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Prehistoric humans hunt a woolly mammoth. More and more research shows that this species – and at least 46 other species of megaherbivores – were driven to extinction by humans. Credit: Engraving by Ernest Grise, photographed by William Henry Jackson. Courtesy Getty’s Open Content Program ================================================================== Researchers at Aarhus University have concluded that human hunting, rather than climate change, was the primary factor in the extinction of large mammals over the past 50,000 years. This finding is based on a review of over 300 scientific articles. Over the last 50,000 years, many large species, or megafauna, weighing at least 45...

Ancient Egyptians, 2000-3000 thousand years ago, not only worshipped crocodiles, offering them bread, meat and wine, but also sacrificed and mummified them, a new study confirms. Published in the journal Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, the research purports to have gained a deeper understanding of a religious practice behind the mummification of crocodiles in ancient Egypt. The specific crocodile mummy examined for the study that led to the conclusions was 2.2 meters-long and is housed at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The team of experts conducted various scans on the mummified crocodile, which revealed a fish hook...

More than 146,000 years ago, Neanderthals hunted birds and other game during short stays at a Spanish cave called Cova Negra. Anthropologists studying the bones they left behind came across one that stood out: a part of the skull that contains the inner ear bones just a few centimeters long, from a child who lived to about age 6.The bone displays a handful of tiny anomalies most commonly found in people with Down syndrome today. The child likely had this condition and had hearing loss, scientists report today in Science Advances—the oldest known example of the condition. If confirmed, the...

A study shows that repetitive tasks carried out by ancient Egyptian scribes – high status men with the ability to write who performed administrative tasks – and the positions they sat in while working may have led to degenerative skeletal changes.Researchers in Prague, Czech Republic, examined the skeletal remains of 69 adults males, 30 of whom were scribes, who were buried in the necropolis at Abusir, Egypt...They identified degenerative joint changes that were more common among scribes compared to men with other occupations.These changes were in the joints connecting the lower jaw to the skull, the right collarbone and the...

Horses were domesticated at least twice, researchers report June 6 in Nature. Genetic data suggest Botai hunter-gatherers in Central Asia may have been the first to domesticate the animals for milk and meat around 5,000 years ago. That attempt didn't stick. But other people living north of the Caucasian Mountains domesticated horses for transportation about 4,200 years ago, the researchers found.Those latter horses took the equine world by storm. In just a few centuries, they replaced their wild cousins and became the modern domestic horse...ancient people from southwest Asia known as the Yamnaya have been credited with being the first...

While excavating a cemetery for medieval knights in Spain, archaeologists came across something unexpected: the remains of a woman. Pierced by sharp objects, her bones suggest she fought and died in battle, likely over 800 years ago. The discovery prompted a flurry of questions about her role in the male-dominated society. Who was she? Why was she buried there? Did she fight alongside the knights? By analyzing her skeleton, archaeologists shed light on her diet, lifestyle and status, allowing them to venture several hypotheses about her identity, according to a study published May 14 in the journal Scientific Reports.

A GP has shared his expertise on two common sexually transmitted infections - gonorrhoea and syphilis - as cases of the infections in the UK are at an all-time highUK Health Security Agency's latest figures have shown that cases of gonorrhoea and syphilis are at a record high across the UK. As summer approaches, a lack of education about these common STIs could lead to an even greater increase in cases, warns a doctor. Dr Donald Grant, a GP and senior clinical advisor at The Independent Pharmacy, has offered his expert advice on these two sexually transmitted infections, highlighting the...

An international team of researchers studying a 4,000-year-old Egyptian skull that had signs of cancer say they have found evidence that ancient Egyptian medical practitioners knew about and potentially even tried to treat the deadly disease...While previous studies have revealed that Egyptians from these periods were able to identify, describe, and treat diseases and traumatic injuries, build prosthetics, and even place dental fillings, this study is the first to show that these surprisingly advanced ancient people may have tried to treat cancer around the same time they were building the pyramids...To conduct their analysis, the researchers were able to procure...

November 21, 2022 Share Email 592205.jpg Credit: U.S. Military One of the keys to bringing home unidentified military remains, including POW/MIAs and the more than 81,500 soldiers unaccounted for in conflicts dating back to World War II, is using science to determine where home might be. University of Utah scientists are engaged in an effort, in support of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, to develop methods that can trace the geographic origin of remains, particularly teeth. Why teeth? Because everyone’s body, including their teeth, contains a record of where they’ve lived and traveled in the form of various stable isotopes...

A British museum will remove the bones of a true-life giant in an effort to honor the deceased’s final wishes, but trustees want to retain the remains in the interest of “bona fide research.” “John Hunter and other anatomists and surgeons of the 18th and 19th centuries acquired many specimens in ways we would not consider ethical today and which are rightly subject to review and discussion,” trustees of the Hunterian Museum wrote in a statement. Irishman Charles Byrne reached a staggering height of 7-foot-7, earning the nickname of the “Irish Giant.” Upon his death in June 1783 at the...

Thomas Gingeras did not intend to upend basic ideas about how the human body works. In 2012 the geneticist, now at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, was one of a few hundred colleagues who were simply trying to put together a compendium of human DNA functions. Their ­project was called ENCODE, for the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. About a decade earlier almost all of the three billion DNA building blocks that make up the human genome had been identified. Gingeras and the other ENCODE scientists were trying to figure out what all that DNA did. The assumption...

The oldest human viruses, including herpes, have been uncovered in 50,000-year-old Neanderthal bones - and experts could soon recreate them. Researchers at Brazil's Federal University of São Paulo identified remnants of the herpesviruses, which causes cold sores, the sexually transmitted papillomavirus and adenovirus, also known as the common cold, in two male Neanderthals' DNA found in a Russian cave. Previous theories suggested that Neanderthals may have gone extinct because of viruses and the latest study may be the first to provide evidence for this idea. Now, the team hopes to synthesize the viruses and infect human cells in a lab...

After nearly 40 years, police say they have solved two cold-case murders of Virginia women using genetic genealogy. On Tuesday morning, cops arrested Elroy Harrison, 65, in connection with the 1986 slaying of Jacqueline Lard, 32, who was working at a real-estate office when she was beaten and left dead under a pile of carpet in the woods. Authorities say they also expect to charge Harrison in the death of Amy Baker, 18, who was fatally strangled and dumped in the woods after her car broke down in 1989. Forensic evidence links the two cases, police said. ...

An ancient necropolis discovered near Naples, Italy was used to bury the dead about 2,800 years ago, around the time the city of Rome was founded about 100 miles (161 kilometers) to the northwest.The discovery gives researchers a rare insight into the Iron Age cultures that existed before the Roman domination of the region. The astonishing finds near the town of Amorosi, about 30 miles (48 km) northeast of Naples, include 88 burials in "pit tombs" of both men and women.The men were typically buried with weapons, whereas the women were often buried with bronze ornaments, including bracelets, pendants, brooches...

Archaeologists have unearthed a sprawling ancient Roman cemetery in southern France containing 1,430 graves and evidence of funerary banquets held in honor of deceased family members.Excavations of the cemetery, called the Robine necropolis due to its proximity to a canal of the same name, began in 2017 ahead of construction work in the city of Narbonne. The funerary complex was "remarkably well-preserved," having been buried beneath a 10-foot (3 meters) blanket of silt during flooding of the nearby Aude River, according to a translated statement.The graves and artifacts date to between the end of the first century B.C. and the...

In 2018, a female Neanderthal was discovered in the Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. Now, archaeologists from The University of Cambridge have unveiled the reconstructed face of the 75,000-year-old woman, based on the assembly of hundreds of individual bone fragments recovered during excavations. “Neanderthals have had a bad press ever since the first ones were found over 150 years ago,” said Professor Graeme Barker from Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, who led the excavation at the cave where the woman’s remains were discovered. Neanderthals are believed to have become extinct around 40,000 years ago, and discoveries of their remains...

While we don't like to talk ill of the dead, new physiological analysis has found that the king of the dinosaurs was not so smart after all. It upends previous research that last year likened the brain and neuronal composition of the Tyrannosaurus rex to that of a primate. It's been a rough year or two for the long extinct dinosaur. First, we questioned their teeth, finding that those iconic chompers could very much have been smaller and hidden behind lips, and now an international team of paleontologists, behavioral scientists and neurologists have concluded that the T. rex wasn't smarter...

The exceptional discovery of burials about 9,000 years old - probably containing the oldest human remains ever found in Corsica (France) - will allow a better understanding of the history of early settlement of the island and of the Mediterranean. On a hill near the village of Sollacaro, Southern Corsica, nestled under a huge ball-shaped block of eroded granite which served as a shelter for prehistoric peoples, the location has been excavated by a team of archaeologists from several French universities, assisted by a Danish colleague... Having uncovered the bones of four or five adults, a teenager, and a baby...

They remain one of the most elusive groups of humans to have walked on earth. Evidence from the DNA traces left by Denisovans shows they lived on the Tibetan plateau, ­probably ­travelled to the Philippines and Laos in south Asia and might have made their way to northern China more than 100,000 years ago. They also interbred with modern humans...Their DNA, which was first found in samples from the Denisova cave in Siberia in 2010, provides most of our ­information about their existence.But recently scientists have pinpointed a strong candidate for the species to which the Denisovans might have belonged....

Nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy have long fought to maintain control over their land and water. Oral traditions and archaeological evidence indicate the Blackfoot Indigenous peoples and their ancestors have inhabited a broad swatch of North America more than 10,000 years.A study published today in Science Advances reinforces that connection. Genetic data confirm modern Blackfoot people are closely related to those who lived on the land hundreds of years ago. The findings also suggest Blackfoot people descend from a previously unknown genetic lineage extending back roughly 18,000 years ago, when people first populated the Americas—evidence that could bolster their claims...