Today, January 22, 2023, more than a billion people globally will welcome the Year of the Rabbit – or the Year of Cat, depending on which cultural traditions they follow – as the start of the Lunar...
Homo erectus , literally upright man, is an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene, first occurring 2 million years ago, and is widely identified as the first recognizable members of...
A Roman “carcer” is a holding cell for criminals and Roman gladiators awaiting their moment in the amphitheater, where bloodthirsty crowds eagerly anticipated the spectacle of their deaths. One such...
Who knew innocent little Fluffy could be so devious? Cats’ reputations have often swayed from good to evil over the years as they have been both revered and feared around the world. One of the most...
"Brewing", "herbs," "broomsticks," "woman." When one hears these words together, most often the assumption is that the person in question is a witch. Yet brewing has a very human meaning as well, one...
On January 17 th , 1569, the simple, unwed house servant Agnes Bowker of Market Harborough, England, was in the throes of giving birth to a secret child. By her side were the midwives Margaret Roose...
Archaeologists unearthed an extensive animal burial ground at the 2,000-year-old port of Berenice on the Red Sea coast of Egypt a decade ago. Now they say that the evidence found in almost 600 animal...
Experts have found a giant new cat geoglyph in Peru near the world-famous Nazca Lines. They identified the huge figure of the feline on a hill that overlooks the pre-Hispanic designs and features...
Ancient Egypt is famous for its mummies of pharaohs, however, the ancient Egyptians mummified animals as well as people. In 2020, new non-invasive technology was used to digitally unwrap three animal...
Gone are the days when a mummy had to be unwrapped to discover what’s inside. Improvements in medical technology and the application of that technology to archaeological research has helped...
Animals far outnumber us on the planet. And while humans have domesticated some of them for work or food, others have been observed, admired, feared, and revered from afar. For many ancient cultures...
Farmers in China may have domesticated Asian leopard cats during the Neolithic era, more than 5,000 years ago. This is a different species than the only living type of domestic cat today, the Felis...
A museum in St. Augustine, Florid has a rather unusual artifact – an ancient rug made completely out of cat fur. This rug is sometimes referred to as the ‘Sacred Cat Rug’ and has a claim on the title...
A new study shows that animal domestication was not only a question of food for the ancient Maya. Remains of a variety of species, including small dogs, large cats, and some turkeys, suggest the Maya...
Generally, it is a good idea for farmers to keep a keen lookout for possible predators for their livestock. But what should they do if that predator is a huge beast which can supposedly hop over high...
According to an extensive DNA analysis of cat genes the domestic cat is descended from wild cats that were tamed twice; once in the Near East and then in Egypt. The study suggests that cats lived for...