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<p>The desert winds swept over the sands and out to the sea. Waters churned and the ships, loaded with wine from the ancient city of Tyre, tumbled in the storm.</p> <p>Swamped, the Tanit and Elissa foundered around 800 B.C., coming to rest upright some 1,300 feet under the Mediterranean, too deep for recovery.</p>

Two of the shipwrecks were likely from the end of the 19th century or beginning of the 20th century, including a "large motorized metal wreck" with no traces of cargo. In that wreck, researchers noted that the davits, which would have been used to lower lifeboats, were facing outward, which means any crew may have been able to leave the ship. The second ship was likely a wooden fishing boat.A third shipwreck was likely a merchant vessel that sailed between the first century BC and the second century. The ROV spotted artifacts that appeared to be amphoras, or tall, two-handled...

The Early Neolithic site of KTG, located on the North African Mediterranean coast near the Gibraltar strait (Fig. 1a), predates and partly overlaps in time with IAM2 (Table 1). At KTG a full Neolithic assemblage is found, including a diversity of cultivated cereals, domestic mammals and cardial ceramics. In contrast to the people at IAM, those at KTG are genetically similar to European Early Neolithic populations...Overall, the genetic patterns of local interaction between different groups in northwestern Africa are comparable to those found in Europe: farmers assimilated local foragers' ancestry in a unidirectional admixture process. Cases of hunter-gatherer communities adopting...

Fish soup. Salmon tartare with mango salsa. Sea bream a la plancha.The human genus has been eating fish since the dawn of time. Almost 2 million years ago, hominins in Kenya deboned a catfish. Around 800,000 years ago, hominins in Israel grilled a giant carp. Evidence of shellfish consumption also abounds, and it’s even been proposed that coastal Neanderthals dived for clams.It is therefore unsurprising that freshwater fish were critical resources for inland prehistoric peoples in North America, not to mention modern ones. It is surprising that archaeologists investigating their predecessors – the earliest people in Beringia (the land bridge...

...This year, the General Services Administration (GSA) will give away six of the historic beacons, including the Warwick Neck Light, at no cost. An additional four will be sold via public auction. The goal of the transfers is to preserve the historic buildings, even as technology renders them obsolete...Since the passage of the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act in 2000, the GSA has been transferring ownership of lighthouses... to groups willing to preserve them, according to a statement from the agency...At many lighthouses, upkeep is challenging: Two of the structures up for auction, the Penfield Reef Lighthouse in Fairfield, Connecticut,...

The petroglyphs were carved on a granite rock face that was once part of an island, meaning people would have had to make the carvings while standing on a boat, or from a platform constructed on ice, said Martin Ostholm, a project manager with the Foundation for Documentation of Bohuslan's Rock Carvings who is one of the archaeologists who discovered the petroglyphs, told Live Science.Bohuslan is already known for its rock carvings, including Bronze Age art made at Tanum... The team was looking for new petroglyphs in the area when they came across the moss-covered rock face. They noticed some...

Researchers announced Thursday that the timeline of Greece’s history needs to be pushed back by at least a quarter million years after a shocking discovery deep inside an open coal mine. Archaeologists uncovered the nation’s oldest archaeological site, which dates back at least 700,000 years. It is thought to be associated with some of our earliest hominin ancestors, according to The Associated Press. Although older archaeological sites have been uncovered in other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, this is the first major discovery of this age in Greece, and may completely rewrite aspects of the nation’s human history. The...

Key points: The study provides the first scientific evidence that silver used in her jewellery was sourced from the Aegean Islands in Greece. The findings offer an insight into the trade networks that existed and the emergence of Egyptian state. An analysis of bracelets owned by Queen Hetepheres — the mother of King Khufu, who would go on to build the Great Pyramid — has found that Egypt and Greece were involved in long-distance trade earlier than previously known.

According to the researchers, these findings are the first-ever archaeological proof of visitors from Southeast Asia originating outside of Makassar on Sulawesi arriving in mainland Australia.Two watercrafts depicted in the rock art feature motifs that appear on the Moluccan types of Southeast Asian vessels. They are distinct from other seafaring cultures from the region, enabling the researchers to confirm their identity.As well as their distinctive shape and configuration, both boats appear to display triangular flags, pennants, and prow adornments. By comparing these two depictions with historically recorded watercraft from islands in Southeast Asia, the researchers suggest that they probably came...

Location of Kaylu archeological site (a no 1), Jebel (a no 2), and Dam-Dam-Cheshme 1 and 2 (a no 3); view of the rockshelter (b1); location of the two burials (b2 and b3); Caspian Sea view from the site (c); human remains state of preservation (d and e); lithic industry from layer 7 of Kaylu (f) – point (1), lunates (2, 3), end-scraper (4), splinted pieces (5, 6), cores (7, 8). Credit: Open Archaeology (2023). DOI: 10.1515/opar-2022-0289 Stone Age humans may have made extended maritime voyages on the Caspian Sea, according to a new study published in the journal Open...

The discovery has revealed the Roman city of Neapolis, with its networks of submerged streets and monuments, was a crucial trading hub in ancient north Africa.The fourth century tsunami that partly destroyed Neapolis was well recorded at the time. It struck in Alexandria, one of the great seats of learning in the ancient world as well as the Greek Island of Crete...The further recovery of Roman food products, including roughly 100 tanks of fermented fish that was used as a condiment known as garum in the Roman empire, has told the archaeological team more about Neapolis's history...The Tunisian and Italian...

In the 1970s, two Roman inscriptions — dated from 245 to 253 AD — were discovered in Écija (known in ancient Roman times as Astigi), a city in Spain's southern province of Seville. The writings on the tablets suggest that the emperor at the time had exempted the Roman province of Baetica (roughly the equivalent of modern-day Andalusia, a region of southern Spain) from taxes...A gigantic tsunami that began in the Bay of Cadiz crashed into land, causing numerous coastal settlements to be abandoned and engulfing everything its path, including the city of Seville, located 45 miles inland from the...

...in 2019 during the renovation of a structure in the Carmona municipality of Seville... a mausoleum from 2,000 years ago with eight niches... had never been looted. The remains of six members of a wealthy family were interred in the communal grave. And there were various offerings on them, one of which was a quartz container with “a solid mass inside.” They belonged to the niche of a woman in her 40s...One of the amphora’s unique features is that it was carved in quartz, a very hard, resistant, and unusual material......Professor of Organic Chemistry José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola... stresses that...

An international team of biologists, geneticists, anthropologists and biochemists has... generated genomic and mitochondrial DNA data to test theories surrounding the migration of ancient peoples in Mexico...Prior research, based mostly on archaeological evidence, has suggested that drought-driven migration of ancient people from Mexico's north to the south occurred many times in the years before Europeans arrived. The northern region, called Aridoamerica, was dry and mostly desert. The people living there at the time survived as hunter-gatherers. Farther south was Mesoamerica, where early people survived by farming.Prior research has shown that there were several long-term droughts in Aridoamerica, leading people to...

The sixth century historian Procopius, in both his History of the Wars, and The Secret History, mentions a sea monster--a gigantic whale--named Porphyrios that dwelt in the Bosporus Strait and the Black Sea, and which terrorized the shipping lanes around Constantinople for about fifty years, and which causes significant headaches for the Emperor Justinian & the Roman navy. Our information is fairly limited, but what can we say about this real life Moby Dick?SOURCES:The Secret History, ProcopiusThe History of the Wars, ProcopiusA Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities, KaldellisPinned by The Historian's CraftPorphyrios: The Sea Monster that Terrorized the Late Roman Empire3:51...

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...