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Ancient Origins Tour IRAQ

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Portrait of a male Viking wearing fur. Source: Digital Storm / Adobe Stock

Elite Danish Vikings Wore Beaver Fur as a Status Symbol

A new study has revealed that elite Vikings, specifically highly ranked Danish Vikings, used and wore beaver furs as a means of showing off their exalted social status. This practice is not...
Mohamed Ghassen Nouira holding textile fragments made with his ancient purple dye using Murex sea snails from Tunisia.    Source: Mohamed Ghassen Nouira

Tunisian Man Rediscovers Secret of Priceless Ancient Purple Dye

A Tunisian man has been able to solve an ancient mystery. He has found a way to re-create an ancient purple dye that was once linked to ancient kings and emperors. Through a long process of trial and...
Illustration of the later Bronze Age by Rasmus Christiansen.               Source: Dandebak

Puzzling Family Structure Revealed in Bronze Age Households

Archaeogenetic analyses have provided new insights into social structures of Bronze age households in ‘Europe’ 4000 years ago. Nuclear families lived together with foreign women and unrelated...
Skulls from the Andean Paracas (top left). (CC BY-SA 3.0); Paracas skull at Ica Museum(right). (CC BY 2.0); Child head shaping methods (bottom left).

Elongated Skulls Increased Kudos in Ancient Peru

Archaeologists dig them up all over the ancient world from Egypt to Peru, and now, these curious elongated skulls are believed to have been “status symbols,” according to a recent paper in Current...
The skeletons and a depiction of what the grave may have originally looked like.

Mammoth Tears of Compassion Sealed A 34,000-Year-Old Children’s Grave

About 34,000 years ago, two physically challenged boys were buried head to head, with tens of thousands of animal bone offerings, according to a Cambridge Journal of Antiquity paper published last...
Elkhound, a Viking Dog.

Viking Dogs Followed Their Masters to Valhalla

By THORNEWS Large amounts of animal bones have been found in Viking Age ship graves. For example, there were eight large sighthounds (Old Norse: mjór) buried on both sides outside the ship In the...
The Chavola of the Sorceress, Dolmen in Alava, Spain

Neolithic Bones Reveal Socio-economic and Cultural Differences are Nothing New For Spain

The researcher Teresa Fernández-Crespo, lead author of this study, had in a previous piece of work found demographic differences between the people buried in dolmens and those buried in caves: while...
Reconstructed heads of the children that may have been sacrificed for a double burial in Sunghir, Russia.

The Sunghir Burial Site: Were these Two Children Sacrificed in a Form of Prehistoric Scapegoating?

One of the clearest signs of behavioral modernity in the archaeological record is the appearance of art and religion. Once we see indications of creative and speculative minds at work trying to...
Cro Magnon diorama showing a mammoth bone shelter.

Did Man and Mammoth Ever Live in Harmony? Not Quite…

Humans and mammoths coexisted in Europe for about 30,000 years. As a result, it makes sense that humans would have used mammoths and their remains for food and possibly for making clothing and even...
Astronomical Writing in Cyprus Figurines

Religious statues from Cyprus show evidence of astronomical writing

An analysis of five late Bronze Age Terracotta religious statues , dating back around 3,300 years and found at various sites in Cyprus, has revealed the presence of astronomical ‘writing’, which has...