Free Republic

View of winged Lion of Venice at Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy. (Photo by BGStock72 on Shutterstock) In A Nutshell Scientific testing shows Venice’s bronze Lion of St .Mark was cast in China during the Tang Dynasty (AD 618–907), not in Europe. Lead-isotope analysis traced the copper to the Guishan, Yaojialing, and Anji mines along China’s Lower Yangzi River. Stylistic evidence reveals it began as a mythic tomb guardian called a zhènmùshòu, complete with horns and bat-like ears later cut away. Venetian merchants, possibly the Polo family, may have refashioned the statue into a winged lion as Venice’s new...

Detail from Fra Mauro's map, a work of unprecedented thoroughness and accuracy. PUBLIC DOMAIN If you had landed in Venice during the mid-15th century, you might have been accosted by a monk with a prominent nose and baggy, smurf-like hat. Ignoring your exhaustion and atrocious body odor after a long sea journey, he would have dragged you to a nearby tavern and cross-examined you about your travels. What was the weather like? What kind of precious gems were mined? What animals did you encounter, and how many heads did they have?The monk was Fra Mauro, a 15th-century version of Google...

Arctic carving shows complexity of ancient hunting groups. Northern hunters may have been killing whales 3,000 years ago and commemorating their bravery with pictures carved in ivory. Archaeologists working in the Russian Arctic have unearthed a remarkably detailed carving of groups of hunters engaged in whaling — sticking harpoons into the great mammals. The same site also yielded heavy stone blades that had been broken as if by some mighty impact, and remains from a number of dead whales. All of this adds up to the probability that the site, called Un’en’en, holds the earliest straightforward evidence of the practice...

3,000-year-old ivory carving depicts whaling scene From ANI London, April 1: Archaeologists working in the Russian Arctic have unearthed a remarkably detailed 3,000-year-old ivory carving that depicts groups of hunters engaged in whaling, which pushes back direct evidence for whaling by about 1,000 years. According to a report in Nature News, the ancient picture implies that northern hunters may have been killing whales 3,000 years ago and commemorating their bravery with pictures carved in ivory. Among the picture which depicts hunters sticking harpoons into whales, the site also yielded heavy stone blades that had been broken as if by some...

Dr Karel Fraaije travels back in time to explore a hidden treasure from the English Middle Ages: the Hereford World Map. This enormous artwork shows what thirteenth-century scholars from England thought our planet looks like.The document is dotted with ancient legends, biblical sites, and a great number of presumptions about strange and distant places. The mapmakers even proposed that some people on the edges of the known world had faces in their chests.The video concludes with debunking a common myth about the middle ages: contrary to modern popular opinion, medieval mapmakers did not believe that the world was flat. This...

GALVESTON — A U.S. Navy submarine that can roll on wheels across the ocean floor will leave Pier 40 today on a weeklong expedition to search the deep for evidence of ancient human habitation. The Navy's only nuclear-power research vessel, the NR-1, will carry scientists looking for signs of early humans who may have lived on a coast that 19,000 years ago extended 100 miles farther into the Gulf of Mexico than it does today. If scientists on the expedition, dubbed "Secrets of the Gulf," find evidence that humans roamed those ancient shores, it would push back the earliest known...

<p>Washington — A people who may have been ancestors of the first Americans lived in Arctic Siberia, enduring one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth at the height of the Ice Age, according to researchers who discovered the oldest evidence yet of humans living near the frigid gateway to the New World. Russian scientists uncovered a 30,000-year-old site where ancient hunters lived on the Yana River in Siberia, some 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle and not far from the Bering land bridge that then connected Asia with North America.</p>

Archaeologist Greer Jarrett at Lund University in Sweden has been sailing in the footsteps of Vikings for three years. He can now show that the Vikings sailed farther away from Scandinavia, and took routes farther from land, than was previously believed to have been possible. In his latest study, he has found evidence of a decentralised network of ports, located on islands and peninsulas, which probably played a central role in trade and travel in the Viking era. Traveling in the wake of the Vikings | 5:35 Lund University | 29.4K subscribers | 18,547 views | May 20, 2025 From...

The Herald Scotland reports that prior to the construction of a new housing development in Guardbridge, Fife, archaeological excavations uncovered traces of some 10,000 years of local history. The historic village takes its name from a sixteenth-century bridge that led pilgrims across the River Eden to St. Andrews, but a team from GUARD Archaeology recently unearthed evidence that the site was a hotspot of human occupation far earlier than that. During the Upper Paleolithic period, some of Scotland's first inhabitants made flint tools at the site. Later, early Neolithic farmers left many pits across the area, which contained burnt cereal...

As Phoenician sailors ventured into the waters of the western Mediterranean Sea to establish new settlements in the early first millennium b.c., they deliberately brought the familiar scents of home with them, according to a statement issued by the University of Tübingen. Researchers from the University of Tübingen and the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) recently analyzed more than 50 miniature ceramic vessels found in ancient tombs, houses, and sacred areas at a Phoenician site on the island of Motya, off the west coast of Sicily. The study determined that all had been made in southern Phoenicia, near present-day Beirut,...

A civilization confident in itself reads the Iliad. A civilization in decline denounces it. Guess which one we are. A confident civilization does not quake at the sight of Homer. It does not avert its gaze from Pericles or issue trigger warnings before mentioning Caesar. It does not treat the Iliad like some toxic spill to be cordoned off by hazmat crews. Yet ours does. As Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath warned in Who Killed Homer?, the gravest threat to the classics is not public indifference but professors themselves—men and women who, having ceased to teach Homer, now cower...

Ancient Chinese written documents record that by the second century a.d., a vast trade network had already been established connecting peoples and goods from the Mediterranean, the Near East, India, and Asia. This has been confirmed by archaeological excavations throughout Southeast Asia, which have uncovered various items such as Indian jewelry, Roman glass, and Persian pottery. According to a Science News Today report, however, a comprehensive new study has revealed that silver coinage may be the key to truly understanding just how interconnected these distant regions actually were. Found at many archaeological sites across this region, the coins feature a...

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...

When the Bedale hoard was first discovered by metal detectorists in 2012, it was immediately recognized as one of the most significant assemblages of Viking-era silver objects and jewelry that had ever been found in England. Dating to the late ninth or early tenth century, the collection consists of 29 silver ingots and several elaborate neck rings, among other items. According to a statement released by the University of Oxford, a recent study of the origins of the Bedale silver is shedding new light on the international scope and far-reaching extent of Viking trade. Researchers led by Oxford archaeologist Jane...

Rome's love for pepper and incense fueled a global trade network. This episode follows their journey -- from Arabian deserts and Indian coasts, through Petra and Red Sea ports, to Mediterranean hubs -- ending in the spice markets of the Eternal City, including the Horrea Piperataria. From Desert to Rome: the Spice Roads of the Ancient World | 8:35 Ancient Rome Live | 80K subscribers | 475 views | August 11, 2025

The dispersal of archaic hominins beyond mainland Southeast Asia (Sunda) represents the earliest evidence for humans crossing ocean barriers to reach isolated landmasses. Previously, the oldest indication of hominins in Wallacea, the oceanic island zone east of Sunda, comprised flaked stone artifacts deposited at least 1.02 million years ago at the site of Wolo Sege on the island of Flores. On Sulawesi, the largest Wallacean island, previous excavations revealed stone artifacts with a minimum age of 194,000 years at the open site of Talepu. Now, archaeologists from Griffith University show that stone artifacts also occur at the nearby site of...

Scylax of Caryanda, a Greek in the service of the Persian Great King, is best known for his early exploration of India and for shaping what the ancient Greeks knew about the East. Born in the late 6th century BC in a Carian town of Asia Minor (Anatolia), he lived at the cultural crossroads of Greek and Persian influence. Scylax became both an explorer and a writer—an essential figure in the transmission of geographical knowledge between civilizations. Unfortunately, Scylax’s original writings have not survived. What we know of his life and work comes from fragments preserved by later historians like...

...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...

The Ancient Greeks were active travelers, despite the dangers of land travel and the fear of highwaymen. Sea travel required ample supplies and means. A fascinating archaeological find exhibited in the Agora Museum in Athens is rectangular clay tablets with inscribed names and occupations that purportedly served as travel documents in antiquity. Most travelers were aristocrats and well-to-do citizens who traveled to witness and experience the wonders of the ancient world, and other famous places and sights. Others traveled for pilgrimage; healing in sanctuaries such as the Sanctuary of Asclepius in Olympia, the Sanctuary of Apollo on Delos Island, or...

WITH A PUEFACE BY THE BISHOP OF OXFORD. ' And the august abode from whence they came.' Speculations as to an Eastern emigration are scarcely more than glanced at here; and it may appear almost superfluous to refer to two groundless hypotheses which have been formed—the first, that Greek remains have been discovered in South America, and that faint vestiges of Greece are also traceable in the islands of Hawaii. The other supposition is that of the Hawaiian race being of Hebrew origin, and that these islanders represent the lost tribes of the house of Israel.