The massive circular structure appears to be an archaeologists dream: a recently discovered antiquity that could reveal secrets of ancient life in the Middle East and is just waiting to be excavated. It’s thousands of years old – a conical, manmade behemoth weighing hundreds of tons, practically begging to be explored. The problem is – [...]
In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of “time crystals” — physical structures that move in a repeating pattern, like minute hands rounding clocks, without expending energy or ever winding [...]
A city car park has been hailed a “real treasure trove of archaeology” after seven more skeletons were unearthed from the grave of a medieval knight. Archaeologists working on the site now believe they have uncovered the remains of a family crypt having found bones from three fully grown adults, four infants and a skull. [...]
An Egyptian excavation mission from the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA) uncovered on Thursday a complete industrial area that can be dated to the Graeco-Roman era. The discovery was found during routine excavation work at the archaeological site of Tell Abu-Seifi, located east of the Suez Canal and south of Qantara East. The industrial [...]
Life on Earth may have originated not in warm tropical seas, but with weird tubes of ice — sometimes called “sea stalactites” — that grow downward into cold seawater near Earth’s poles, scientists are reporting Bruno Escribano and colleagues explain that scientists know surprisingly little about brinicles, which are hollow tubes of ice that can [...]
Archaeologists have uncovered remnants of a Stone Age culture on the route of a planned rail line in northern Israel, including obsidian arrowheads and fertility objects like a stone phallus and a carved depiction of female genitalia. The oldest ruins at the site date to 9,000 years ago, the Israel Antiquities Authority said, but it [...]
The skeletal remains of an individual that lived 40,000-30,000 years ago were found in northern Italy and are believed to be that of a human/Neanderthal hybrid. If further analysis proves the study correct, the remains belong to the first known such hybrid, providing direct evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbred. The present study focuses on [...]
British archaeologists have discovered a previously unknown palace or temple near the ancient city of Ur in the first foreign excavation at the site in southern Iraq since the 1930s. A small team of archaeologists working from satellite images hinting at a buried structure have uncovered the corner of a monumental complex with rows of [...]
A mass extinction that occurred over 200 million years ago, killed off a slew of huge predators, including hefty beasts that looked like crocodiles and enormous armadillos, according to new research. Some of the prehistoric predators – animals known collectively as the early pseudosuchians – likely preyed on certain dinosaurs, which later evolved some of [...]
Africa isn’t the kind of place you might expect to find penguins. But one species lives along Africa’s southern coast today, and newly found fossils confirm that as many as four penguin species coexisted on the continent in the past. Exactly why African penguin diversity plummeted to the one species that lives there today is [...]
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