 1991, his remains provided archaeologists with a wealth of information about life in Europe more than 5,000 years ago. Surprisingly, sequencing of his genome indicated that he shared a very high proportion of his ancestry with early farmers who lived in Anatolia. Science News Today reports that a groundbreaking new study analyzed the DNA of 47 other individuals who lived alongside Ötzi in the Austrian Tyrol between 6400 and 1300 b.c. to determine if they shared genomic similarities. The research...

Aze.Media reports that a team of researchers from several Azerbaijani institutions unearthed a remarkable [3,800]-year-old tomb belonging to a high-status Bronze Age warrior. The archaeologists were investigating an area of Keshikchidagh State Historical and Cultural Reserve when they located the kurgan, or burial mound, which measured 90 feet in diameter and stood 6 feet high. When the archaeologists began excavating this feature, they revealed a large central interior chamber that was covered with 14 large stone blocks, each weighing approximately one ton. The tomb within this passage was divided into three sections: one containing the body and personal equipment, another...

Sir Thomas More's head could be exhumed 500 years after it was parboiled and put on a spike on London Bridge. St Dunstan's, an Anglican church in Canterbury, Kent, where the remains of Henry VIII's lord chancellor lie, has launched a bid to have them unearthed and placed in a shrine. More was beheaded at Tower Hill in 1535 after he refused to acknowledge the monarch as head of the church following Henry's break from Rome.

This week we pop across to the Mendips and explore the heart of Somerset with a rather unsettling Mystery. Deep in mining country a discovery was made, 20m below the surface, to this day we have yet to fully explain what happened here. The Most Unsettling MYSTERY, No one can Explain... | 14:25 Paul Whitewick | 191K subscribers | 12,833 views | July 13, 2025

Abstract: Ancient Egyptian society flourished for millennia, reaching its peak during the Dynastic Period (approximately 3150–30 bce). However, owing to poor DNA preservation, questions about regional interconnectivity over time have not been addressed because whole-genome sequencing has not yet been possible. Here we sequenced a 2× coverage whole genome from an adult male Egyptian excavated at Nuwayrat (Nuerat, نويرات). Radiocarbon dated to 2855–2570 cal. bce, he lived a few centuries after Egyptian unification, bridging the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods. The body was interred in a ceramic pot within a rock-cut tomb1, potentially contributing to the DNA preservation. Most...

Helen Alderman was a young girl when she learned that her great-uncle was the Florida soldier executed on July 7, 1865, with three others who had conspired to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. On a sunny afternoon 129 years after Lewis Thornton Powell’s death, Alderman, 72, and about two dozen friends, family and historians gathered Saturday under the shade of six cypress trees at a Geneva community cemetery to bury a small mahogany box and close the story of the Florida farm boy who joined John Wilkes Booth in one of the most notorious acts in American history. “Never in my...

A new study reveals a long-isolated North African human lineage in the Central Sahara during the African humid period more than 7,000 years ago To the point DNA analysis from two naturally mummified individuals from Libya: More than 7,000 years ago, during the so-called African Humid Period (Green Sahara), a long isolated human lineage existed in North Africa. Limited gene flow: The genomes do not carry sub-Saharan African ancestry, suggesting that, contrary to previous interpretations, the Green Sahara was not a migration corridor between Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa. The spread of migratory herding in the Green Sahara probably occurred through...