The Aborigines of Australia are considered one of the oldest continuously surviving cultures in the world, encompassing hundreds of diverse cultural groups, each with their own creation stories...
Skeletal trauma has been studied in the remains of hundreds of people who lived in medieval Cambridge excavated from three cemeteries dating back to between the 10th and 14th century. The study has...
The Agricultural, or Neolithic (New-Stone Age) Revolution , marks the birth of modern civilization. Traditional wisdom says that is when we started to become us. That is when we began to grow crops,...
A report out this week has evidence of ivory softening for creating tools and ornamental animals being achieved by ancient people more than 12,000 years ago. However, the Siberian scientist who made...
Lady Godiva was an English noblewoman who lived during the 11th century AD. Although she belonged to the upper class, she had a reputation for being sympathetic towards the less fortunate and was...
The imperial harem of the Ottoman era was the collection of wives, servants, and concubines of the Sultan, who sometimes numbered in the hundreds. Some were mere playthings or used for the production...
Jørgen Brønlund was a Greenland-born Inuit polar explorer, educator, and Catholic catechist who participated in two Danish expeditions to Greenland in the early 20th century. Famously, he was the...
In the ancient world salt was so valuable that Roman soldiers were sometimes paid with salt instead of money . A monthly salt allowance was a salarium , and this Latin word seeds both the French word...
Was there ever a Trojan War? That is, the almost legendary battle fought between Greeks and Trojans. This question continues to go unanswered by the academic and archaeological world. If we read from...
When odd, skull-shaped grave items were found by archaeologists decades ago at an Aztec temple in Mexico, they were assumed to be mere toys or ornaments, and were catalogued and stored in warehouses...
A grave in Peru has been shown to contain the world’s oldest female hunter. This news is potentially explosive. It may change our understanding of gender relations in the ancient Americas and even...
Archaeologists all over the world have for decades refuted claims of an extraterrestrial influence on the building achievements of ancient humans. The academic community regard such claims as “...
Legendary heroes like King Arthur have motivated people and given them hope in difficult times. Who is the legendary figure who inspired you when you were younger (or still does)? How has their story given you hope or what has it taught you?
Even today, many people still believe that Christopher Columbus was the person who “discovered” America when he landed there in 1492. That belief overlooks the fact that indigenous people had already...
Two culturally and archaeologically significant rock shelters were destroyed by a mining company in Western Australia. The caves were ruined by blasting carried out by Rio Tinto, who remarkably did...
Neanderthals are generally classified by palaeontologists as the species Homo neanderthalensis , but some consider them to be a subspecies of Homo sapiens ( Homo sapiens neanderthalensis ). The first...