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Belize's Midnight Terror Cave is still leaving clues about more than 100 people who were sacrificed to the Maya rain god there more than a millennium ago. Used for burial during the Maya Classic period (A.D. 250 to 925), the cave was named by locals who were called to rescue an injured looter in 2006. A three-year excavation project by California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA) professors and students concluded that the more than 10,000 bones uncovered in the cave represented at least 118 people, many of whom had evidence of trauma inflicted on them around the time...

Genetic testing reveals awkward truth about Xinjiang’s famous mummies (AFP) 19 April 2005 URUMQI, China - After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that Caucasians roamed China’s Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived. The research, which the Chinese government has appeared to have delayed making public out of concerns of fueling Uighur Muslim separatism in its western-most Xinjiang region, is based on a cache of ancient dried-out corpses that have been found around the Tarim Basin in recent decades. “It is unfortunate that the issue has been so politicized because it...

Genetic testing reveals awkward truth about Xinjiang’s famous mummiesM (AFP) 19 April 2005 URUMQI, China - After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that Caucasians roamed China’s Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived. The research, which the Chinese government has appeared to have delayed making public out of concerns of fueling Uighur Muslim separatism in its western-most Xinjiang region, is based on a cache of ancient dried-out corpses that have been found around the Tarim Basin in recent decades. “It is unfortunate that the issue has been so politicized because it...

The remains of dozens of child sacrifice victims have been unearthed in Peru, and many more are likely waiting to be found, archaeologists say. The skeletons show evidence that the children's hearts were removed, said Gabriel Prieto, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Florida who directs the excavations at Pampa La Cruz, the site near Huanchaco where the remains were found. All 76 skeletons had a "transversal clean cut across the sternum," Prieto said, which suggests that "they possibly opened up the rib cage and then they possibly extracted the heart."

Almost three hundred years after the Romans left, scholars like Bede wrote about the Angles and the Saxons and their migrations to the British Isles. Scholars of many disciplines, including archaeology, history, linguists and genetics, have debated what his words might have described, and what the scale, the nature and the impact of human migration were at that time.New genetic results now show that around 75 percent of the population in Eastern and Southern England was made up of migrant families whose ancestors must have originated from continental regions bordering the North Sea, including the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. What...

A prominent Egyptologist has boldly claimed to have solved one archaeology’s greatest mysteries: the location of Queen Nefertiti’s mummified remains. Zahi Hawass, the previous Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs in Egypt, is part of the Egypt-led team that undertook a high-profile excavation in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings that allegedly uncovered amulets once owned by King Tut. The team announced last December that they had also unearthed several unnamed mummies, one of which Hawass believes is the famed ruler. “We already have DNA from the 18th dynasty mummies, from Akhenaten to Amenhotep II or III, and there are two...

The South American mummies were likely victims of brutal murders...Behaving more like detectives than academics, a research team scanned three mummified bodies from Chile and Peru in South America to look for clues on how the individuals died. One male victim was hit on the head and stabbed in the back, while another male was likely killed after receiving "massive trauma" to the neck, which included dislocation, the researchers revealed....mummified remains can hold secrets that are lost when only bones are preserved. Both the stabbing and the cervical rotational trauma of the dislocated neck would have escaped detection in skeletons,...

To the south of the causeway of King Unas in Saqqara necropolis... the sarcophagus of Ptahemwia from the reign of King Ramses II... was discovered last year in Saqqara.Mostafa Waziry, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said Ptahemwia holds several titles, including the royal scribe, the great overseer of the cattle in the temple of Ramses II, the head of the treasury, and the one responsible for the offerings of all gods of Lower and Upper Egypt...The subterranean burial chamber opened on the west side of the shaft at the depth of 7 m. It led to a square...

resident Joe Biden claimed there is no "federal solution" to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. He then jetted off to Delaware for the rest of the week. Today, he called a lid at 10:13 am. ... The admission has prompted calls from lawmakers on Capitol Hill and around the country to end federal vaccine mandates, which are destroying the economy. ... Joe Biden, who ran for President on the promise of ending the COVID-19 pandemic: "There is no federal solution. This gets solved at a state level. ... If there’s no federal Covid solution, why is there a federal vaccine mandate?...

...The sophistication of the body’s mummification process and the materials used – including its exceptionally fine linen dressing and high-quality resin – was not thought to have been achieved until 1,000 years later. Professor Salima Ikram, head of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and a leading expert on the history of mummification, told the Observer: “If this is indeed an Old Kingdom mummy, all books about mummification and the history of the Old Kingdom will need to be revised.” She added: “This would completely turn our understanding of the evolution of mummification on its head. The materials used,...

Over the course of his 30-year journey, Thompson has written five books, all self-published, detailing what he believes to be conclusive evidence that, long before 1492, the Americas were explored repeatedly -- by the ancient Chinese, Venetians, Egyptians, Romans, Vikings, Irish, English and who-knows-who-else. He argues, for example, that a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, commanding a fleet of Chinese junks in the early 1400s, explored the coasts of the Americas. He believes that Marco Polo sailed with the Chinese into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and perhaps into Puget Sound in the 13th century. He is convinced that...

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Spain, working with a colleague from South Africa, has found that for some people living in the Roman Empire, funerary meals were much like everyday meals...During the time of the Roman Empire, rules were made for conquered lands that tended to coincide with rules that the Romans themselves followed. One set of rules governed funeral arrangements. And one of those rules mandated that an animal (or part of one) must be sacrificed and placed into the grave with the person who had died—regardless of age, gender or social status. In this...

The discovery of the three bodies on Indonesia's Alor Island, dating from 7,500 to 12,000 years ago, sheds new light on burial practices and migration through the area... Dr. Sofia Samper Carro said the three burials are significant because the positioning of each body shows a different mortuary practice. Dr. Samper Carro said this might relate to multiple migratory routes through the area from thousands of years ago...The mere process of finding and uncovering the bodies saw Dr. Samper Carro and her team uncover more than 250 bones, including the three bodies, which were in a seated, flexed (on side)...

"When we look at the rise of Mycenaean civilization, the ancient DNA supports the notion that it was a local phenomenon, not something imported from the outside," said co-author Jack Davis, a UC Classics professor and department head."The development of the state by the Mycenaean was indigenous to Greece," Davis said.Among the remains studied for ancient DNA analysis was that of the Griffin Warrior, whose tomb was discovered in 2015 by Davis and UC Classics senior research associate Sharon Stocker... under an olive grove in Pylos, a coastal city in southern Greece. A forensic examination determined the remains belonged to...

Growing up in Greece, Iosif Lazaridis shared his compatriots’ appreciation that they lived in “the crossroads of Europe and Asia,” past and present...Featuring the genomes of more than 1,300 ancient people, 727 of them sequenced for the first time, the work represents one of the largest analyses to date of ancient human DNA...In addition to illuminating shifts in different populations’ genetic makeup across the centuries, the analyses provide fresh genetic insights into old mysteries such as the identities of Minoan and Mycenaean peoples and the geographic origin of Indo-European languages...Until a few years ago, it was difficult or impossible to...

Teeth from long-dead people and animals are divulging the history of modern-day pathogens.Ancient DNA extracted from the teeth of humans who lived long ago is yielding new information about pathogens past and present. In one of the latest studies, researchers uncovered and sequenced ancient herpes genomes for the first time, from the teeth of long-dead Europeans. The strain of herpes virus that causes lip sores in people today — called HSV-1 — was once thought to have emerged in Africa more than 50,000 years ago. But the new data, published in Science Advances on 27 July1, indicate that its origin...

A new analysis of remains from medieval Cambridge shows that local Augustinian friars were almost twice as likely as the city’s general population to be infected by intestinal parasites. This is despite most Augustinian monasteries of the period having latrine blocks and hand-washing facilities, unlike the houses of ordinary working people. Researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology say the difference in parasitic infection may be down to monks manuring crops in friary gardens with their own faeces, or purchasing fertiliser containing human or pig excrement. The study, published today in the International Journal of Paleopathology, is the...

For this study, the researchers collected data on craniofacial morphology from the published literature. This ultimately resulted in a data set including 13 Neandertals, 233 prehistoric Homo sapiens, and 83 modern humans.The researchers focused on standard craniofacial measurements, which are reproducible, and used those measurements to assess the size and shape of key facial structures. This then allowed the researchers to do an in-depth analysis to determine whether a given human population was likely to have interbred with Neandertal populations, as well as the extent of that likely interbreeding.

Lookalike People In Experiment Look-alikes in the study. (François Brunelle) It appears there's more to a doppelgänger than meets the eye. DNA analyses of 16 look-alike couples have revealed some unrelated people with super similar faces also have similar heights, weights, habits, and behaviors. Human resemblance, it would seem, is more than just skin deep. In the study, 3 different facial recognition algorithms were tasked with scoring the likeness of 32 look-alikes pairs; half were classified as doppelgängers by all 3 algorithms. Researchers then conducted genetic analyses and found 9 pairs of "ultra" look-alikes. Together, these super doppelgängers share 19,277...

...The new research was published in the journal PLOS ONE on Wednesday, August 17, wherein researchers found evidence of human Y chromosome sequences from an unidentified group in South America.The findings reportedly bring promising results that can potentially solve the mystery behind the missing genetic link of the human migration into South America.In recent years, multiple studies have continued to conduct the genetic mapping of human migration since our ancient ancestors left the continent of Africa around 60,000 years ago. From there, our predecessors expanded their presence and settlements across the six continents of the world...Amongst these research, three studies...