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'My Heart Will Go On' singer Celine Dion says she is postponing some tour dates due to health diagnosisFighting back tears, singer Celine Dion shared in a video to fans she has been diagnosed with an incurable neurological disorder. Speaking out on Instagram, the 54-year-old Canadian native said, "As you know, I've always been an open book. And I wasn't ready to say anything before — but I'm ready now. I've been dealing with problems with my health for a long time. And it's been really difficult for me to face these challenges and talk about everything that I've been...

HUTCHINSON ISLAND, Fla. — The bones stuck out of the sand. Dakota Brady, 30, said he was with some friends at Chastain Beach in southeast Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Nicole when they discovered human remains. “It was just surreal. Just to think that this is something that we walk on on a daily basis and nobody knows. Everybody’s oblivious to it," Brady said. Authorities learned of the remains soon after. Investigators are examining what they said are likely human remains of the indigenous Ais tribe on Hutchinson Island, a barrier island along the Atlantic about 50 miles north...

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they were looking at a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital. It turns out it was a very cold case. It took a decade of tests and analysis to determine the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday. Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico usually show a hole bashed...

About two years ago I visited Cambodia. While there I wrote this January 2019 post, which focused on the “killing fields” genocide that swept Cambodia in 1975-79, during the rule of the Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot. In connection with my trip, I bought the Ben Kiernan history titled “The Pol Pot Regime,” which I have just now gotten around to reading. Why my fascination with Cambodia in the day of the Khmer Rouge? It is one of the clearest modern instances of leftist/socialist ideology put into practice and then pushed to its logical conclusion. Highly educated elitists...

Mobile technology has transformed the way we live — how we read, work, communicate, shop and date. But we already know this. What we have not yet grasped is the way the tiny machines in front of us are remolding our skeletons, possibly altering not just the behaviors we exhibit but the bodies we inhabit. New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls — bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head, which shifts weight from the spine to the muscles at the back of the head, causing...

Most people don't spend their free time imagining what it would be like to get on the subway and sit across from a 300,000-year-old person. But anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin isn't most people. In June, Hublin published two papers in the highly-respected journal Nature suggesting that the first Homo sapiens — that is, the first members of our species — lived 100,000 years earlier than previously thought in a place that no one would have expected. They also had faces that looked surprisingly like ours. ”I’m not sure these people would stand out from a crowd today," said Hublin on a...

According to new research published in Science Advances, three Neolithic skull fragments discovered by archaeologists at Göbekli Tepe show evidence of a unique type of post-mortem skull modification at the site. The deep, purposeful linear grooves are a unique form of skull alteration never before seen anywhere in the world in any context, says Julia Gresky, lead author on the study and an anthropologist at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. Detailed analysis with a special microscope shows the grooves were deliberately made with a flint tool. One of the fragments even has a hole drilled in it, resembling skull...

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...

An unsettling mystery has washed up on Japan’s shores. Over the past two months, at least eight wooden boats have been found in the Sea of Japan on or near the coast, carrying a chilling cargo — the decaying bodies of 20 people, Japan’s coast guard told CNN. ll of the bodies were badly decomposed and “partially skeletonized” — two were found without heads — and one boat contained six skulls, the coast guard said. The first boat was found in October, then a series of boats in late November. Coast guard officials are now trying to unravel the riddle...

Found on the western side of what was once the Templo Mayor complex in Tenochtitlan, in modern Mexico City, the partially unearthed skull rack was likely built between 1485 and 1502 and may have been about 112 feet (34 meters) long and 40 feet (12 meters) wide. Mostly belonging to young adult men, but also to women and children, several of the unearthed skulls feature holes on both sides, suggesting they belonged to a tzompantli. This was a rack on which the skulls of sacrificed people were arranged on wooden poles and displayed... To make the scene even more horrifying,...

Tunnelers expanding London's Underground (Tube) stations have stumbled on a cache of more than two dozen Roman-era skulls. The skulls likely date from the first century A.D. and may possibly—just possibly—be victims of the famed Queen Boudicca's troops, decapitated during her uprising against Roman rule in 61 A.D.

<p>Human skulls deliberately warped into strange, alien-like shapes have been unearthed in a 1,000-year-old cemetery in Mexico, researchers say.</p> <p>The practice of deforming skulls of children as they grew was common in Central America, and these findings suggest the tradition spread farther north than had been thought, scientists added.</p>

MEXICO CITY (AP).- Mexican archaeologists said Friday they uncovered the largest number of skulls ever found in one offering at the most sacred temple of the Aztec empire dating back more than 500 years. The finding reveals new ways the pre-Colombian civilization used skulls in rituals at Mexico City's Templo Mayor, experts said. That's where the most important Aztec ceremonies took place between 1325 until the Spanish conquest in 1521. The 50 skulls were found at one sacrificial stone. Five were buried under the stone, and each had holes on both sides — signaling they were hung on a skull...

LONDON — Two ancient Egyptian skulls unearthed in a yard in England have been returned to their native country. And the mystery of how they got from the hot sands of Egypt to the rainy north of England has been solved, investigators said Tuesday. The first skull was discovered by homeowner Matthew McClelland as he did some gardening at his home in the northern city of Manchester a year ago. He called authorities, and they discovered a second skull. An analysis by an Oxford University expert confirmed the skulls were a little more than 2,000 years old.

Legend of the Crystal Skulls Volume 61 Number 3, May/June 2008 by Jane MacLaren Walsh Along with superstars like Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, and Shia LaBeouf, the newest Indiana Jones movie promises to showcase one of the most enigmatic classes of artifacts known to archaeologists, crystal skulls that first surfaced in the 19th century and that specialists attributed to various "ancient Mesoamerican" cultures. In this article, Smithsonian anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh shares her own adventures analyzing the artifacts that inspired Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (in theaters May 22), and details her efforts tracking down a...

Skulls Of Modern Humans And Ancient Neanderthals Evolved Differently Because Of Chance, Not Natural SelectionThe approximate locations of the cranial measurements used in the analyses are superimposed as red lines on lateral (A), anterior (B), and inferior (C) views of a human cranium. (Credit: National Academy of Sciences, PNAS (Copyright 2008)) ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2008) — New research led by UC Davis anthropologist Tim Weaver adds to the evidence that chance, rather than natural selection, best explains why the skulls of modern humans and ancient Neanderthals evolved differently. The findings may alter how anthropologists think about human evolution. Weaver's study...

MONROVIA, Liberia - One of Liberia's most notorious rebel commanders, known as Gen. Butt Naked, has returned to the nation his troops terrorized to confess, saying he is responsible for 20,000 deaths. The civil war, which killed an estimated 250,000 people in this nation of 3 million, was characterized by the eating of human hearts and soccer matches played with human skulls. Drugged fighters waltzed into battle wearing women's wigs, flowing gowns and carrying dainty purses stolen from civilians. Before he led his fighters into battle, wearing only a pair of lace-up boots, Blahyi said he made a human sacrifice...

A study into the mysterious changing skull shape of medieval man casts serious doubt on current theories. The peculiar shift from long narrow heads to those of a rounder shape, and back again, which took place between the 11th and 13th centuries, has been noted at sites throughout western Europe. But a study of skulls found at the deserted village of Wharram Percy, near Malton, North Yorkshire, suggests that the anatomical blip was not down to an influx of Norman immigrants, or climate change, English Heritage has said. It examined nearly 700 skeletons recovered from the village. Unlike other...

Chance and isolation gave humans elegant skulls 24 July 2007 NewScientist.com news service Only chance kept us from looking like our crag-browed Neanderthal cousins. A statistical analysis suggests that the skull differences between the two species stems not from positive natural selection but from genetic drift, in which physical features change randomly, without an environmental driving force. Some anthropologists had put the cranial differences down to natural selection arising from Neanderthals' use of their teeth as tools, for instance, or from modern humans' speech. To test if genetic drift could have been responsible instead, Timothy Weaver of the University of...