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Nearly 2,000 years ago, the ancient people of Teotihuacan wrapped bunches of flowers into beautiful bouquets, laid them beneath a jumble of wood and set the pile ablaze. Now, archaeologists have found the remains of those surprisingly well-preserved flowers in a tunnel snaking beneath a pyramid of the ancient city, located northeast of what is now Mexico City. The pyramid itself is immense, and would have stood 75 feet (23 meters) tall when it was first built, making it taller than the Sphinx of Giza from ancient Egypt. The Teotihuacan pyramid is part of the "Temple of the Feathered Serpent,"...

An ancient clay tablet shows that the Babylonians used Pythagorean triples to measure accurate right angles for surveying land.Students may not believe that Pythagoras’ Theorem has real-world uses, but a 3,700-year-old tablet proves that their maths teachers are right. The artifact, named Si.427, shows how ancient land surveyors used geometry to draw boundaries accurately. Discovered in central Iraq in 1894, Si.427 sat in a museum in Istanbul for over a century. Now, mathematician Dr Daniel Mansfield from the University of New South Wales, Australia, has studied the clay tablet and uncovered its meaning. “Si.427 dates from the Old Babylonian (OB)...

Signs will be added to explain the ‘whiteness’ of sculpture plaster casts inside Cambridge University’s archaeology museum as part of a new anti-racist strategy. Plaster casts of Roman and Greek sculptures are said to give a ‘misleading impression’ of the whiteness and ‘absence of diversity’ of the ancient world. And the Classics Faculty at Cambridge University has revealed it will ‘turn the problem into an opportunity’, according to the Daily Telegraph.... ...academics will be encouraged to include ‘content warnings’ to lectures and reading materials.

My father gave me Werner Keller’s The Bible as History when I was a kid. I’ve been a sucker for Biblical histories since then. Keller’s been superseded, both by the deconstructionists who claim the Bible isn’t true and by modern archeology, which has added to and reinterpreted many archeological findings since Keller’s time. And last week, in Jerusalem, an archeologist discovered an earring that helps confirms one of the most pivotal stories in the Bible: The destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the Babylonian captivity.The Bible describes how the Kingdom of Judah, under Jehoiakim, refused to pay tribute to King Nebuchadnezzar...

While digging in his field, an Egyptian farmer recently made the discovery of a lifetime, a roughly 2-meter-tall royal stele. The stele, which was discovered near the Egyptian city of Ismailia, 62 miles northeast of Cairo, appears to commemorate a foreign campaign of Apries (r. 589–570 B.C.E.), an Egyptian pharaoh of the 26th Dynasty who is remembered in the Book of Jeremiah as having come to Jerusalem’s aid during the Babylonian siege (Jeremiah 37:5). The sandstone stele, which includes the cartouche of Apries and 15 lines of hieroglyphic text, stands 2.3 meters tall and is just over a meter wide....

Artist’s impression of the fearsome Thapunngaka shawi. Credit: Adobe stock ============================================================================================================= Australia’s largest flying reptile has been uncovered, a pterosaur with an estimated seven-meter wingspan that soared like a dragon above the ancient, vast inland sea once covering much of outback Queensland. University of Queensland PhD candidate Tim Richards, from the Dinosaur Lab in UQ’s School of Biological Sciences, led a research team that analyzed a fossil of the creature’s jaw, discovered on Wanamara Country, near Richmond in North West Queensland. “It’s the closest thing we have to a real life dragon,” Mr. Richards said. “The new pterosaur, which we...

Si.427 is a hand tablet from 1900-1600 BC, created by an Old Babylonian surveyor. It’s made out of clay and the surveyor wrote on it with a stylus. Credit: Must credit UNSW Sydney ========================================================================================== A UNSW mathematician has revealed the origins of applied geometry on a 3700-year-old clay tablet that has been hiding in plain sight in a museum in Istanbul for over a century. The tablet – known as Si.427 – was discovered in the late 19th century in what is now central Iraq, but its significance was unknown until the UNSW scientist’s detective work was revealed today. Most...

Arthropod fossil. (Javier Ortega-Hernández) ===================================================================================== Charles Darwin famously discussed the "imperfections" of the geological record in his book On The Origin of Species. He correctly pointed out that unless conditions are just right, it's unlikely for organisms to be preserved as fossils, even those with bones and shells. He also said "no organism wholly soft can be preserved". However, after more than a century of fossil hunting since his book was published, we now know the preservation of soft creatures is indeed possible – including some of the most fragile animals, such as jellyfish. But what about the really delicate...

KEY POINTS A 3,500-year-old clay tablet purchased by the Hobby Lobby arts and crafts chain for $1.6 million has been forfeited to the United States. The tablet was illegally transported to the U.S. in 2003 and 2014. In a complaint filed in May 2020, prosecutors said the 5-by-6-inch tablet is considered the property of the Iraqi government and should be returned. ========================================================================== A 3,500-year-old clay tablet purchased by the Hobby Lobby arts and crafts chain for $1.6 million has been forfeited to the United States. The tablet, which bears a portion of the epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian poem considered...

A DOOMED ship that sank after it was hit by gigantic stone blocks following an earthquake 2,200 years ago has been found in Egypt. The wreck was discovered by archaeologists at the site of Thonis-Heracleion, a city that crashed into the water as a result of the megaquake. A ship that sank after it was clattered by falling stone blocks following a cataclysmic earthquake has been found in EgyptCredit: Hilti Foundation ================================================================================ Scattered across a series of interlinked islands off Egypt's northern coast, the metropolis was once the country's gateway to the Mediterranean. It was lost to a cataclysmic event...

In 2018, a message in a bottle dating back to 1886 - 132 years ago - was found half-buried in the sand of a Western Australian beach. According to its contents, it spent more than a century swimming around, before it was discovered nearly 950 kilometres (590 miles) from where it was thrown off a ship in the Indian Ocean. Beachgoer Tonya Illman found the old gin bottle with a rolled-up message in January 2018, 50 meters (164 feet) from the shoreline at the high water mark on Wedge Island. Even though it was missing a cork, surprisingly both the...

Venice, Italy. (Luca Micheli/Unsplash) ====================================================================================== At the bottom of the Treporti Channel, meters beneath the waves of the Venetian Lagoon, a series of surprising ancient structures has just been uncovered. Aligned for a distance of around 1,200 meters (3,937 feet), they suggest that, once upon a time, before sea levels rose and flooded the area, a Roman-era road stretched across the landscape. According to archaeologists, this is evidence that a significant Roman settlement was present centuries before the founding and settlement of Venice in the fifth century CE. "This multidisciplinary study documented the presence of an about 1,200-meter long segment...

A fragment of the meteorite. (David Clarke/EAARO) A small fragment of rock found lying in a field in Gloucestershire in the UK may not have looked like much to the casual passerby, but it could contain vital information about the formation of the Solar System – and the origins of life itself. That's because it did not form here on Earth, but hails from somewhere out past the orbit of Mars. Kicked out by gravitational interactions or a collision between asteroids, the fragment tumbled across the vastness of space to end up punching through our atmosphere to land on Earth...

Bacteriophages on a bacterium. (Graham Beards/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0) ================================================================================= Like the start of a horror movie, ancient creatures are emerging from the cold storage of now-melting permafrost: from incredibly preserved extinct megafauna like the woolly rhino, to the 40,000-year-old remains of a giant wolf, and bacteria over 750,000 years old. Not all of them are dead. Centuries-old moss was able to spring back to life in the warmth of the laboratory. So too, incredibly, were tiny 42,000-year-old roundworms. These fascinating glimpses of organisms from Earth's long distant past are revealing the history of ancient ecosystems, including details of the...

The sample site in Satsurblia cave. (Anna Belfer-Cohen) A cup of mud that has been buried beneath the floor of a cave for millennia has just yielded up the genome of an ancient human. Analysis reveals traces of a woman who lived 25,000 years ago, before the last Ice Age; and, although we don't know much about her, she represents a significant scientific achievement: the feasibility of identifying ancient human populations even when there are no bones to recover. The sample also yielded DNA from wolf and bison species, which an international team of scientists were able to place in...

Visualization of subglacial lakes. (NASA Goddard/YouTube) Antarctica may seem like a static environment: a still, white landscape frozen motionlessly into place. But much more is going on under the ice than we realize – even if you have to travel all the way to space to tell for sure. Over a decade ago, scientists made just such a discovery, when an analysis of data from NASA's ICESat satellite revealed that variations in ice elevation in West Antarctica reflected a vast mass of subglacial water movement underneath the ice sheet. Prior to the discovery, it had been thought that hidden meltwater...

New radiocarbon dates for rabbit bones excavated in the 1960s at Mexico’s Coxcatlan Cave (shown here) raise the possibility that humans lived there roughly 30,000 years ago. Andrew D. Somerville Humans may have inhabited what’s now southern Mexico surprisingly early, between 33,448 and 28,279 years ago, researchers say. If so, those people arrived more than 10,000 years before folks often tagged as the first Americans (SN: 7/11/18). Other preliminary evidence puts humans in central Mexico as early as around 33,000 years ago (SN: 7/22/20). The latest evidence comes from animal bones that biological anthropologist and archaeologist Andrew Somerville and...

Human poop can reveal more than you might think, even when it's really, really old. In a new study of a Central American Maya civilization, samples of ancient feces have shown how the size of this community varied significantly in response to contemporary climate change. Researchers identified four distinct periods of population size shift as a reaction to particularly dry or particularly wet periods, which haven't all been documented before: 1350-950 BCE, 400-210 BCE, 90-280 CE, and 730-900 CE. In addition, the flattened poop piles show that the city of Itzan – which in the modern day would be in...

3D reconstruction of Triamyxa coprolithica. (Qvarnström et al.) =============================================================================== Way back in the Late Triassic period, in what is now modern day Poland, a long-snouted dinosaur ate a big meal of green algae and then took a poop. It was a day like any other for the animal, but for us, roughly 230-million years later, those very fossilized feces have revealed an entire family of undigested beetles. The insects are the first to be described from fossilized feces and they are unlike anything we've discovered in amber before. Not only are these insects much more ancient, their legs and antennae...

Asteroid Day this year, June 30, 2021, is 113 years after the Tunguska impact event in Siberia, which destroyed an area of pristine forest the size of Tokyo. With blasted and burnt tree trunks leveled and stripped bare over such a vast area, it is as though a large atomic bomb had been dropped on the forest. The debate still goes on in the research literature, but a popular theory is that this impact was caused by a small comet fragment, in the region of 328 feet (100 meters) in diameter, that exploded at an altitude of around 5 miles...