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Fresh analysis of Europe's earliest known battle has thrown up the possibility the 1,400 people who died at the site, in Germany's Tollense Valley, were not warriors engaged in a brutal melee, but ambushed merchants who were ruthlessly slain. The identity of the assailants remains unknown but it is thought they surprised the entourage and killed their guards before looting and murdering them. Human remains at the site in North East Germany, near today's border with Poland and 80 miles north of Berlin, were first found in 1996.

The human ability to digest the milk sugar lactose after infancy spread throughout Central Europe in only a few thousand years. This is the conclusion reached by an international research team led by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). The researchers analyzed genetic material from the bones of individuals who had fallen in a conflict around 1200 B.C. on the banks of the Tollense, a river in the present-day German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania... found that only around one in eight of the assumed warriors had a gene variant that enabled them to break down the lactose in milk. "Of the...

Using radiocarbon dating and CT scanning to study ancient bones, researchers have uncovered for the first time a Bronze Age tradition of retaining and curating human remains as relics over several generations. While the findings, led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Antiquity, may seem eerie or even gruesome by today's convention, they indicate a tangible way of honouring and remembering known individuals between close communities and generations some 4,500 years ago... "After radiocarbon dating Bronze Age human remains alongside other materials buried with them, we found many of the partial remains had been buried a...

Though open to interpretation, the bronze disk appears to depict the moon, stars and possibly the sun. A duo of archaeologists from Goethe University Frankfurt and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich took a fresh look at where and how the disk was discovered. The disk was found during an illegal excavation in 1999 near Nebra, Germany, along with a trove of Bronze Age items, including swords and jewelry. If the disk's age matched that of the other items, it would be about 3,600 years old. A release from Goethe University this week calls out the "vague information given by the looters."...

The foundations of a 5,700-year-old Neolithic house, evidence of Bronze Age burials and Iron Age smelting have been discovered by archaeologists as a result of excavations at the sites of two road realignment projects in Co. Cork. They were unearthed in a total of eight separate excavations carried out after the county council undertook two road realignment projects on the N73 (the main road between Mallow and Mitchelstown) close to the villages of Shanballymore and Kildorrery. On one of the sites, archaeologists discovered the foundations of a Neolithic house dating back to approximately 3,700 BC, which they believe may have...

Not just metals, hierarchical societies and fortified settlements: a new food also influenced economic transformations in the Bronze Age around 3,500 years ago. This is evidenced by frequent archeological discoveries of remains of broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.), a cereal with small, roundish grains. A major study by the Collaborative Research Center 1266 at Kiel University (CAU) was published yesterday (13 August) in the journal Scientific Reports. It shows how common millet got onto the menu in Bronze Age Europe. Intensive trade and communication networks facilitated the incredibly rapid spread of this new crop originating from the Far East. "Wheat,...

The remains of "monumental temples" dating to the Iron Age and medieval buildings may be hidden underground at Navan Fort, an archaeological site in Northern Ireland, a new study finds. Exactly what's left of these ruins, however, remains to be seen. Archaeologists discovered the buried structures by using remote-sensing techniques that allowed them to map the hidden landscape and detect anomalies, such as architectural features made by humans. These Iron Age and medieval buildings suggest that Navan Fort was "an incredibly important religious center and a place of paramount sacral and cultural authority in later prehistory," study co-researcher Patrick Gleeson,...

In the run-up to the expansion of a quarry near Mammendorf in [Frstenfeldbruck Bavaria Germany], finds and settlement structures come to light again and again. This year there is an enigmatic double grave. Mammendorf - A mysterious double grave from the Bronze Age has been discovered near Mammendorf in the Magdeburger... "The double grave was covered by six millstones and a stone block weighing around one ton, a menhir," said project manager and archaeologist Susanne Friederich on Wednesday. "The surface of the stone stele was provided with bowl-like depressions in three places." Anyone who was buried under this heavy stone...

Archaeological excavations in the Perdig&otildees complex, in the Évora district, have identified "a unique structure in the Prehistory of the iberian Peninsula", Era -Arqueologia announced. Speaking to the Lusa agency, the archaeologist in charge, António Valera, said that it was "a monumental wooden construction, of which the foundations remain, with a circular plan and more than 20 metres in diameter". it is "a ceremonial construction", a type of structure only known in Central Europe and the British isles, according to the archaeologist, with the designations as 'Woodhenge', "wooden versions of Stonehenge", or 'Timber Circles' (wooden circles). The structure now identified...

In their reports, the researchers said these findings suggested that the pavement and wall stones were from the time of Helike's destruction and supported stories that the city ruins were for a long time submerged in the sea or a lagoon. The ruins were buried by silt, which, combined with a general uplifting of the land, had left the once-submerged site about half a mile inland from the present shore. A house built on the shore between the Selinous and Kerynites Rivers in the 1890's is now about 1,000 feet from the sea.

igging on a coastal plain at the Gulf of Corinth three years ago, archaeologists came upon some ruins of Helike, a Greek city destroyed by earthquake in Plato's time. A search for the rest of Helike has now turned up something even more ancient, rare and inviting.The archaeologists say they have uncovered the stone foundations, cobbled streets and pottery of a well-preserved 4,500-year-old urban center, one of the few Early Bronze Age communities ever found on the Greek mainland.Preliminary investigation at the prehistoric site, the researchers say, reveals that this was a prosperous town at the time pre-Homeric Troy enjoyed...

The burial ground is located near the city of Lisakovsk in the Kostanay region of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Archeologist Emma Usmanova from Karaganda State University has been working on it for several decades. About 3,500 years ago, people of the Andronovo culture lived on this territory. A distinctive feature of the culture of that period was the development of horse breeding. The animals were used not only for food but also for harnessing to chariots and riding. This is confirmed by the remains of horses that were discovered in the burial ground Novoilinovsky-2. Scientists drew attention to the approximate...

A major global cooling event that occurred 4,200 years ago may have led to the evolution of new rice varieties and the spread of rice into both northern and southern Asia, an international team of researchers has found. Rice is one of the most important crops worldwide, a staple for more than half of the global population. It was first cultivated 9,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley in China and later spread across East, Southeast, and South Asia, followed by the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. In the process, rice evolved and adapted to different environments, but...

...Prof. Haak will also try to detect more plague DNA in hundreds of skeletons from the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. So far, DNA evidence from a dozen skeletons points to little variability between the strains of Yersinia pestis in such remains, suggesting that the pestilence spread rapidly across the continent. The speed may owe to another human advance at this time -- the domestication of wild horses, which may literally have carried the disease into Europe. "We see the change from wild local horses to domesticated horses, which happened rapidly at the beginning of the Bronze Age," said...

Researchers at the University of York and the British Museum have discovered traces of opiates preserved inside a distinctive vessel dating back to the Late Bronze Age. Vessels of this type, known as 'base-ring juglets', have long been thought to have links with opium use because when inverted they resemble the seed head of the opium poppy; they are known to have been widely traded in the eastern Mediterranean ca. 1650 - 1350BC. Researchers used a range of analytical techniques to study a particular juglet housed in the British Museum, which is a sealed vessel, allowing the contents inside to...

Archaeologists found the burials in 2017, ahead of the construction of a skate park in Lechlade-on-Thames, a town in the southwestern county of Gloucestershire, England. Radiocarbon dating revealed that the two men lived in about 2200 B.C. The chieftain's burial held the skulls and hooves from four different cattle, Hood said. Head and hoof burial offerings were practiced in Europe during the Bronze Age, but were less common in Britain. "In fact, all previous examples here [in the U.K.] have been single cattle burials, so the Lechlade burial is unique in this regard," because it had four, Hood said. "It's...

Underwater excavations led by Ankara UniversityÂ’s Research Center for Maritime Archaeology (ANKÃœSAM) have uncovered sunken ships ranging from the second century B.C. to the Ottoman period in Ä°zmirÂ’s Urla district. A recent excavation uncovered a ship estimated to date back 4,000 years, which experts say would make it the oldest sunken ship to have been discovered in the Mediterranean. Urla Port is one of TurkeyÂ’s rare underwater excavation sites. Professor Hayat Erkanal, the head of Limantepe excavations for the underwater ancient city of Klozemenai and director of ANKÃœSAM, said the port dates back to the seventh century B.C. Klozemenai, he...

Through close scrutiny of the surviving fragments of ancient chronography, it is possible to work out the way Eratosthenes, in his lost Chronographiai (ca. 220 BC), arrived at his date for the Fall of Troy (1183 BC) -- a 'universal' reference point in antiquity. By combining new information from Manetho, with Timaeus, Ctesias, Herodotus and other sources, he devised a compromise chronology for the Greek past: 'high' enough to satisfy Hellenistic cultural interests, and 'low' enough to satisfy Alexandrian critical scholarship.What was reckoned originally to be an event of the 10th century BC, and later raised as far as the...

Remains of a long dead house mouse have been found in the wreck of a Bronze Age royal ship. That makes it the earliest rodent stowaway ever recorded, and proof of how house mice spread around the world. Archaeologist Thomas Cucchi of the University of Durham, UK, identified a fragment of a mouse jaw in sediment from a ship that sank 3500 years ago off the coast of Turkey. The cargo of ebony, ivory, silver and gold - including a gold scarab with the name of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti - indicates it was a royal vessel. Because the cargo...