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The new story begins in Southeast Asian rice fields. The earliest known chicken remains come from Ban Non Wat, a dry rice–farming site in central Thailand that roughly dates to between 1650 B.C. and 1250 B.C. Dry rice farmers plant the crop on upland soil soaked by seasonal rains rather than in flooded fields or paddies. That would have made rice grains at Ban Non Wat fair game for avian ancestors of chickens.These fields attracted hungry wild birds called red jungle fowl. Red jungle fowl increasingly fed on rice grains, and probably grains of another cereal crop called millet, grown...

A 65,000-year-old tool – a kind of ancient Swiss Army knife – found across southern Africa has provided scientists with proof that the ancestors of modern homo sapiens were communicating with each other.In a world first, a team of international scientists have found early humans across the continent made the stone tool in exactly the same shape, using the same template, showing that they shared knowledge with each other...These tools were produced in enormous numbers across southern Africa roughly 60-65,000 years ago.Because the people across southern Africa all chose to make the tools look the same, it indicates they must...

Excavations of a Viking-era site in Iceland has revealed a previously unknown man-made cave.Archaeologists from the Archaeological Institute of Iceland have been excavating near the small village of Oddi in Rangárvellir, Iceland.Oddi was the seat of the Oddaverjar, a powerful clan in the medieval Icelandic Commonwealth. One of the most famous clan members was Sæmundur the Learned (AD 1056-1133) who wrote the early histories of the Norwegian Kings. The settlement developed into a major centre for culture and learning, with Iceland’s patron saint, Þorlákur Þórhallsson, receiving his education at Oddi from the age of nine (AD 1142-1147).Man-made caves at Oddi...

Proteins extracted from fragments of prehistoric eggshell found in the Australian sands confirm that the continent’s earliest humans consumed the eggs of a two-metre tall bird that disappeared into extinction over 47,000 years ago.Burn marks discovered on scraps of ancient shell several years ago suggested the first Australians cooked and ate large eggs from a long-extinct bird – leading to fierce debate over the species that laid them.Now, an international team led by scientists from the universities of Cambridge and Turin have placed the animal on the evolutionary tree by comparing the protein sequences from powdered egg fossils to those...

“Genyornis was two meters tall and 200 kilos. We don’t know exactly what it would have looked like because it’s been dead for a while and there are few skeletal remains available. It was certainly a flightless bird with some characteristics shared with ostriches, like the big chest and small wings, but it would have looked more like a big goose or duck,” The evidence that humans were eating these large eggs comes from burnt eggshells found among the remains of ancient cultures. Scientists studying these sites find two different types of eggshells, one of which comes from emus and...

Archaeologists have unearthed the ancient burial of a woman lying on a bronze bed near the city of Kozani in northern Greece. It dates to the first century B.C. Depictions of mermaids decorate the posts of the bed. The bed also displays an image of a bird holding a snake in its mouth, a symbol of the ancient Greek god Apollo. The woman's head was covered with gold laurel leaves that likely were part of a wreath... The wooden portions of the bed have decomposed. Gold threads, possibly from embroidery, were found on the woman's hands, Chondrogianni-Metoki said. Additionally, four...

The discovery of pottery from the ancient Lapita culture by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) has shed new light on how Papua New Guinea (PNG) served as a launching pad for the colonization of the Pacific—one of the greatest migrations in human history.The new study makes clear the initial expansion of the Lapita people throughout PNG was far greater than previously thought.The study... is based on the discovery of a distinctive Lapita pottery sherd, a broken piece of pottery with sharp edges, on Brooker Island (200km east of mainland PNG) in 2017 that lead researcher Dr. Ben Shaw...

The first detailed academic study of East African maritime traditions shows changes in boatbuilding techniques but the continuing use of wooden vessels by fishers.Researchers have used photogrammetry technology to document the watercraft using the Zanzibar Channel, on which so many livelihoods depend.Large local vessels—the mtepe, dau la mtepe, and even the larger jahazis—have long left the Zanzibar Channel because of the development of modern transport infrastructure, the end of the mangrove-pole trade, and the changing political economy of the wider Indian Ocean...The small-scale artisanal fishing sector is buoyant, largely reflecting population growth, leading to falling stocks and soaring catch rates...

Summary: Who helped build the first trading networks in the earliest civilization? Scholars long thought that wandering nomads moving their flocks in the Near East helped spur urban growth by bringing stone, wood, and metals to the plains of Mesopotamia. That assumption was built, in part, on studies of modern-day nomads in Anatolia, Iraq, and Iran. Thanks to recent isotopic analyses from ancient sites, that view is under siege. Archaeologists like Emily Hammer from the University of Pennsylvania suggest that pastoralists did not stray far from home until long after cities like Ur and Mari flourished around 2000 B.C.E. That...

JERUSALEM - A boat that plied the coast of the Holy Land 1,300 years ago carrying fish, carobs and olives is helping researchers better understand a little-known period in the region's history. The boat, discovered in a coastal lagoon near the northern city of Haifa, dates from the early 8th century, not long after the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest of the Middle East. The find suggests that a long tradition of sea trade was not disrupted by the arrival of new rulers from the Arabian desert.

In this video, we look at the mysterious historical origins of one of the world's favorite spices: Cinnamon.

"According to a story in Herodotus, the nature of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and the advantages and inconveniences of each, were as well understood at the time of the neighing of the horse of Darius, as they are at this hour." John Adams: A DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTIONS OF GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. [3.80] ... Otanes recommended that the management of public affairs should be entrusted to the whole nation. [democracy] "To me," he said, "it seems advisable, that we should no longer have a single man to rule over us - the rule of one is...

New ancient DNA analysis has shed light on how the black rat, blamed for spreading Black Death, dispersed across Europe -- revealing that the rodent colonized the continent on two occasions in the Roman and Medieval periods. By analyzing DNA from ancient black rat remains found at archaeological sites spanning the 1st to the 17th centuries in Europe and North Africa, researchers have pieced together a new understanding of how rat populations dispersed following the ebbs and flows of human trade, urbanism, and empires...The study -- led by the University of York along with the University of Oxford and the...

A new phenomenon of constructing distinctive funerary monuments, collectively known as megalithic tombs, emerged around 4500 BCE along the Atlantic façade. The megalithic phenomenon has attracted interest and speculation since medieval times. In particular, the origin, dispersal dynamics, and the role of these constructions within the societies that built them have been debated. We generate genome sequence data from 24 individuals buried in five megaliths and investigate the population history and social dynamics of the groups that buried their dead in megalithic monuments across northwestern Europe in the fourth millennium BCE. Our results show kin relations among the buried individuals...

An ancient trading ship carrying wine that lay undiscovered at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea for more than 2,000 years has been damaged and looted since being discovered by archaeologists, French authorities said Wednesday.The ship, named Fort Royal 1, is thought to have sunk off the coast of Cannes on the French Riviera during the second century BC.Divers tasked with the first official explorations of the wreck, which was discovered in 2017, found that some of the clay containers used to transport wine at the time had been removed by divers who had broken into the vessel."Well-conserved wrecks from...

Separated by geography and language, there's not much that might seem to connect India's five dwindling Jewish communities – except praying in Hebrew, and food. ...Kolkata is home to the Baghdadi Jews, who were once abundant enough to warrant five synagogues; now there aren't enough for a minyan (minimum [10] male Jews required for liturgical purposes). Magen David and the smaller Beth El Synagogue were both classified as protected monuments and renovated by the Archaeological Survey of India in 2017. ...The story of disappearing Jewish populations finds echoes elsewhere in India. Jews are believed to have first arrived in India...

Polar bears from the Arctic. Tigers from India. Giraffes from the Serengeti. The Romans brought animals thousands of miles for the beast hunts and shows staged in the Colosseum.How did the Romans Capture Animals for the Colosseum? | August 16, 2019 | toldinstone

It’s not that Africa is shown as being too small on the majority of world maps, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong explains below, it’s how almost every other part of the world has been artificially inflated. If we want someone to blame for this distortion, then we need look no further than the year 1569 when the cartographer Gerardus Mercator devised a solution to the problem of representing a globe on a 2D map’s surface. Mercator’s projection was revolutionary and invaluable for nautical navigation, but in the modern era, is outdated and wildly inaccurate. You can see this for yourself quite...

Researchers excavated human footprints out of a small bluff next to a dried-up playa lake and radiocarbon-dated embedded seeds to around 23,000 years ago. Their results suggest that people entered the Americas thousands of years earlier than the accepted estimate....some of these prints could be tens of thousands of years old, making them potentially the best evidence yet that people reached the Americas far earlier than once believed. Radiocarbon dating of seeds surrounding the prints suggests that they were made during the Last Glacial Maximum, when massive ice sheets are thought to have blocked any passage from the Bering Land...

A team of archaeologists from the Iraqi German Mission of the State Board of Antiquities and the Orient Department of the German Archaeological Institute have excavated a 4000-year-old boat near the ancient city of Uruk.Uruk, also known as Warka was an ancient city of Sumer (and later of Babylonia), situated on the dried-up ancient channel of the Euphrates River.Uruk played a leading role in the early urbanisation of Sumer in the mid-4th millennium BC, emerging as a major population centre until it was abandoned shortly before or after the Islamic conquest of AD 633–638.The boat was first discovered during a...