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These expert navigators sailed thousands of nautical miles long before other societies.The 2016 animated family film Moana brought the long-told story of Polynesian seafarers (along with some incredibly catchy tunes) to a much wider worldwide audience. Now, geochemical analysis is confirming the oral history of ancient Polynesia’s incredible sailors in a new study published April 21 in the journal Science Advances. Long before Europeans arrived, Polynesian wayfinders sailed to islands across the central Pacific in canoes, and the stories of their adventures have survived largely through oral history. There has been limited material evidence supporting these accounts of Polynesian societies...

Vikings occupied Greenland from roughly 985 to 1450, farming and building communities before abandoning their settlements and mysteriously vanishing. Why they disappeared has long been a puzzle, but a new paper from the Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) determines that one factor—rising sea level—likely played a major role...The departure of these Viking settlers coincided with the beginning of the period known as the Little Ice Age, which had a particular impact on the North Atlantic. But while cooling and freezing might seem likely to lower sea levels, a variety of factors combined to have the opposite...

Archaeologists have used wood taxa analysis to distinguish between imported, drift and native wood from five Norse farmsteads on Greenland.Historical records have long suggested that medieval Norse colonists on Greenland (AD 985–1450) relied on imported material such as iron and wood. Until now, it has not been fully recognized where these imports of wood came from...All sites were occupied between AD 1000 and 1400 and dated by radiocarbon dating and associated artifact types.A microscopic examination of the cellular structure of the wood previously found by archaeologists on these sites enabled the identification of tree genus or species, and the results...

It’s the first trove of artifacts identified from a sanctuary in the ancient Greek city of Paestum, which dates from the 5th century B.C. Paestum, famed for its three massive Doric-columned temples, is near the archaeological site of Pompeii, but farther down the Almalfi coast. The small temple was first identified in 2019 along the ancient city walls but excavations were halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Italian Culture Ministry said in a statement. Excavations yielded several small terracotta figurines in the first months of resuming work, the Ministry said. Archeologists found seven bull heads found around a temple...

The Viking shields found on the Gokstad ship in 1880 were not strictly ceremonial and may have been used in hand-to-hand combat, according to a new analysis.Dozens of Viking round shields from a famous ship burial unearthed in Norway were not strictly ceremonial as long thought; instead they may have protected warriors in battle, a new study finds.A reanalysis of the wooden shields, which were unearthed in the Gokstad ship in southern Norway in 1880, suggests they may have once been covered with rawhide (untanned cattle skin) and used in hand-to-hand combat, according to a new study published on March...

The Benin Bronzes Consist of Thousands of Metal Sculptures and Plaques Which Adorned the Royal Palace of the Kingdom of Benin, Presently Located in Edo State, Nigeria...Although the collection is commonly referred to as the Benin Bronzes, the pieces are predominantly crafted from brass of varying compositions using the lost-wax casting method, a process by which a duplicate sculpture is cast from an original sculpture.Edo artisans used manillas, meaning bracelet, as a metal source for making the Benin Bronzes. Manillas were also used as decorative objects and currency across parts of Western Africa.In a new study published in the journal,...

People have inhabited the Andes mountains of South America for more than 9,000 years, adapting to the scarce oxygen available at high altitudes, along with cold temperatures and intense ultraviolet radiation. A new genomic study published in the journal iScience suggests that Indigenous populations in present-day Ecuador also adapted to the tuberculosis bacterium, thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans..."We found that selection for genes involved in TB-response pathways started to uptick a little over 3,000 years ago," says Sophie Joseph, first author of the paper. "That's an interesting time because it was when agriculture began proliferating in the...

One of the oldest copper fishhooks in the world was discovered during excavations in Ashkelon, southern Israel, the Israel Antiquity Authority (IAA) announced on Wednesday.The 6,000-year-old discovery was made in 2018 when the IAA carried out excavations prior to the construction of the Agamim neighborhood in Ashkelon. However, the find is only being presented to the public now; it will be exhibited for the first time at the 48th Archeological Congress on April 3, the IAA press release said."This unique find is 6.5 cm (2.5 inches) long and 4 cm (1.5 inches) wide, its large dimensions making it suitable for...

Below the surfaces of freshwater springs, lakes and rivers, sunken landscapes hold clues about the daily lives, beliefs and diets of the first humans to settle in what is now the United States. But submerged prehistory, as the study of these millennia-old sites is widely known, is often overlooked in favor of more traditional underwater archaeology centered on shipwrecks...From Miami to Lake Huron to Warm Mineral Springs, these are three sites driving the conversation about the nascent discipline.The hunt for sunken evidence of early humans in North America began some 60 years ago with a swirl of controversy in southwestern...

The elusive striped "cat-fox" familiar mostly to Corsican shepherds and as a source of intrigue to scientists, is indeed its own species specific to the French Mediterranean island, the French office for Biodiversity (OFB) announced Thursday. New genetic analysis has "revealed a unique genetic strain to the wild cats" found in the remote forest undergrowth of northern Corsica, it confirmed. Genetic sampling clearly distinguishes the ring-tailed Corsican cat-foxes from mainland forest felines and domestic cats, said the OFB in a statement. While resembling house cats in some ways, the cat-fox earned its name from its length—measuring 90 centimeters (35 inches)...

...we continue our travels through Guinea-Bissau, a country that just weeks ago experienced a deadly coup attempt that aimed to kill the president, prime minister, cabinet, and army officials, and succeeded in killing almost a dozen people before it was stopped. The president describes the coup attempt as an attack on democracy, and the officials say that it was led by a convicted drug baron...Before European colonial times, Guinea-Bissau and the Bissagos Islands in particular... were central to trade between Africa and Europe... but today, it's the drug trade that they are essential to.The islands are famous for having huge...

The cave is one of Ireland's largest natural caves, running for around 402 metres to a depth of 46 metres...The earliest historical reference to the cave is in the Trecheng Breth Féne "A Triad of Judgments of the Irish", more widely known as "The Triads of Ireland". The Triads are a series of manuscripts that date from the 14th to the 19th century AD, describing Dunmore Cave (written as "Dearc Fearna") as one of "the three darkest places in Ireland".This may be in reference to events in the "Annals of the Four Masters", a chronicle of medieval Irish history compiled...

Elephant Bird Egg What a whole Aepyornis egg would have looked like when freshly laid, seen in a market near the town of Toliara on the southwest coast of Madagascar. Credit: Gifford Miller More than 1,200 years ago, flightless elephant birds roamed the island of Madagascar and laid eggs bigger than footballs. While these ostrich-like giants are now extinct, new research from the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU Boulder) and Curtin University in Australia reveals that their eggshell remnants hold valuable clues about their time on Earth. Published on February 28 in the journal Nature Communications, the study describes...

In the Middle Ages, the Roman alphabet and runes lived side by side. A new doctoral thesis challenges the notion that runes represent more of an oral and less of a learned form of written language....Johan Bollaert, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies... has investigated written language used in public inscriptions in Norway from the 1100s to the 1500s. Last autumn, he defended his doctoral thesis "Visuality and Literacy in the Medieval Epigraphy of Norway."The assumption that runes represent a more oral tradition is based on the idea that runic inscriptions are contextually bound and are...

A study published in early March identified at least eight new groups of ancient humans that lived through earth’s most recent Ice Age. Researchers used the genomes of 357 ancient European humans who existed between 5,000 and 35,000 years ago to assess which ancestry profiles survived through the Last Glacial Maximum (25,000 t0 19,000 years ago), according to the study published March 1 in Nature. The analysis revealed eight distinct tribal groups who are believed to have existed in Europe and were developed enough to survive through the Ice Age. Each of the groups were given a unique name, such...

These prehistoric mines' ages were a "long-standing mystery," says David Pompeani, a geologist at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Previous research used archaeological remnants to evaluate when mine sites were active, but later mining at the same sites often obliterated ancient artifacts, Pompeani says. To work around this, he and his colleagues took a different approach: instead of artifacts, they looked for signs of mining preserved in the environment.For a recent study in Anthropocene, the researchers examined sediments from two small inland lakes near ancient mines on Lake Superior's isolated Isle Royale in Michigan. Such sediments are affected by...

The Malay Peninsula and the islands of Sumatra, Borneo, and Java were originally part of a large landmass of rainforests and coastal mangroves in the South Asia continental shelf known as the Sundaland some 26,000 years ago (see figure a).But during the last major period of global warming in Earth's history, from the Last Glacial Maximum period (approximately 26,000—20,000 years ago) to the mid-50 Holocene (approximately 6,000 years ago), sea level rose 130 meters. The rise in sea level flooded and submerged half of the Sundaland, breaking land bridges and splitting the large landmass into smaller islands of the region...

In the summer of 1495, King Hans of Denmark and Norway anchored his warship off the southern coast of Sweden. While Hans was on land, his vessel—known as Gribshunden or Griffen—mysteriously caught fire and sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea.Hans was on his way to Kalmar, where he hoped to be elected king of Sweden and reunite the broader Nordic region under a single ruler. As such, Hans brought many opulent status symbols, including luxurious foods and spices, to help persuade the Swedish leadership to agree to his plan.Remarkably, many of those foods and spices have survived underwater...

The first people to enter the Americas may have taken the coastal route along the Bering Strait Land Bridge during these two periods.During the last ice age, the coastal route from Asia to North America was so treacherous, humans likely crossed over only during two time windows, when environmental factors were more favorable for the long and dangerous journey, a new study finds.The first window lasted from 24,500 to 22,000 years ago, and the other spanned from 16,400 to 14,800 years ago, according to the study, published Feb. 6 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(opens in...

When the Vikings sailed west to England more than a millennium ago, they brought their animal companions with them and even cremated their bodies alongside human ones in a blazing pyre before burying them together, a new study finds.These animal and human remains were found in a unique cremation cemetery in central England that has long been assumed to hold the remains of Vikings — in particular, the warriors who sailed west to raid the countryside in the ninth century A.D. However, the new analysis revealed that several of the burial mounds didn’t contain just the remains of humans but...