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Archeologists from the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IANES) at the University of Tübingen have uncovered a large Bronze Age city not far from the town of Dohuk in northern Iraq. The excavation work has demonstrated that the settlement, which is now home to the small Kurdish village of Bassetki in the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan, was established in about 3000 BC and was able to flourish for more than 1200 years. The archeologists also discovered settlement layers dating from the Akkadian Empire period (2340-2200 BC), which is regarded as the first world empire in human history. Scientists headed...

BEIJING: A 3000-year-old bronze sword has been discovered in a local river by an 11-year-old child in east China's Jiangsu Province. Yang Junxi discovered the rusty sword on July 2 when he was playing near the Laozhoulin River in Gaoyou County. While washing hands in the river, Yang touched the tip of something hard and fished out the metal sword. He took it home and gave it to his father Yang Jinhai. Upon hearing the news, people began flocking to Yang's home, Jinhai said. "Some people even offered high prices to buy the the sword, but I felt it would...

An ancient Greek Corinthian helmet was found in a fifth century BC grave in the Taman Peninsula, southwest Russia. Made of bronze, ancient Greek Corinthian helmets covered the entire head and neck, with slits for the eyes and mouth, protruding cheek covers (paragnathides) and a curved protrusion in the back to protect the nape of the neck. The helmet has a padded interior made of fabric or leather to protect the warrior’s skull. These helmets were essential for the Greek hoplites, the famous foot soldiers of the phalanxes.

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade. For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to...

The largest-ever study of ancient DNA from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) suggests that the Iberian male lineages were almost completely replaced between 4,500 and 4,000 years ago by newcomers originating on the Russian steppe... Most striking was an influx of new people during the later Copper Age, otherwise known as the Beaker period because of the ubiquitous presence in burials of large drinking vessels, from about 4,500 years ago. By the Early Bronze Age, 500 years later, these newcomers represented about 40% of Iberia's genetic pool - but virtually 100% of their male lineages... This is an extraordinary...

Large ancient-DNA study uncovers population that moved westwards 4,500 years ago. A mysterious group of humans from the east stormed western Europe 4,500 years ago -- bringing with them technologies such as the wheel, as well as a language that is the forebear of many modern tongues, suggests one of the largest studies of ancient DNA yet conducted. Vestiges of these eastern emigres exist in the genomes of nearly all contemporary Europeans, according to the authors, who analysed genome data from nearly 100 ancient Europeans. ...last year, a study of the genomes of ancient and contemporary Europeans found echoes not...

In November 1897, in a field near the village of Coligny in eastern France, a local inhabitant unearthed two strange objects. One was an imposing statue of Mars, the Roman god of war. The other was an ancient bronze tablet, 5 feet wide and 3.5 feet high. It bore numerals in Roman but the words were in Gaulish, the extinct version of Celtic spoken by the inhabitants of France before the Roman conquest in the first century B.C. The tablet, now known as the Coligny calendar, turned out to record the Celtic system of measuring time, as well as being...

The remains of a group of people who died 6200 years ago in a massacre in Croatia have been genetically analysed to reveal their ages, sex and ancestry.Mario Novak at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb, Croatia, and his colleagues retrieved DNA from 38 of 41 individuals found in a mass grave in Potočani, Croatia. The other three remains didn’t contain enough genetic material to sequence...“There are at least 41 individuals of both sexes and almost all age groups – the youngest is about 2 years old and the oldest is about 50,” says Novak. Radiocarbon dating of each...

The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had “dark to black” skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain’s oldest complete skeleton has revealed. The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age. People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population. It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and...

A DNA study of Britons has shown that genetically there is not a unique Celtic group of people in the UK. According to the data, those of Celtic ancestry in Scotland and Cornwall are more similar to the English than they are to other Celtic groups. The study also describes distinct genetic differences across the UK, which reflect regional identities. And it shows that the invading Anglo Saxons did not wipe out the Britons of 1,500 years ago, but mixed with them. Published in the Journal Nature, the findings emerge from a detailed DNA analysis of 2,000 mostly middle-aged Caucasian...

The blood in Irish veins is Celtic, right? Well, not exactly. Although the history many Irish people were taught at school is the history of the Irish as a Celtic race, the truth is much more complicated, and much more interesting than that ... Research done into the DNA of Irish males has shown that the old Anthropological attempts to define 'Irish' have been misguided. As late as the 1950s researchers were busy collecting data among Irish people such as hair colour and height, in order to categorise them as a 'race' and define them as different to the British....

By comparing DNA from ancient bone specimens to DNA obtained from modern animals, the researchers discovered that the Kerry red deer are the direct descendants of deer present in Ireland 5000 years ago. Further analysis using DNA from European deer proves that Neolithic people from Britain first brought the species to Ireland. Although proving the red deer is not native to Ireland, researchers believe that the Kerry population is unique as it is directly related to the original herd and are worthy of special conservation status. Fossil bone samples from the National Museum of Ireland, some up to 30,000 years...

Research led by the University of Leeds has discovered genetic evidence that overturns existing theories about human migration into Island Southeast Asia (covering the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysian Borneo) - taking the timeline back by nearly 10,000 years. Prevailing theory suggests that the present-day populations of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) originate largely from a Neolithic expansion from Taiwan driven by rice agriculture about 4,000 years ago - the so-called "Out of Taiwan" model. However an international research team, led by the UK’s first Professor of Archaeogenetics, Martin Richards, has shown that a substantial fraction of their mitochondrial DNA lineages (inherited...

To see the DNA results of some of the ancient people click here. You'll have to scan around to find this exact page but it contains many links of interest. A compilation of DNA haplotypes extracted from ancient remains Cheddar ManIn 1903, skeletal remains were found in a cave in Cheddar, England. The remains of a 23 year-old man, who was killed by a blow to the face, were discovered to be at least 9,000 years old. Ninety-four years after the discovery of "Cheddar Man", scientists were able to extract mitochondrial DNA from his tooth cavity. Name Haplo Haplotype Cheddar...

Irish, Scots and Welsh not Celts - scientists September 09 2004 at 08:15PM Dublin - Celtic nations like Ireland and Scotland have more in common with the Portuguese and Spanish than with "Celts" - the name commonly used for a group of people from ancient Alpine Europe, scientists say. "There is a received wisdom that the origin of the people of these islands lie in invasions or migrations... but the affinities don't point eastwards to a shared origin," said Daniel Bradley, co-author of a genetic study into Celtic origins. Early historians believed the Celts - thought to have come from...

Y chromosomes rewrite British historyAnglo-Saxons' genetic stamp weaker than historians suspected 19 June 2003 HANNAH HOAG Some Scottish men's Y's are remarkably similar to those of southern England. © GettyImages A new survey of Y chromosomes in the British Isles suggests that the Anglo-Saxons failed to leave as much of a genetic stamp on the UK as history books imply1. Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans invaded Britain repeatedly between 50 BC and AD 1050. Many historians ascribe much of the British ancestry to the Anglo-Saxons because their written legacy overshadows that of the Celts. But the Y chromosomes of...

SUNDAY DECEMBER 02 2001 Genetic survey reveals hidden Celts of England JOHN ELLIOTT AND TOM ROBBINS THE Celts of Scotland and Wales are not as unique as some of them like to think. New research has revealed that the majority of Britons living in the south of England share the same DNA as their Celtic counterparts. The findings, based on the DNA analysis of more than 2,000 people, poses the strongest challenge yet to the conventional historical view that the ancient Britons were forced out of most of England by hordes of Anglo-Saxon invaders. It suggests that far from being ...

Scientists have uncovered evidence for a large-scale, prehistoric migration into Britain that may be linked to the spread of Celtic languages. The mass-movement of people originated in continental Europe and occurred between 1,400 BC and 870 BC. The discovery helps to explain the genetic make-up of many present-day people in Britain. Around half the ancestry of later populations in England and Wales comes from these migrants. ...When the newcomers arrived, the existing British population traced most of its ancestry to people who arrived at the end of the Neolithic, around the time Stonehenge was being built. They were part of...

The genetic profiles of people associated with Funnelbeaker and Globular Amphora cultures show evidence of being recent migrants to the region. This finding shows that the period between arrival of agriculture and "steppe"-related ancestry, hitherto thought of as an uneventful period, was more dynamic than previously hypothesised......Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (~6,000-3,700 years ago)...Individuals associated with the Corded Ware culture expanded from Eastern Europe and then assimilated preferentially central European women into their culture, giving them the same burial ritual as members of the immigrating group...Once established, individuals of the Corded Ware culture (4,900-4,400 years ago) changed genetically through...

The origins of a family of languages including modern Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Mongolian date back some 9,000 years to millet farmers that inhabited northeastern China, a study found after evaluating linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence... Millet was an important early crop as hunter-gatherers transitioned to an agricultural lifestyle.There are 98 Transeurasian languages. Among these are Korean and Japanese as well as various Turkic languages including Turkish in parts of Europe, Anatolia, Central Asia and Siberia; various Mongolic languages including Mongolian in Central and Northeast Asia; and various Tungusic languages in Manchuria and Siberia.This language family's beginnings were traced to...