A medieval Buddhist tradition started by a Buddhist monk centuries ago has people this month in Thailand exhuming and painstakingly cleaning the remains of 3,890 people who were buried without their...
Archaeologists call them the Nazca lines of Kazakhstan – hundreds of giant geoglyphs formed with earthen mounds and timber found stretched across the landscape in northern Kazakhstan. They are...
By Anna Liesowska An ancient wealthy young woman was found laid to rest with her horse and weapons by workers who accidentally dug up her burial mound. The excavator smashed the prehistoric...
A multinational team of professionals has launched an ambitious ‘Colossus of Rhodes Project’ to revive the tallest statue of the Hellenistic period. The planned 150-meter tall colossus would house a...
A Dutch Egyptologist recently deciphered the oldest known abecedary or alphabet-like primer on a 3,500-year-old shard of pottery from an Egyptian tomb excavated 20 years ago. The earliest alphabets...
Archaeologists doing an underwater survey in the Aegean Sea in Greek territorial waters have found an amazing 22 shipwrecks of merchant vessels that sank between 700 BC and the 16th century AD. The...
According to accepted historical accounts, Cleopatra, the last active pharaoh of ancient Egypt, committed suicide by holding a snake to her breast and allowing it to bite her, killing her with its...
Many ancient civilizations had beliefs surrounding the hauntings of ghosts and malevolent spirits, and so they relied on careful rituals and exorcisms to keep the supernatural at bay. Read Part I...
Ghosts and malevolent spirits haunted the ancients, and so they relied on careful rituals and exorcisms to keep the supernatural at bay. The concept of a spiritual afterlife connects cultures across...
Different societies approach death in a great variety of ways. One community in California about 3,000 to 4,000 years ago honored their dead by burying the deceased headless in some cases or with...
Buried with stone axe and horn-tipped arrow, ancient human remains have archaeologists reshaping their assumptions. In a first for Siberia, a burial mound dating to the 'New Stone Age' has been...
Over the past half-decade, ancient DNA research has revealed some surprising aspects to our evolutionary history during the past 50,000 years. Perhaps the most startling of these has been the extent...
The image of a couple exchanging rings during a wedding ceremony is instantly recognizable, and is held as an ancient tradition. A ring on a certain finger indicates that the wearer is married, but...
“It was just lying there” the finder explained as he recalled the moment and the previous two years of inquiries to understand what it was, along with his frustration of not knowing how it ended up...
The discovery that won the latest Nobel Prize for Medicine wouldn’t have been much of a revelation to doctors in ancient China. Pharmaceutical chemist Tu Youyou established that the compound...
A meeting of the peoples of the European Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean coast may be memorialized in an ancient rock carving of a sailing vessel in the north of Spain. Sailing vessels were...
Berlin recently agreed to curb the number of migrants it welcomed after a backlash against Angela Merkel’s suspension of EU rules limiting numbers. It followed previous scenes of crowds welcoming new...
Ometepe is an island located on Lake Nicaragua in Nicaragua. The name of this island comes from the indigenous Nahuatl language. Ome means as ‘two’, whilst tepetl means ‘peaks / hills / mountains’...
London, Paris and New York are global cities: modern hubs for travel, technology and trade, their names and images echo around the globe, capturing our imaginations with their distinctive histories,...
How did the world sound to our ancient human relatives two million years ago? While we obviously don’t have any sound recordings or written records from anywhere near that long ago, we do have one...
Over the years, scientists have found evidence of cancers, heart disease, starvation, ulcers, smallpox, tuberculosis and other infections in ancient remains from all over the world. Now, for the...
Gilgamesh is the ancient Sumerian epic, written some 4,000 years ago on cuneiform clay tablets and rediscovered only in the nineteenth century. It is a story that has echoes of the biblical Old...
Scientists have decoded the DNA of a bacteria found thriving in ancient permafrost, and are now seeking to understand the genes which provide its extraordinary longevity. Work is also underway to...
