Als letztes Jahr in Nordirland Skelettreste auftauchten, wurde die Entdeckung von einer beunruhigenden Frage überschattet: War dies eine archäologische Stätte oder ein Tatort?
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Ancient viruses have really gotten on our nerves, but in the best of ways.
One particular retrovirus — embedded in the DNA of jawed vertebrates — helps turn on production of a protein needed to insulate nerve fibers, researchers report February 15 in Cell. Such insulation, called myelin, may have helped make speedy thoughts and complex brains possible.
The retrovirus trick was so handy, in fact, that it showed up many times in the evolution of vertebrates with jaws,
Cats make the perfect pets – they’re low maintenance and independent. But doctors warn they may be exposing you to any number of potentially deadly diseases.
In the past few days, public health officials revealed the first person had died from Alaskapox – an extremely rare smallpox-like bacteria – and an Oregon resident was hospitalized with the Bubonic plague, an archaic disease that killed one-third of Europe’s population in the 1300s.
In both cases, the patients had caught the disease
A mammoth ivory tool unearthed in central Europe has offered a peek at how teamwork enabled Stone Age folks to make thick, sturdy ropes.
Excavations and sediment screening at southwestern Germany’s Hohle Fels Cave in 2015 produced the rare find. Researchers assembled 15 mammoth ivory pieces recovered from the site into a nearly complete rope-making implement. The final product, about 20 centimeters long, featured four circular holes containing carved spiral grooves, archaeologists Nicholas Conard and Veerle Rots report January 31
To the delight of nostalgia-loving Brits, one of the most beloved TV programmes of the 1990s – ‘Gladiators’ – is finally back.
The iconic show, now presented by Bradley Walsh and his son Barney, sees brave contestants pit themselves against elite bodybuilders to prove their mettle.
But how do the games stack up against the original gladiators of Ancient Rome, from which the show takes its name?
Contrary to popular belief, Dr Andrew Sillett, a classics lecturer at the University
It is a question that frequently pops up on pub quizzes: how many of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World can you name?
Perhaps more pertinently, how many are still standing?
The answer, as a new book reveals, is only one: the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The Seven Wonders Of The Ancient World, by historian Bettany Hughes, tells the story of each of the glittering marvels of engineering.
Five of the six that are now lost to the past
Scientists have uncovered the Amazon’s earliest and largest example of farm-based citylike settlements high in the foothills of the Ecuadorian Andes.
The thousands of mounds, plazas, terraces, roads and agricultural fields — revealed for the first time in their fullest extent by airborne laser scans — necessitate a rethinking of just how complex ancient civilizations of the Amazon may have been, researchers report in the Jan. 12 Science.
Over the last decade or so, the use of light detection
Ancient herders, who rode horses and drove ox-drawn carts west out of their grassy homelands in southwest Asia, erased a DNA divide between far-flung farmers and hunter-gatherers-fishers around 5,000 years ago.
The molecular legacy of these ancient herders, known as the Yamnaya people, reshaped Eurasians’ genetic profile, impacting everything from their descendants’ height to their susceptibility to some diseases (SN: 3/3/23). For instance, it left people today with predominantly northern European ancestry especially prone to developing multiple sclerosis.
While they may be all but lost, Britain is hiding a habitat you might never have expected to find on this cold island.
As these stunning maps reveal, the UK is home to one of the world’s rarest ecosystems: the temperate rainforest.
Although it might seem unlikely, the west coast of Britain is actually one of the few places where these beautiful landscapes can prosper.
While they could have once covered as much as 20 per cent of the country,
Soft fruits may have been the main dish on some ancient primate menus.
An analysis of hundreds of fossilized primate teeth from the Fayum Depression, a desert basin in Egypt, shows just a handful were fractured, researchers report December 13 in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology. So few chipped teeth suggests the animals more often feasted on easy-to-chew foods like fruits rather than hard objects like seeds or nuts that might inflict tooth damage.
