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Ancient Global Dimming Linked to Volcanic Eruption Ker Than for National Geographic NewsMarch 19, 2008 A "dry fog" that muted the sun's rays in A.D. 536 and plunged half the world into a famine-inducing chill was triggered by the eruption of a supervolcano, a new study says. The cause of the sixth-century global dimming has long been a matter of debate, but a team of international researchers recently discovered acidic sulphate molecules, which are signs of an eruption, in Greenland ice. This is the first physical evidence for the A.D. 536 event, which according to ancient texts from Mesoamerica, Europe,...

According to a statement released by the Max Planck Society of Evolutionary Anthropology, DNA samples from all of the human remains unearthed in lower Austria from the neighboring early medieval burial sites at Mödling and Leobersdorf have been analyzed. The study determined that all of the nearly 150 individuals buried at Leobersdorf were mostly of East Asian origin, while the 500 individuals buried at Mödling shared an ancestry associated with European populations. "The genetic difference between these groups was very clear and consistent for most of the individuals at the sites," said geneticist Ke Wang of Fudan University. Yet the...

The Avars, mysterious horse-riding warriors who helped hasten the end of the Roman Empire, dominated the plains between Vienna and Belgrade, Serbia, for more than 2 centuries. Then, they vanished without a trace...The Avars had no written records. Grave goods and historical accounts suggest they dominated the plains of modern-day Hungary soon after their arrival in Europe about 1500 years ago. They interred their elites in massive burial mounds, surrounded by weapons, and finely decorated gold and silver vessels. They were often buried with horses and riding equipment. (The earliest stirrups in Europe are from Avar graves.)...The first Avar burials...

A rare find of remains of an Avar warrior and a belt set that can be dated to the turn of the 7th to the 8th century, has been found at the Vinkovci Cemetery by archaeologists, the city museum in that eastern Croatian town confirmed on Monday. While conducting archaeological research at the city cemetery in Vinkovci, which had started before the coronavirus pandemic and resumed these days, and investigating Avar graves, discovered by workers who had been expanding burial plots, archaeologists of the city museum unearthed remains of an Avar warrior and a set belt that can be dated...

...Skull binding spread across central Asia in the second century B.C., expanded into Europe around the second and third centuries A.D. and became increasingly popular in central Europe by the first half of the fifth century A.D., according to the authors... For the new study, researchers examined 51 elongated skulls from burials in the Mözs graveyard, in what was once a Roman province known as Pannonia Valeria. The graves, 96 in all, were divided into three groups and represented three generations, from A.D. 430 until the cemetery was abandoned in A.D. 470. The first burial group is thought to be...

Just off the west coast of the Bodrum peninsula, southwest of an island called Yassiada, there is a submerged reef appropriately referred to by some as The Ship Trap. About A.D. 626, in the reign of Emperor Heraclius, when the Persians and the Avars were laying siege to Constantinople, the capital of the East Roman Empire, the reef claimed another victim, a small ship bearing in its hold a cargo of nearly a thousand wine amphorae. For more than thirteen centuries the shipwreck lay on the seabed until it was discovered by Kemal Aras, a Turkish diver, who then showed...