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As part of a DFG-funded project, a German-Tunisian team co-directed by LMU archaeologist Stefan Ritter has surveyed the ancient city of Meninx on the island of Jerba and reconstructed its trading links in antiquity. The port of Meninx was unusually situated and well protected. Incoming ships first had to negotiate a deep and broad submarine channel in the otherwise shallow bay, before approaching the city itself via another channel that ran parallel to the coast for much of its length. They then had to traverse a wide stretch of shallow water to reach the city's wooden and stone quays, which...

...Known as D4h, this lineage is found in mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from mothers and is used to trace maternal ancestry.The team from the Kunming Institute of Zoology embarked on a 10-year hunt for D4h, combing through 100,000 modern and 15,000 ancient DNA samples across Eurasia, eventually landing on 216 contemporary and 39 ancient individuals [iow, cherry picking] who came from the ancient lineage.By analyzing the mutations that had accrued over time, looking at the samples’ geographic locations and using carbon dating, they were able to reconstruct the D4h’s origins and expansion history.The results revealed two migration events....

Temple of Apollo, built ca. 540 BC by the ancient greeks Temple of the Greek god Apollo, built ca. 540 BC, Corinth, Greece. Credit: Following Hadrian/CC BY-SA 2.0 Recent research shows that ancient Greeks used a primitive type of lifting machine to move heavy stones before they began using cranes 2,500 years ago. It is commonly believed that the foremost discovery of the ancient Greeks in building technology is the crane. Yet, enormous stone structures were known to have been built in Greece at least 150 years before the use of cranes themselves. Cranes first appeared in the late sixth...

An ancient Nabataean temple with marble altars has been found in the gulf of Pozzuoli outside Naples in the Italian region of Campania. A statement from the Italian ministry of culture says: "The two marble altars of the Roman period, datable to the first half of the first century AD, are inserted inside the great Temple of the Nabataeans, now submerged." It is unclear when or if the ancient ruins will be removed from the seabed.The Nabataean population was based in the desert areas of the Arabian Peninsula. Around 2,000 years ago they established a settlement at Pozzuoli, building up...

Nearly 300 silver coins believed to be more than 1,000 years old have been discovered near a Viking fortress site in north-west Denmark, a museum has said.The trove – lying in two spots not far apart – was unearthed by a girl who was metal-detecting in a cornfield last autumn."A hoard like this is very rare," Lars Christian Norbach, the director of the North Jutland Museum, where the artefacts will go on display, told Agence France-Presse.The silver coins were found about 5 miles (8km) from the Fyrkat Viking ringfort, near the town of Hobro. From their inscriptions, they are believed...

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...