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Remnants of an ancient city dating back to the Roman Empire have been unearthed in the Egyptian city of Luxor. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery in a news release Tuesday. Images of the site reveal the remains of a residential community. Authorities are describing the unearthed city as the oldest remaining structures in this area of Luxor. Mostafa Waziri of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities called the area the “most important and oldest residential city on the eastern mainland in Luxor Governorate,” according to the news release, as translated by Google. Modern-day Luxor contains the ruins...

EGYPT 2000 BC: Drills were used that turned 500X faster than today's power drills and bored into granite rock with ease. Dentists worked with cement fillings, dental bridges, and inserted artificial teeth. Doctors performed pregnancy tests, determined the sex of an unborn child, fed nourishment through tubes, fitted artificial legs and hands; and used anesthetic and sophisticated instruments to perform bone and brain surgery? Mysterious moving walls, automatically flashing lights and lamps that shone century after century, non-stop? A detailed map of Antarctica dating back thousands of years, without ice! A 400 ft pyramid was found on the seabed. 44...

Since their discovery in 2010, the ex­tinct ice age humans called Deniso­vans have been known only from bits of DNA, taken from a sliver of bone in the Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia. Now, two partial skulls from eastern China are emerging as prime candidates for showing what these shadowy people may have looked like. In a paper published this week in Science, a Chinese-U.S. team presents 105,000- to 125,000-year-old fossils they call “archaic Homo.” They note that the bones could be a new type of human or an eastern variant of Neandertals. But although the team avoids the word,...

(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers affiliated with institutions in the U.S., Europe and South America has found evidence that suggests the native people of South America likely arrived from more than one place. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel, André Strauss and Mark Hubbe describe how they applied imaging technology to skulls that have been unearthed in Brazil and what was revealed. For many years, it was believed that a single wave of ancient immigrants made their way from Asia to North America and eventually to South America—the first people to exist in the New...

Will Dunham October 23, 2014 They lived on a remote dot of land in the middle of the Pacific, 2,300 miles (3,700 km) west of South America and 1,100 miles (1,770 km) from the closest island, erecting huge stone figures that still stare enigmatically from the hillsides. But the ancient Polynesian people who populated Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, were not as isolated as long believed. Scientists who conducted a genetic study, published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology, found these ancient people had significant contact with Native American populations hundreds of years before the first Westerners reached the...

THE GIST: * A series of low, long walls are cleverly constructed traps that used the landscape. * Gazelle, ibexes, wild asses and other large herding animals were the targets. * No one is sure why the kites were abandoned. British RAF pilots in the early 20th century were the first to spot the strange kite-like lines on the deserts of Israel, Jordan and Egypt from the air and wonder about their origins. The lines are low, stone walls, usually found as angled pairs, that begin far apart and converge at circular pits. In some places in Jordan the lines...

Matt Ford scours the countryside for enigmatic rock carvings left by our ancestors. While some people dream of the warm sun of southern Spain for their retirement, David Jones chose high fells, the sharp teeth of a gale and the quest to find 5,000-year-old artwork. "I decided to build a new life when I retired," says the former IT marketing specialist, as a bitter wind whips through his hair. "I wanted the last third to be quite different from the first two thirds. I walk a lot, I work with charities, and I do this." "This" is joining more than...

Source: Harvard University Date: October 2, 2007 Even Without Math, Ancients Engineered Sophisticated Machines Science Daily — Move over, Archimedes. A researcher at Harvard University is finding that ancient Greek craftsmen were able to engineer sophisticated machines without necessarily understanding the mathematical theory behind their construction. Recent analysis of technical treatises and literary sources dating back to the fifth century B.C. reveals that technology flourished among practitioners with limited theoretical knowledge. "Craftsmen had their own kind of knowledge that didn't have to be based on theory," explains Mark Schiefsky, professor of the classics in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences....

Spy pics reveal ancient settlements August 03, 2006 06:51pm AUSTRALIAN researchers studying declassified spy satellite images have found widespread remains of ancient human settlements dating back 130,000 years in Syria. The photographs were taken by United States military surveillance satellites operating under the CIA and defence-led Corona program in the late 1960s. The team of researchers travelled to the Euphrates River Valley in April and June and searched sites they had painstakingly identified using the images, which were only declassified in the late 1990s. Group leader Mandy Mottram, a PhD student at the Australian National University's School of Archaeology and...

Surgery as practiced by the ancients leaves long heritageResearchers find that medical treatments still in use today date from antiquity By Penny Bouloutza - Kathimerini Medical practitioners in antiquity left a wealth of knowledge for doctors of the future: the main principles of the diagnosis of disease and the treatment of injuries have been known since the time of Hippocrates. Stefanos Geroulanos, professor of surgery at Zurich University and director of the intensive-care unit at the Onassis Cardiology Center, said that the first operations were performed in the Neolithic period. “Dozens of skulls have been found with holes drilled in...

Ancients Rang In New Year with Dance, Beer By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Dec. 30, 2005 — Many ancient Egyptians marked the first month of the New Year by singing, dancing and drinking red beer until they passed out, according to archaeologists who have unearthed new evidence of a ritual known as the Festival of Drunkenness. During ongoing excavations at a temple precinct in Luxor that is dedicated to the goddess Mut, the archaeologists recently found a sandstone column drum dating to 1470-1460 B.C. with writing that mentions the festival. The discovery suggests how some Egyptians over 3,000 years ago...

Disaster may have killed ancients By Paul Rincon BBC News Online science staff Homo heidelbergensis appears about 600,000 years ago The remains of 28 early humans found buried at the bottom of a cave shaft in northern Spain may belong to a group that died suddenly in a "catastrophe". Experts conducted an analysis to determine whether it was likely the bodies accumulated in the shaft over years or were dumped at the same time. They concluded the 350,000-year-old death chamber may have held the victims of a disease outbreak or a massacre. The study details are published in the Journal...

Dig unearths Bronze Age sun disc The sun disc is the first recorded example of its kind in Wales An ancient gold disc which was used as an item of adornment at a burial 4,000 years ago has been discovered in Ceredigion. Experts say the priceless sun disc is the first one of its kind to be found in Wales and only the third known piece of gold from the Bronze Age uncovered here. The disc found by chance by an archaeologist digging at Copa Hill at the Cwmystwyth Mines - 10 miles outside Aberystwyth - was the subject of...

<p>Historians and researchers announced today that Radio Carbon dating evidence, and the discovery of ancient British style artefacts and inscriptions, provided "the strongest indications yet" that British explorers, under the Prince Madoc ap Meurig, arrived in the country during the 6th Century and set up colonies in the American Midwest.</p>

Ancient Scots link to Stonehenge STEPHEN STEWART November 17 2003 ANCIENT Scots may have enjoyed sophisticated economic, social and cultural links with the builders of one of the world's most mysterious ancient monuments, according to new research. Experts have revealed a previously unknown link between the elite of ancient Scots society and Stonehenge, dispelling the myth that Scotland's Bronze Age tribes were uncultivated barbarians. Research into the discovery of a series of enigmatic axe carvings at the Wiltshire site and one in Argyll has hinted that the country's ancient magnates were proto-capitalists who ruled a powerful monopolistic dynasty. Dr Alison...