Divers have uncovered an ancient pleasure barge near the now-submerged island of Antirhodos, in Egypt. 

The Greek philosopher Strabo wrote about these pleasure boats when he visited Antirhodos from 29 to 25 BCE:

"These vessels are luxuriously fitted out and are used by the royal court for excursions, and by crowds of revelers who set off from Alexandria across the canal to the public festivals," he wrote. "Day and night, the boats are full of people playing the flute and dancing uninhibitedly and with great abandon."

Several earthquakes and the rise in sea level over the centuries have since submerged Antirhodos. It is now roughly seven meters underwater, beneath a layer of sediment. There, divers from the European Institute of Underwater Archaeology spotted the remains of a well-preserved ship. 

At first, they believed the timbers came from two separate ships. They soon realized it was just one vessel, and completely different from anything anyone had found before. These types of boats have been depicted in ancient writings and mosaics, but have never actually been seen before. 

Built for sheltered waters

“It’s extremely exciting because it’s the first time ever that such a boat has been discovered in Egypt,” study lead Franck Goddio told The Guardian. 

At 28 meters long and 7 meters wide, with a rounded stern and flat bottom, researchers think it was built for sheltered waters, not the open ocean. Propelled by up to 20 rowers, its shape suggests the boat made leisurely voyages along canals and rivers. Its width would have allowed it to have a central pavilion or cabin for elite passengers. Greek inscriptions carved into the wood, likely by those who worked on or traveled aboard the barge, point to its Alexandrian origins. The craft is 2,000 years old.

Researchers have suggested one other use of the vessel, based on its location. The wreck is relatively close to the remains of the Temple of Isis. Goddio and his team think it might not have solely been a pleasure barge, but took part in religious festivals linked to the goddess. 

The wreck will remain on the seabed under UNESCO preservation guidelines. From it, researchers hope to discover more about life, luxury, and religious practices during early Roman Egypt. 

Four hundred thousand years ago, someone took up a piece of pyrite, struck it against a stone, and started a fire. Archaeologists working on a site in Suffolk have found the pyrite and the scalded clay it left behind. But what species knew how to make fire in Britain almost half a million years ago?

About 1.5 million years ago, early hominins -- the group ranging from Australopithicus to modern humans, but not apes like chimpanzees or gorillas -- maintained fire in open-air sites in Kenya. And 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals may have struck the side of stone bifaces to catch a spark.

The newly discovered evidence in Barnham, Suffolk, fills in a crucial step along the way. It is also now the oldest known evidence for deliberate fire-starting, as opposed to fire maintenance, by an astonishing 350,000 years. Earlier hominins likely used fire arising from lightning strikes or wildfires, but did not know how to create it themselves.

Barnham has long been a fruitful archaeological site. The site attracted at least two separate species of hominin around 400,000 years ago. One of these, which contributed older tools to the site, may have been Homo heidelbergensis. This early human left behind tool remnants in Britain, referred to as the Clactonian culture.

Not dull cavemen, after all

The second culture probably left behind the evidence of fire-starting. They weren't Homo sapiens, who were still living it up in East Africa at the time. The most likely candidate is Homo neanderthalis. A Neanderthal site from approximately the same era was found at nearby Swanscombe, although no human remains have been discovered at Barnham.

Long stereotyped as dull cavemen, Neanderthals were our closest cousins. Recent research shows they made art and ritually buried their dead. Now, it seems they may have started fire as well.

This second, likely Neanderthal culture at Barnham used fire. It left its scars in reddened clayey silt scattered around the site, rich in haematite. Haematite forms when iron-rich minerals are heated.

The team behind the new research, published in Nature, experimented with burning sediments to recreate the distribution of haematite and the magnetic properties of the silt. The closest replica came from a dozen four-hour exposures to temperatures between 400-600°C, a typical hearth temperature.

But it's the flecks of pyrite found at the site that may have just rewritten our understanding of human technological evolution. They were found scattered among pieces of stained flint, and they didn't match any sediment in the immediate vicinity of the site. Someone had brought them there.

Striking pyrite against flint is one of the oldest methods of starting a fire. These pyrite pieces transform the Barnham site into an enigmatic glimpse into the creativity and technological advancement of early human species.

Unless bones are discovered at Barnham, however, we can't confirm exactly who these brilliant cousins of ours were.

In early July of 1908, Luigi Pernier was heading an archaeological mission to Crete. One evening, the Italian was writing a letter to his superiors when he was interrupted by the arrival of Zacharias Eliakis, who supervised the dig that afternoon. Eliakis had a strange object with him.

It was a clay disk, the size of a dinner plate, and still covered in dirt. Pernier examined the object. There appeared to be writing in an unknown language, carved into the disk. Thrilled with the discovery, Pernier added a postscript to his letter, describing the disk. He signed off saying that this object might be "one of the most important monuments of early Cretan writing."

Over a hundred years later, the object which came to be called the Phaistos Disk remains unique and completely untranslated.

A singular object

The disk was uncovered in the Phaistos acropolis, an ancient Minoan site near the southern coast of Crete. A massive palace surrounded the city of Phaistos. The Minoan people had been living there since 3,600 BCE. Excavation had been ongoing for nearly a decade before Eliakis uncovered the disk.

He found it in a basement on the north end of the palace, in an area dating to around 1800 BCE, the Middle Minoan period. With it was a tablet with writing in Linear A, a still undeciphered ancient Aegean script, and pottery from that Middle Minoan period.

The disk itself was made of very fine clay, about 2 centimeters thick and 16 centimeters across. It's not perfectly circular, as it was made by hand rather than with a mold. Its creator stamped 242 individual figures into the wet clay, laying down the sigils in concentric circles, separated by lines, on both sides of the disk. Then it was fired at high heat, preserving it. The use of stamps makes this disk the first known use of movable type.

The writing was unlike anything else archaeologists had found in Crete. The Middle Minoan people had both the Linear A script and a slightly earlier one called the Cretan Hieroglyphic. The Phaistos Disk's carefully stamped people, plants, animals, and objects represent a third, seemingly unrelated writing system, in use at the same time as the other two. That is, quite frankly, too many writing systems for one island.

Early excitement, first attempts

Classicists rushed to be the first to interpret the new discovery. Dr. Arthur Evans was the first notable figure to step forward. Evans had led excavations at the Minoan palace of Knossos, even coining the name "Minoan," after the legendary Cretan king Minos. He'd also worked with Linear A and B, discovering that they were two different systems and assigning them the names we still use.

Evans argued that the disk wasn't even Cretan, but had come from somewhere in Asia Minor. He numbered the unique symbols 1-45 and categorized them.

He disagreed with Pernier on number seven, arguing that it was not a hat but a breast, and therefore indicated a female divinity. Evans was a prominent figure in the "Great Goddess" theory, which posited that a single matriarchal deity had been worshiped across Eurasia since prehistory. This is now largely debunked, and I really can't get into it, so let's move on.

He also linked number 29, the cat, to this goddess. The two symbols appeared together several times, and both appeared with 24, which he believed was a temple. The fact that it did not resemble Minoan temples was, he argued, an indication of the symbols' non-Cretan origin.

Evans argued that the Linear A tablet found with the disk proved that in Crete, hieroglyphic systems were out of date by the time of the Phaistos disk. But in Anatolia, with whom the Minoans were in contact, hieroglyphs were still in use. That was as far as he got in terms of deciphering it, though.

Continuing attempts, continuing failure

How do you read something written in an unknown language, with unknown letters, when you don't even know what direction or order the symbols are read in or what many of them represent? The seeming impossibility of the task only attracted more challengers.

Stanford doctor of philology George Hempl examined the disk and made early progress, noting with Sherlock Holmesian panache that the way pressure was applied to the stamps showed they had been made from the outward side in, and right to left, not the reverse as Evans suggested. The number of unique sigils, furthermore, meant that each one represented a syllable, not a word or a single sound.

Hempl's proposed solution hinged on the text being written in Greek. His technique was a more sophisticated application of something called Frequency Analysis. This matches the frequency of a symbol appearing against how often it appears in the language on average. Hempl generated a religious text, from which he spun an involved story of pillaging Cretan privateers, an Ionian priestess, and a cattle-based cult. This theory is not accepted by modern scholars.

As the decades wore on, classicists, philologists, cryptographers, and people with no qualifications whatever attempted to solve the mystery of the disk. It was interpreted as a receipt, calendar, game board, hymn, land title, work of fiction, mathematical treatise, and whatever Hempl thought was happening. The language was variously assumed to be Ionic Greek, Attic Greek, Luwian, Hittite, Egyptian, Basque, Dravidian, Semitic, Sumerian, and more.

As the years went on, and the gibberish translations piled up, some scholars began to question if the Phaistos Disk was real at all. Wasn't it suspicious that these symbols hadn't turned up anywhere else in Crete?

Rings, combs, and bowls

Then, the symbols started turning up elsewhere in Crete.

In 1934, Greek archaeologist Spiridon Marinatos found the Arkalochori Axe in a cave in central-eastern Crete. This axe has 15 pictographic signs, several of which appear to match those of the Phaistos disk. In particular, symbol 2, the head with a plumed helmet or hair, appears several times on both artifacts.

In 1965, a team led by Doro Levi, another Italian archaeologist, was excavating the ruins of a building in Phaistos. Among the ruins was a collection of pottery and scraps. On an otherwise unassuming bowl was stamped number 21, the comb. The same comb symbol turns up again, stamped on a broken tablet in Phaistos, also found long after the disk.

Later artifacts also provide parallels to the spiral writing arrangement. Near the Minoan site at Knossos is a necropolis centered around the Mavro Spelio cave. During the 1920s, Arthur Evans found a gold signet ring there while excavating the tombs. The writing was arranged in a spiral pattern, just like on the disk. All of the artifacts seem to date from the Middle Minoan period.

Phaistos fraud?

In 2008, the speculation that had been simmering for a century was reignited. Jerome Eisenberg was an antiquities dealer who dedicated himself to sniffing out fakes and standing up against illegal and unethical antique importation. He also edited his own archaeology magazine, Minerva. For the centennial of Luigi Pernier's discovery, Eisenberg published an article in Minerva arguing that the disk was a hoax, perpetrated by a jealous Pernier.

Eisenberg's theory went as follows: Pernier, seeing Evans' success in nearby Knossos, and the relative lack of finds, especially writing, from Phaistos, decided to craft an untranslatable text which would boost his reputation and impress Evans and his own mentor, Federico Halbherr. Familiar with Italian artifacts, Pernier based his creation on the Etruscan Magliano Disk. Found in 1882, the Magliano Disk was a lead plate with a spiral of writing on both sides.

Defenders of the disk pointed to nearby, contemporary parallels as evidence that it was genuine. But Eisenberg interpreted these as sources of inspiration for Pernier's forgery. He pointed to several signs that were similar to symbols in Linear A and B, as well as other "stamped" symbols in Minoan artifacts.

At the same time, Eisenberg argued that the uniqueness of the disk was evidence of forgery. There were no other flat clay disks in the Bronze Age, nor "other hieroglyphic script of this type."

His article is detailed and lengthy, breaking down the suspicious circumstances of the find (which occurred during a late inspection) and the linguistic issues with the script. For instance, he argued that there were too many unique signs and too few repetitions to be real writing.

Why no thermoluminescence?

Eisenberg's claims inspired new appraisals of the disk. Many called for thermoluminescence analysis, a precise dating technique that involves heating a small sample and measuring the amount of radiation it absorbs. This test would give its proper age and settle the authenticity question pretty definitively.

The Archaeological Museum in Heraklion has declined to do so. Partly, they are resistant to anything that would damage the disk, even slightly. But also, they have nothing to gain and everything to lose from a test. But even without the definitive proof, many scholars are willing to argue for the disk's authenticity.

Pavol Hnila, a researcher at the University of Berlin, responded to Eisenberg in 2009. Analyzing Pernier's personal letters, Hnila argued that Pernier had not behaved like a jealous forger. He was open and sincere about the potentially suspicious way the disk was found. If he had wanted to, his position would have allowed him to arrange a much less questionable discovery. Pernier himself raised the similarity of his finding to the Magliano disk.

As for the writing, Hnila and others pointed out that the parallels to other languages could be due to cultural interaction in Minoan times. It's normal for writing systems developed in the same region and era to borrow symbols from one another. Some of the best proof, however, comes from a recent investigation into what else has turned up at the Phaistos site.

Similar artifacts to the Phaistos Disk

Along with the disk and the Linear A tablet, the basement ruin was filled with pottery. During the Middle Minoan period, when the disk was made, Minoans were making a particular type of fine ware decorated with stamps. These stamp marks were largely ornamental, with geometric or floral designs, but some are clearly representational.

In fact, a number of those vessels' designs have symbols that match those on the Phaistos Disk.

So the Phaistos disk is not the only stamped, fired clay item from this era. It's true that so far, it remains unique. But if it were a special or ceremonial object, it would certainly be more cleanly made than the ordinary bric-a-brac of Minoan life. Today, most scholars think that the disk is likely genuine.

But even if the disk is real, translating it, without other examples of this script, is nearly impossible. That doesn't stop people from trying. John Chadwick, the scholar who translated Linear B, was so bombarded with attempts he had to put out a request that people stop sending him their Phaistos disk solutions. Decades on, the field is even more crowded.

Multiple papers have come out in recent years, bringing the weight of computing power to bear on the problem. So far, they have not triumphed.

High in the mountains of western Norway, researchers have uncovered a 1,500-year-old reindeer trap that was preserved beneath the ice for centuries, until recent melting exposed it.

In 2024, 76-year-old local hiker Helge Titland spotted some unusual wooden stakes protruding from a patch of melting snow on the Aurlandsfjellet plateau. He had already discovered several ancient hunting sites nearby and was certain this was a significant find.

Researchers from Vestland County Council and the University Museum of Bergen came this year and found the trap even more exposed by melting ice.

“We have never seen anything like this before,” said local archaeologist Oystein Skar. “It is completely unique.”

Ancient corral

Hundreds of logs and branches are arranged in two long rows, creating a funnel-like guiding fence that converges into a large enclosure. Here, hunters could capture or kill the reindeer. Archaeologists believe that this mass-capture corral dates back to the mid-sixth century, at the end of the early Iron Age.

It is the only ancient wooden facility of its kind ever found in Norway and possibly Europe. The ice that imprisoned it for hundreds of years helped to preserve it. The team believes that snow and ice buried the structure soon after it was abandoned.

Nearby, archaeologists have found hundreds of reindeer antlers, many with cut marks across them. There were also iron spearheads, bits of arrows and bows, and several carved wooden items.

The discovery “gives insight into the importance reindeer hunting may have had...We now suspect that wild reindeer hunting played an even greater role [in the early Iron Age] than earlier believed,” Leif Inge Astveit, an archaeologist at the University Museum of Bergen, told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation.

One of the most puzzling finds at the site, which sits at 1,400m, is a richly decorated wooden oar. “What these were used for, and why they were brought into the mountains 1,500 years ago, is still a mystery,” said Skar.

Though melting ice revealed these extraordinary objects, its disappearance also makes them vulnerable to rapid decay. All items are kept frozen at the University Museum of Bergen, allowing them to be slowly thawed and dried to prevent further damage.

At the bottom of a lake in Kyrgyzstan lie the ruins of a former trading hub along the Silk Road. Its remnants have lain undisturbed for 500 years, after a massive earthquake submerged it. Now, a joint team of Kyrgyz and Russian archaeologists has begun excavations under the lake. They discovered numerous buildings, fragments of pottery, and a vast funerary complex.

Lake Issyk-Kul lies in northeastern Kyrgyzstan, near the Kazakhstan border and on the edge of the Tien Shan Mountains. At 182km long and up to 60km wide, it is larger than many countries. Its salty waters prevent it from freezing over even in the cold mountain winters. They also hide the remnants of the medieval town of Toru-Aygyr. Like other settlements around Lake Issyk-Kul, Toru-Aygyr thrived off trade and travel.

The region was so connected in the high Middle Ages, in fact, that the bubonic plague outbreak known as the Black Death may have begun somewhere along the shores of Issyk-Kul. In the mid-1300s, the Black Death killed two out of every three residents of Europe.

A century after the first bubonic plague cases showed up around Issyk-Kul, an earthquake submerged Toru-Aygyr. It remained there for the next 600 years.

An underwater necropolis

This week, the Russian Geographic Society announced its first discoveries at the Toru-Aygyr site. Perhaps the most enigmatic of them is a 60,000-square-meter necropolis, dated to the 13th through 14th centuries. All the skeletons in the necropolis lie facing north towards the Kaaba in Mecca, in alignment with Muslim burial practice.

The necropolis is degrading rapidly, prompting swift excavation. This diving season, the team recovered two skeletons, one female and one male. Forensic results have yet to be released.

Fourteenth-century skeletons from Toru-Aygyr will be of particular interest, since bodies from two other cemeteries near Issyk-Kul show bubonic plague in their DNA. Their tombstones date their deaths to 1338 and 1339, perhaps marking the first outbreak of the Black Death.

Life along the Silk Road

The rest of the discoveries so far in Toru-Aygyr may not be as existential as the necropolis, but they offer valuable insights into life in Kyrgyzstan nearly a millennium ago. The remains of an ornately decorated building, for instance, hint at village social life. The archaeologists suspect it to have been a mosque, a madrasa, or a bathhouse.

They also found a millstone, many ceramic fragments, and an intact grain-storage vessel known as a khum. This last was embedded into the bottom of the lake, and the team will return in the future with specialized equipment to extract it.

Nearby, they found more burial sites outside the main necropolis. These burials appear to date from before Islam became the dominant religion, and indicate continued occupation of the settlement for many centuries.

"In the 10th century, the Kara-Khanid State was formed on this land," said expedition leader Maksim Menshikov in a press release. "People here practiced various religions: pagan Tengrianism, Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity. The ruling elite often turned to Islam throughout their rule, but this religion became widespread in Central Asia only in the 13th century."

One unsolved mystery at Toru-Aygyr is when and why it was abandoned. By the time the earthquake submerged the settlement at the beginning of the 15th century, its occupants had already left. Finding out why will take detective work through primary sources. The team hopes that Chinese records from the time may hold secrets.

"The Chinese considered this territory a zone of their interests, but they could not control it," said Menshikov. "Nevertheless, we see that this location is reflected in Chinese sources. This gives us hope to correlate historical materials with the results of our excavations."

Starting in October, online sites of varying levels of legitimacy started posting stories about human remains found in Antarctica. Very old human remains. What is the body of an early 19th-century young Chilean woman doing in the Great White South?

Eye-catching AI images of perfectly preserved women suggested lost histories and forgotten worlds. But is there anything to it?

Bones on the beach

In 1985, a real Chilean biologist named Daniel Torres Navarro was collecting marine debris on a beach at Cape Shirreff, on Livingston Island in the South Shetlands. There, half-buried in the pebbles of the rocky beach, he found an algae-covered chunk of human skull.

Navarro conducted a thorough search of the area but couldn't find any other remains. He carefully collected the skull in several fragments and brought it to Santiago, where University of Chile anthropologist Claudio Paredes reconstructed the skull and performed an initial examination, dating it to about 175 years old.

Navarro took Paredes back to the find site during the 1987-88 field season, when Navarro found the diaphysis -- the long, middle shaft -- of a human femur. They were due to leave the very next day, so it wasn't until 1993, when Navarro returned to the area again, this time to study fur seals, that he could search the site where he'd uncovered the leg bone. There he found what is, for now, the last of the remains --another long bone.

So there you have it: three pieces of bone and a whole lot of questions.

Hello? Whose bones are these?

Paredes examined the cranium in a report to the Antarctic Institute of Chile. Based on the teeth and the ossification of sutures in the skull, which is considered the most reliable method for estimating age from remains, the person in question was between 18 and 25 years old.

It's when we get to the sex and race determinations that things get a little tricky. Paredes determined that the owner of the skull had been female, based on eight physical characteristics. Of these, six fell in the range considered more common in females, one fell in the male range, and another was undetermined.

Skeletal remains can be used to determine sex with fairly high, though not perfect, accuracy. However, that rate falls without the pelvis, the most important marker. A 2023 review paper found experts only had a 76.6% accuracy rate in determining sex from the cranium alone. So while the skull indicates female traits, it could very well have belonged to a man.

The problem with skull measuring

The race determination is, well, a whole can of worms. Forensic anthropology is a field that has evolved significantly over the past 30 years since Paredes examined the skull. Scientific consensus increasingly rejects skull measurements as reliable indicators of racial background.

There are physical traits, even skeletal, that can hint at a person's racial background. But using skull measurements to determine if a subject is "mongoloid," as they did then (hint: we don't use that word anymore) is closer to pseudoscientific Victorian-era eugenics than it is to modern, evidence-based forensic anthropology.

Even accepting skull measurements as legitimate, there is significant ambiguity in the ID of the skull. Of the 14 measurements that were standard at the time, Paredes was only able to take nine. Navarro himself admitted that post-mortem deformations "could have affected some cranial measurements" and that the high number of missing teeth "would hinder racial determination."

With all of those caveats established, the researchers concluded that the cranium showed both "mongoloid" and "caucasoid" traits, which they believed indicated mixed descent. This, Navarro theorized, would match an early 19th-century Southern Chilean person who was, as many are in that region, descended from Indigenous people and white sailors.

In a later 1999 article on his find, Navarro says that there are plans to conduct DNA analysis on all three of the skeletal remains. If this analysis was ever performed, I have not been able to find it.

Rewriting Antarctic history?

So, the find is real. The age is reliably a young person. The sex is likely, but not certainly, female. Of race, the less said, the better.

However, this find does not, as some recent articles claimed, "rewrite human history." Even if we accept the racial and sexual identification of the remains, there are several ways they could have ended up on a beach in the South Shetlands.

First, it is possible that the remains were of someone who died at sea, and their body washed up on the island. One specific incident is relevant: On September 4, 1819, San Telmo, a 74-gun Spanish navy ship, sank in the Drake Passage. All hands -- some 644 people -- were presumed lost.

Not long after, Captain William Smith discovered the South Shetland Islands. But when he actually landed on a later visit, he found man-made wreckage already there -- the battered remains of the San Telmo. If wooden boards from the ship could wash up on the beach, why not a body?

Then, of course, there were sealers. Not long after Smith named the South Shetlands, sealers arrived to exterminate the local pinnipeds. From 1820 to 1824, some 60-75 British sealers were living and hunting on Cape Shirreff. They left behind ruined huts, glass bottles, harpoons, carved figures, and broken stoves. But, several of the new articles are quick to point out, there weren't female sealers! How could a woman's remains have ended up there?

A woman in a sealer camp

In fact, it is neither impossible nor even unlikely that a young Chilean woman might find herself aboard a sealer on the wrong side of the Drake Passage.

While uncommon, it was not unheard of for a married woman to join her husband at sea in the 19th century. Whaling ships, for example, might carry the captain's wife, and some, like Mary Brewster and Mary Chipman Lawrence, even left detailed diaries of their lives at sea on these vessels.

Indigenous women, in particular, might find themselves at sea for less savory reasons. In the South Pacific whaling trade off Southern Australia, European sailors would bring, voluntarily or no, Aboriginal women with them as both "wives" and workers. In 1819, a passing ship reported seeing European sealers go ashore on the mainland and seize aboriginal women, bringing them back to their sealing camp on Kangaroo Island.

A missionary in Tierra del Fuego reported a similar practice in 1889: "The sealers think nothing of kidnapping a Fuegian woman, [and] imprisoning her on board for the whole sealing season."

It's a grim fate to contemplate, but not an unlikely one. It's also possible that she went sealing disguised as a man. This practice isn't just a fictional trope, but a reality born out in historical records. A study on women in 19th-century whaling found four cases of women masquerading as men, and those were only the ones who were found out.

Dangerous territory

Navarro found the skull in 1985. Most of the papers on it came out in the 1990s. Why is it showing up on a rash of online sites now? I don't know for certain, but I know that the current interest spike started in July, on the Spanish-speaking internet.

The skull might be a curiosity or conspiracy-starter here, but for Chile, it may be more significant. Chile is one of the nations that signed the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. The treaty formally froze all territorial claims and theoretically prevents any future ones. But proof of early exploration or even indigenous settlement would be a significant bulwark to Chile's existing claim. Countries like Russia, the United States, and Brazil have asserted their right to make future claims. Those with existing slices of the pie are anxious to shore up their perceived legitimacy.

About two months after Spanish sites revived the Antarctic skull story, it crossed over, slightly garbled, onto the English web. The English articles dialed up cultural depictions of Antarctica as a place of myth. Since its discovery, it has featured in the works of early science fiction authors like Jules Verne, and the horrors of Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft. That haunting mystique continues today as alien/Nazi/flat earth conspiracies in the scarier corners of our culture.

So it's with all of this in mind that I urge skeptical caution when approaching stories like this. Don't get me wrong, the remains are a cool find. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Between the coastal lowlands and arid highlands of Peru lie about 5,200 holes. Carved before the Spanish invasion in 1532, the so-called "Valley of Holes" has long intrigued archaeologists and conspiracy theorists alike. New data suggest the site may have been an elaborate marketplace and, later, an Inca tax depot.

Situated in the Pisco Valley about 200km south of modern-day Lima, the Valley of Holes lies atop Monte Sierpe, or "Serpent Mountain." The name is not a coincidence. A 1.5km line of round holes snakes across the hilltop, evocative yet eluding obvious purpose. Explanations for the monument have included a grave site, a geoglyph (like the animal shapes at Nazca), an agricultural site, and, recently, a marketplace.

Holes at a crossroads

At the dawn of the first millennium, the Pisco Valley lurked at the edge of the Chincha Kingdom. Although a military society, the Chincha had advanced agricultural techniques. The remnants of their fields lie at the bottom of the foothills, the soil still rich thanks to their use of fertilizers like guano. They fished, too, and sailed the coast.

It was probably the Chincha who first dug the 5,200 holes atop Monte Sierpe. Their kingdom fell to the Inca around 1480, although the Chincha leaders retained much of their autonomy. If the Inca built the Valley of Holes, they had only 60-ish years to do so before the Spanish overthrew them. There are also no similar sites in the Inca heartland.

Monte Sierpe sits in the foothills of the Andes, at the intersection of major trade routes between agricultural plains, fishing coastlines, and mountain mines. Earlier archaeologists suggested that it was ideally positioned as a location for bartering. Now, they have the data to back that up.

Seeds in the ground

The team published their results this week in Antiquity. They surveyed the entire site with high-resolution aerial photography and sampled the soil in 19 holes. They found a variety of seeds and plants not present in the surrounding ground. These included maize, cotton, and brassica. Also present was Humboldt's willow, a coastal riparian plant used in basket-weaving.

While mountain plants could blow down from higher altitudes, the agricultural products and coastal plants required human transport. The structure of the site also suggests it hosted an activity with many participants. The holes are arranged in clusters of about a dozen rows each, with six or so holes per row.

These clusters could have served as categories in a marketplace, with goods laid out in each hole for easy display. There is enough space between holes to walk through the middle of each cluster, and busier traffic could have crossed between clusters.

Monte Sierpe under the Inca

The Inca did not use money, but their taxation system was rigorous and effective. They recorded census and financial information with a string-based writing system where the placement and type of knots on a string indicated numbers. Different strings combined together into quipus, the equivalent of books.

The authors of the new study suggest that one such quipu, found near Pisco Valley, may describe the Valley of Holes. This quipu recorded large-scale accounting functions, possibly including taxation quotas at the Monte Sierpe site. During the Inca period, it would have been an obvious center of taxation in their strict system.

Right now, the system of writing on quipus retains many mysteries. The exact purpose of this particular quipu is not known. But like many linguistic mysteries, advances in machine learning and encryption may mean answers are closer than ever before.

Scientists in Turkey have found a new route that ancient people used to spread north from the Middle East. Lying between western Anatolia and southeastern Europe, a now-submerged land bridge may have been a crucial migration route for both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

Until now, researchers believed that humans entered Europe mainly overland through the Balkans or the Levant -- what is now the Israel/Jordan/Syria region.

This new find suggests an alternative route. Archaeologists working with Turkish universities have discovered 138 stone tools at 10 sites off the coast of Ayvalık in northwestern Turkey, suggesting early peoples walked across a land bridge spanning the shallow Aegean Sea to Greece. 

A vital bridge for human migration

“These findings mark Ayvalık as a potential new frontier in the story of human evolution,” said study co-author Goknur Karahan. “This now-idyllic region once offered a vital land bridge for human movement during the Pleistocene era, when sea levels dropped and the submerged landscape was briefly exposed.”

During the Pleistocene era, the Earth was in the midst of the last Ice Age. Vast amounts of water were locked in glaciers, lowering global sea levels. This newly dry land would have turned the islands and peninsulas of today’s Ayvalık into an unbroken stretch of land linking the two continents.

The North Aegean coastline is geologically active, and artifact preservation rare. Even so, the team uncovered tools showing clear signs of the Levallois technique, a Paleolithic tool-making method. They also found hand axes and cleavers that are typical of early human cultures across Africa, Asia, and Europe.

“The presence of these objects in Ayvalık... provides direct evidence that the region was part of wider technological traditions shared across continents,” said Karahan. 

The discovery suggests that ancient humans weren’t just walking along the land bridge. They likely lived or stayed in the area for extended periods. This possible new route into Europe could reshape our understanding of early migration.

An Egyptian magician-prince who delves into the crumbling sepulchers of his ancestors in search of forgotten lore: It sounds like the pitch for an early 20th-century pulp adventure novel. But Prince Khaemwaset, living in the 12th century BCE, really was an archaeologist, adventurer, and explorer of his own already ancient civilization.

The Egypt of Prince Khaemwaset

People were farming and forming permanent settlements in Egypt as early as the 6th millennium BCE. By around 2900 BCE, Egypt was ruled by Pharaohs who built elaborate monuments, used hieroglyphic writing on papyrus, and worshipped gods like Horus. All this to say, when Prince Khaemwaset (also spelled Khaemweset, Khamwese, Khaemwes, and so forth) was born around 1281 BCE, his homeland already boasted a rich history.

He was the son of one of Egypt's most famous kings, Ramesses II, he whose vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Though his mother was only the king's second wife, Isetnefret, his father didn't hold it against him. At least in official depictions, Khaemwaset is right next to Amun-her-khepeshef, the son of Ramesses' beloved first wife, Nefertari.

The two princes were born in the reign of their grandfather and reared in the turbulent days of Ramesses' early reign. Khaemwaset must have been a good student at school, because he soon entered the priesthood. His order was dedicated to the worship of Ptah, the Egyptian creator-god associated with sculptors and craftsmen. It was his experience there that led him to the efforts he's remembered for today.

High priest and archaeologist

The priesthood has been the dumping ground for extraneous heirs across time and place. Prince Khaemwaset, however, seems to have been genuinely passionate and well-suited for a career with Ptah. Ptah, incidentally, became part of the modern word, "Egypt"; from Hikuptah (House of the spirit of Ptah) to the Greek Aigyptos, thence into English as "Egypt."

More relevantly here, Ptah's priests were the keepers of royal tradition and of one of the greatest temple libraries in Egypt. Skill, dedication, and, let's be honest, nepotism, accelerated Khaemwaset's career. By the time he was thirty, he was the High Priest of Ptah, gaining the title Setem. The title came with great responsibility, as well as a presumably very cool-looking panther-skin robe.

According to inscriptions he had written, the prince was "never happier than when he was reading the records of earlier times." It upset him that so many ancient monuments were falling into ruin. By the New Kingdom, some of Egypt's most famous wonders, including the pyramids and the Sphinx, were neglected and crumbling.

His new position as High Priest gave Khaemwaset the power to pursue his passion. He launched an extensive campaign, finding, restoring, and labeling the monuments and artworks of past dynasties. Like modern museum labels, the inscriptions he added to ancient statues explained who had built them, and when (and by whom) they'd been restored.

Khaemwaset at Giza

Though his priestly duties were extensive, and deaths in the family eventually made him the heir apparent, Khaemwaset only accelerated his restoration work. His greatest efforts came after a visit to Giza and the Old Kingdom necropolis of Saqqara. The monuments there were well over a thousand years old and were half-forgotten and in disrepair.

Using historical documents, he painstakingly matched the ruins with archival records. Then he wielded his position for funds to restore them, and added his inscription labels. He worked on the mastaba of Shepseskaf, the sun temple of Niuserre, the pyramid of Unas, and many others.

His most famous site is undoubtedly the Great Pyramid of Khufu -- the largest of the Giza pyramids. Khaemwaset not only restored but also conducted excavations around the pyramid. During these excavations, he uncovered a statue of Kawab, the son of Khufu. He seemed to have been particularly delighted by this statue, which he restored and placed in a special "museum" chapel at Memphis.

The inscription he added says where and how he found the statue, and that he restored it "because he loved the noble ones who dwelt in antiquity before him, and the excellence of everything they made."

Ancient Egyptian pr?

Some academics have pointed out, quite rightly, that the restoration of ancient monuments was a political act which advertised the power and prestige of Khaemwaset's dynasty, glorifying him and his father. They sometimes cite this in opposition to his popular reputation as a scholar and the first Egyptologist.

I personally find this a strange argument. It's like saying Captain Scott wasn't a real explorer because he was motivated by a desire to glorify himself and the British Empire. But yes, I suppose if we're quibbling, Khaemwaset didn't do all the monument restoration and research purely for the love of the game.

Whatever his motivation, his archaeological fervor kept his memory alive long after his death. Khaemwaset never became pharaoh. He died in his fifties. Ramesses II died much later and was instead succeeded by another of his many, many sons. But today and in ancient times, Khaemwaset is far better remembered than his younger brother, the pharaoh Merneptah.

Even during his lifetime, Khaemwaset had a reputation for possessing mystical, ancient knowledge. Khaemwaset's compositions used cryptography and obscure, archaic styles, and his willingness to enter ancient tombs garnered both admiration and fear. After his death, this reputation evolved into a mythology which became a literary genre.

The Setne (from his title, Setem) stories from Ptolemaic-era Egypt are adventure tales, about the exploits of the magician-Prince Setne-Khaemwese. These stories have Setne using his antiquarian knowledge to navigate ancient tombs, recovering magical books, and encountering the restless spirits of the dead. The influence of these stories on later Western fiction, and eventually Hollywood, is obvious.

A man of enduring mystery

Into the modern era, Khaemwaset is a figure of both mystery and appeal. Egyptologists give him the honor of being one of them, while Ancient Egyptian appreciators of a more, shall we say, supernatural interest have likewise turned to Khaemwaset.

He appears to have been a person of interest in early 20th-century Western esoteric thought. In fact, this author found a number of blog posts from the depths of the internet suggesting that Khaemwaset still occasionally figures in what, out of respect for our crystal-owning readers, I will only describe as non-typical spiritual belief.

But to return to more stable ground, Khaemwaset presents yet one more great mystery to modern Egyptology.

It was Khaemwaset who founded the Serapium, a massive joint tomb for the sacred Apis bulls. These bulls were incredibly important to ancient Egyptian worship and fell under the purview of Ptah. Rather than entombing them in individual mausoleums, Khaemwaset had one massive tomb constructed, which was in service for centuries afterward.

In 1852, Auguste Mariette found the Serapium and began excavations. In the oldest section of the ruin, he found a store of treasures bearing the names of Khaemwaset and his father. Finally, he came upon a gilded coffin. Inside were nondescript remains and a man's golden mask. For many years, Egyptologists believed this was the tomb and corpse of Khaemwaset.

But the body wasn't his. In fact, it wasn't even human; instead, it was yet another sacred bull. The actual tomb of Prince Khaemwaset, High Priest of Ptah and first Egyptologist, still lies undiscovered beneath the sands of Egypt.

For centuries, the giant stone statues on Easter Island, known as moai, have fascinated the world. The colossal human figures, some up to 10 meters high and weighing 86 metric tonnes, have had both scientists and the general public asking the same question: How did the Rapa Nui people move them into position?

Crafted between 1250 and 1500 CE, nearly 900 moai were carved and placed across the island. How they were constructed and transported was passed down orally through generations. When modern researchers asked the Rapa Nui people how the statues were moved, the answer was astonishingly simple: They said the moai “walked.” New research proves that this was, in fact, the case. 

Easter Island has very few trees, so the idea of dragging the statues on wooden sledges or rollers seemed highly unlikely. So researchers began considering that “walking” might not be a metaphorical expression. Could the statues really be moved upright, rocking side to side in a forward motion? 

A team of researchers led by Carl Lipo from Binghamton University and Terry Hunt from the University of Arizona took a creative approach in their new study. They previously showed you could move statues using an upright rocking motion.

First, get it rocking

“Once you get it moving, it isn’t hard at all,” explained Lipo. "The hard part is getting it rocking in the first place."

Following this success, they sought to determine if the same principles applied to statues as large as the moai. Researchers used computer simulations and built a 4.35-ton replica of a moai to get their answer. By looping ropes around the statue and having 18 people rock it side to side in a zigzag motion, they successfully moved it 100 meters in just 40 minutes. The experiment showed that the statues could “walk” with surprisingly little effort.

“The physics makes sense,” said Lipo in a statement. “What we saw experimentally actually works. And as it gets bigger, it still works. All the attributes that we see about moving gigantic ones only get more and more consistent the bigger and bigger they get, because it becomes the only way you could move it.”

The secret lies in the moai’s design. Each statue has a forward lean and a wide, D-shaped base, allowing it to pivot and tip safely from side to side. More evidence for this method is the roads on Rapa Nui. At about 4.5 meters wide with a concave surface, they are perfectly suited for guiding the walking statues. Researchers think they were actually created as the moai were moved along the surface of the ground.

“Every time they're moving a statue, it looks like they're making a road. The road is part of moving the statue,” said Lipo.

Beyond the mechanics, this discovery highlights the ingenuity of the Rapa Nui people.

"It shows that the Rapa Nui people were incredibly smart,” said Lipo. "They figured this out. They're doing it the way that's consistent with the resources they have." 

Stories of ancient Roman artifacts and ruins being dug up in back gardens or disrupting construction projects are common. It seems that a British pensioner can hardly dig a new plot for potatoes, nor an Italian municipality put in a new road, without Roman artifacts interfering.

But New Orleans, an ocean away from the former Roman Empire, should have been a safe bet. Not so. Last spring, Tulane University anthropologist Daniella Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, found a Latin-engraved and seemingly ancient stone in their backyard.

Could it be real?

Their first concern was that, like many New Orleans constructions, their home was built on an older cemetery. Santoro reached out to D. Ryan Gray of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans. Gray, a fellow professor of anthropology, helps map the hidden cemeteries and burial grounds of New Orleans.

He checked the location, but the couple's cheerful yellow house in Carrollton, New Orleans, didn't lie on any known burial site. That's when Gray turned to the curious Latin inscription. While Gray sent it to an expert in Austria, Santoro passed the inscription onto a colleague at her university, Dr. Susann Lusnia. Both classicists returned with the same conclusion: This wasn't another Roman artifact hoax.

The stone reads, roughly, as follows:

To the Spirits of the Dead for Sextus Congenius Verus, soldier of the praetorian fleet Misenensis, from the tribe of the Bessi, [who] lived 42 years [and] served 22 in the military, on the trieme Asclepius. Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, his heirs, made [this] for him [who was] well deserving.”

How did it get to New Orleans?

It's an obvious question. How did a 2nd-century Roman navy man's headstone end up in Louisiana? The two experts provided a vital clue. You see, modern archaeology had already uncovered the tombstone of Sextus Congenius Verus, near an old Roman port in Italy.

For decades, it had been listed as missing from the local museum. The city of Civitavecchia, which Sextus would have known as Centumcellae, was a target of intense Allied bombing during the Second World War. In the destruction of the bombs and the chaos of post-war Italy, much of the collection was lost or destroyed.

The story of the mysterious ancient Roman tombstone made it on the news, where Erin Scott O’Brien recognized her old home -- and her old decorative garden stone.

O'Brien had placed the stone in the garden in the early 2000s and left it there when she moved out a decade later. She'd inherited what she thought was a piece of yard art from her maternal grandparents. Her grandfather, Charles Paddock Jr, was a WW2 vet who had spent much of the war in Italy. Paddock brought the stone, and his wife Adele, back from the war.

The couple had put the stone in a display case in their home. There it remained until they both died in the 1980s. Eventually, it ended up with his granddaughter, Erin O'Brien.

Now, finally, it's going back to Italy. The tombstone is now in the hands of the FBI's Art Crime team, who are working to repatriate it to Civitavecchia.

In 1715, a violent hurricane off the Florida coast tore eleven Spanish ships to pieces and drowned most of their crew. That was only the start of the drama. Now, after the waterlogged ruins of the fleet have inspired piracy, arson, and archaeological theft, one of the shipwrecks has surrendered more treasure -- over $1 million in 18th-century coins.

So many rotting Spanish hulls litter the seabed off the central Floridian coast that this stretch of shoreline is called the Treasure Coast. This summer, a salvage company recovered over a thousand coins and other artifacts. “Every find helps piece together the human story of the 1715 fleet,” said director of operations Sal Guttuso. 

It's not just the monetary value of such a haul but also the historical significance that enraptures the hodgepodge of treasure hunters and amateur historians who obsess over the 1715 Fleet. The new discoveries will soon circulate in Florida museums, but in the meantime, many tantalizing questions remain unanswered. Where did they find the haul? Which ship, in particular, yielded the horde?

The comeback fleet

The Fleet of 1715 was intended to restore the Spanish Empire to its former glory. After half a century of economic mishaps and a decade of brutal war, Spain's once-regular deliveries of silver bullion had dwindled and then stopped entirely.

But from the get-go, mishaps plagued the project. Its commander, Juan Esteban de Ubilla, arrived in the Mexican port city of Veracruz in 1712. Ingots had been collected, coins minted, and ships refurbished. He was raring to go. But the year came and went, and no orders came. The Spanish Crown was engaged in complex peace negotiations and wanted Ubilla to hold off until the new world order set in.

Ubilla spent the next three years engaged in a series of first venomous, then sycophantic letters to his commanding officer in Mexico City. Both he and the fleet's sailors waited at Veracruz, wanting both in entertainment and back pay. In fact, the only thing of note that appears to have happened to Ubilla during this time was an unspecified "accident with his sword" that left him unable to travel for a time. (For a fascinating and often hilarious account of Ubilla's three-year bureaucratic nightmare, see this article.)

But on July 31, 1715, the Fleet did finally set sail -- straight into a hurricane, which sank eleven of its twelve ships and killed over a thousand men, including the unfortunate Ubilla.

Real-life Treasure Island

Eleven ships loaded with treasure, sunk in shallow Caribbean waters? The race was on to find them.

The Spanish had a head start. The largest ship in the Fleet, the Urca de Lima, floundered on a sandbank off the coast of Fort Pierce, Florida. The survivors evacuated the precious cargo to a salvage camp on the beach. Then they set the beached ship on fire to hide it from passing ships. Their captain hopped aboard a Spanish mail ship to carry news of the wreck to the Crown.

Unfortunately for Spain, word of the disaster had spread among nearby pirates. Charles Vane and Henry Jennings wasted no time fishing around the coastline for visible shipwrecks. Instead, they captured the mail ship and exhorted the captain of the Urca de Lima to give up the exact location. He did so.

Vane, Jennings, and their crew paid the survivors at the salvage camp a highly armed visit. Resistance was out of the question. They surrendered the modern equivalent of $23 million to Vane and Jennings.

Underwater art thieves

In 1932, the state of Florida authorized underwater excavations of a shipwreck they believed to be the Urca de Lima. Other wrecks followed, scattered along the Florida coastline. Exactly which ship became which wreck remains a hot topic of discussion among aficionados of the 1715 Fleet. Unspoken: the implication that the wrecks found so far may not even be the most exciting ships of the fleet.

Given the allure of the treasure ships, along with their historical importance, the government of Florida allows only one company at a time to excavate them. For the past decade, the lucky company has been Queens Jewels LLC. By law, Queens Jewels must donate up to 20 percent of each salvage haul to Florida museums.

While the ships themselves have mostly deteriorated in the warm Floridian water, artifacts remain buried beneath 300 years of sand. These artifacts include the silver coins known as pieces of eight and a variety of rarer gold coins. They're archaeological treasures -- and fetch a hefty price on the underground art market.

Queens Jewels has respected its donation requirements. But the temptation of making an extra million dollars or so proved too much for one of its subcontractor companies, a family of treasure hunters operating under the colorful name Booty Salvage. The family stole half of what they recovered from a 2015 dive before turning the rest over to Queens Jewels, according to one of the family's own members, Eric Schmitt, who was haunted by the theft.

A year after the crime, he dove back to the wreck and placed three of the coins in the sand. Then he sat on the secret.

That is, until last year, when Eric Schmitt texted the founder of Queens Jewels. Over a series of 36 messages, he confessed to the charade. Perhaps by this point, the stolen coins seemed trivial: He sent the texts from a jailhouse, following his arrest for assault with a deadly weapon.

Federal authorities have spent the past year tracking down as many of the stolen coins as they can.

The new find

After all this drama, Queens Jewels is back in the headlines. This time, it's with a success story. Divers directed by Captain Levin Shavers have recovered over a thousand artifacts from a 1715 Fleet wreck, valued at $1 million. This haul includes pieces of eight, gold escudos, and other unspecified gold pieces.

Queens Jewels has yet to release the details of the excavation. We do not yet know its location, nor do we know whether any of the artifacts bear clues to the identity of the ship. But the company is already liaising with local museums to restore and display some of the recovered pieces, which are fragile after 300 years of immersion in saltwater.

"Each coin is a piece of history, a tangible link to the people who lived, worked, and sailed during the Golden Age of the Spanish Empire," Guttuso commented in Queens Jewels' press release. "Finding 1,000 of them in a single recovery is both rare and extraordinary."

This does not mark the end of Queens Jewels' search for the 1715 Fleet shipwrecks. With only a handful of wrecks discovered, the secrets of July 31, 1715, remain a treasure for the future.

In a new study, an international research team found that pre-Neolithic people in Southeast Asia were mummifying their died by smoke-drying them. This would make them the oldest human mummies made intentionally, predating the previous contenders by thousands of years.

This find is an entire new chapter in the history of human funerary practice. Not only was this burial method widespread, it's still being practiced today.

An ancient practice

For the Dani (also known as Hubula) people in West Papua, Indonesia, it's important to preserve important deceased community members. They will pose and wrap the bodies of their loved ones into a fetal position, then expose the wrapped body to smoke in order to preserve them. This results in what are called "hyper-flexed" remains.

Hsiao-chun Hung, a researcher with the Australian National University in Canberra, was familiar with the Dani's funerary practices. So when she was in the field in Vietnam in 2017, she immediately noticed the similarity between the ancient burials and the modern Dani ones.

Hyper-flexed or crouching remains were a common practice among the ancient peoples of Southeast Asia. Traditionally, archaeologists have classified them as "primary burials." Primary burials are when the deceased is buried directly in the ground shortly after death. Secondary burials, in contrast, are defined by post-mortem treatment of the body prior to internment.

But Hung, observing the similarity to Dani practices, hypothesized that these Vietnamese burials may have been more elaborate than we thought.

They tested 69 remain samples from southern China, northern Vietnam and Indonesia. The sites were burial mounds, caves, and open-air. While all the remains were curled up, some were flexed on their sides while others were sitting upright or even prone. But over 80% of them showed signs of significant heat exposure.

Smoking the dead

The team used several different tests to gauge whether the remains had been heated after death, including a simple eye test. Many of the bones are visibly burnt, especially in the cranium, lower limbs, and elbows. This suggests that they were deliberately exposed to controlled heat, rather than fully cremated. The bones only burnt in areas with a thinner covering of flesh.

But not all heat treatment leaves visible marks on the bone. X-ray analysis examined the chemical structure of 20 samples. Nine had been heated above 525˚C, and another eight may have been exposed to lower temperatures.

To investigate the lower-temperature treatments, researchers used infrared spectroscopy. Heat exposure changes materials on a structural level, so by examining the bone crystallinity, scientists can tell whether bone, even ancient bone, has been heated above 400°C. Of the 64 samples they tested this way, only eight had not been exposed to heat.

The study suggests that most of the bodies were tightly bound shortly after death, then smoked over low heat for a long time, before being buried.

The most famous early mummies, like those of Egypt or Peru, were desiccated. The dryness of their surroundings sucked out any liquid, leaving a dry, preserved body. But in climates like East and Southeast Asia, the environment is too damp. Instead, they resorted to smoking their dead in order to preserve them. And as these new findings suggest, they've been doing it for a long time.

Oldest human mummies

Before this find, the oldest known man-made human mummies were the Chinchorro mummies of modern-day Chile. The oldest of these dates to 5050 BCE. The Chinchorro people preserved bodies through a complex process of disassembly, heat treatment, and reconstruction. The arid Atacama Desert helped preserve these ancient remains.

But the oldest sample Hsiao-chun Hung and the research team examined was from over 14,000 years ago, roughly twice the age of the Chinchorro mummies. Not only are these mummies much older, but they're from a climate very different from what is usually associated with mummification practices.

While the 14,000-year-old specimen is the oldest we know of, Hung believes the practice may be even older, citing flexed burial sites across the region from as much as 42,000 years ago. In much of Southeast Asia, the practice faded out once people adopted farming 5000 to 3500 years ago.

The geographic range is also massive, extending across most of Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and Australia. One of the tantalizing unanswered questions is whether the burial practices of Papua share a common lineage with those of the ancient Southeast Asians.

Are similar sites in Australia, Japan, and Southeast Asia all descended from one tradition? How ancient really are the oldest human mummies?

Ancient Egyptian pharaohs, including the famous Hatshepsut, sent sea voyages to trade with the distant kingdom of Punt. Centuries of ancient explorers like Hannu and Nehsi voyaged to Punt, bringing back golden riches, spices, incense, ebony, ivory, and exotic animals.

Punt was a land from poems and stories, of golden mines and sweet-smelling resins, far away over the sea. Its association with the aromatics used in worship gave it the name "Land of the Gods."

By the end of the New Kingdom era, however, it had fallen into legend. Today, the kingdom survives in Egyptian records and a handful of artifacts. We know it existed, but historians still debate where the kingdom of Punt actually was, and who lived there.

Punt in the Old Kingdom

We don't know for certain when the Egyptians and the people of Punt, also anglicized as Pwenet, first came into contact. The first recorded expedition occurred under the 5th-dynasty pharaoh Sahure, in the 25th century BCE. Sahure invested heavily in Egypt's navy and trade networks, sending expeditions to the Levant, Sinai, and Punt.

An important record of the Old Kingdom, the Palermo stone, records the wealth Sahure's Punt expedition brought back to Egypt: 80,000 units of myrrh, 6,000 of electrum, and 23,000 staves, possibly of ebony. We don't know what the units of measure were, but 80,000 anythings of myrrh is a great deal of myrrh. They also brought frankincense cuttings, which Sahure attempted, without success, to cultivate in Egypt.

For the remainder of the Old Kingdom, trade with Punt continued, though the expeditions were infrequent. The voyage would have been long and dangerous. In fact, the last Old Kingdom pharaoh, Pepi II, had to send an expedition to collect the body of the previous, failed expedition's leader.

Under the very long reign of Pepi II, who ascended to the throne at age six and died between 62 and 94 years later, several expeditions went to Punt. His records also reference an expedition that occurred around 60 years earlier, in the reign of Djedkare Isesi.

Apparently, Djedkare Isesi's expedition had brought a dancing dwarf entertainer back from Punt. Pepi II, then eight, very much wanted a dwarf of his own. In a letter to the expedition leader, Harkhuf, Pepi II expressed that he was far more excited to see the dwarf than he was for all the tribute.

Forgotten, rediscovered, forgotten again

Following the end of Pepi II's reign, the Old Kingdom collapsed. A changing climate left the region temporarily dry, leading to famine, worsening political instability. Egypt collapsed into multiple decentralized and intermittently warring regions. Massive trade expeditions fell by the wayside, and Punt was half-forgotten.

This chaotic First Intermediate Period eventually settled back down under the 11th dynasty, beginning the Middle Kingdom era. Around 2000 BCE, Pharaoh Mentuhotep III sent a trading voyage to Punt, reopening the route, or perhaps forging a new one.

His official, Henu, traveled across the desert from Koptos (now Qift) to the Red Sea, along a route called the Wadi Hammamat. From there, he sent ships out of the port of Wadi Gawasis. The ships made it to Punt, loaded up on myrrh, and came back. Mentuhotep III was so proud of the success that, as pharaohs were wont to do, he had someone carve it in stone and park the stone along the Wadi Hammamat.

Throughout the subsequent 12th dynasty, regular trade with Punt continued out of Wadi Gawasis. Myrrh and other aromatics were an especially important product of Punt because they served in religious rituals.

But boat-building is a privilege afforded only to those with access to timber. When Egypt broke apart again around 1630 BCE, foreign Hyksos kings ruled the north, and therefore the timber trade out of the Levant. No more timber, no more Punt.

The Hatshepsut expedition

One of the most famous Ancient Egyptian rulers, the Pharaoh Hatshepsut, was notable not only for being a woman but for being a great builder who led Egypt into a period of prosperity. She accomplished this, at least partially, through her expedition to Punt.

When she took the throne, it had been at least 200 years since the last Egyptian voyage to Punt. The end of the Middle Kingdom, the chaotic Second Intermediate Period, and the beginning of the New Kingdom had left Wadi Gawasis abandoned, the harbor filled with silt, and their trade routes forgotten.

Enter Hatshepsut. After the death of her husband-brother Thutmose II, she became regent for her young son-nephew, Thutmose III. A few years into her "regency," she gave up the pretense and adopted the full title and regalia of a reigning monarch.

In the ninth year of her rule, according to inscriptions at her temple, Hatshepsut heard the voice of an oracle: The great god Amun-Re himself instructed her to search for the lost Punt and reforge the path to the land of myrrh.

Alternatively, she saw it as a way to continue her program of expansion without the logistical complications of conquering (and then ruling) land outright. Egyptologist Pearce Paul Creasman proposed this interpretation, describing Hatshepsut's exploration missions as an attempt to legitimize her power.

Either way, she sent a great fleet, declaring, "I will lead the army on water and on land, to bring marvels from God's land to this god."

Glimpses of Punt at Deir el-Bahri

The expedition appears to have gone swimmingly. Nineteenth-century British expeditions looking for trade routes were usually lucky to escape with their lives, but the Ancient Egyptian trade expeditionaries returned successfully and heavily laden with riches.

Lavish illustrations and inscriptions, preserved on the walls of Deir el-Bahri, Hatshepsut's massive mortuary temple complex, tell the story of her expedition.

Hatshepsut chose a man named Nehsi to lead. Nehsi was a high court official of Nubian (a kingdom mostly encompassed by modern-day Sudan) descent, serving as her chief treasurer.

His expedition comprised five ships, all 21 meters long, carrying a force of 210 men. They also brought a large statue of Hatshepsut to put in Punt once they arrived, though whether this was intended as a gift or more of a flag-planting is ambiguous.

In addition to their large statue, the Egyptians brought "bread, beer, wine, meat, fruit, and everything found in Egypt." In exchange, they got a wealth of luxury and exotic goods: myrrh, whole living myrrh plants, other aromatics, gold, ebony wood, leopard skins, baboons, cattle, monkeys, hounds, eye paint, and slaves.

The relief showed the land of Punt populated by giraffes, rhinos, ibexes, donkeys, and birds, with ebony and date-palm trees. Puntite houses were round huts on stilts. What the relief wall doesn't show, however, is how exactly they got to Punt.

The rulers of Punt

In Punt, Hatshepsut's emissaries met with the king, Parehu, and his wife, Ati. Ati is depicted far outside the typical idealized norm in Egyptian art, with a wide lower body and rolls of fat. Egyptologists have debated why she is depicted this way. Is it an offensive or humorous caricature, a representation of a medical condition, or a stylized rendering of a normal, large woman?

Some even interpret it as a clue to Punt's location. It may depict steatopygia, a type of build where substantial adipose tissue accumulates in the thighs and gluts. This build is found most frequently in the Khoisan people of Southern Africa and in some indigenous groups in Central Africa.

How to become a lost kingdom

The trade relationship that Hatshepsut established outlived her. In the 19th dynasty, another of the most famous pharaohs recorded an expedition. Ramesses II, known as Ramesses the Great, sent an expedition during his reign from 1279 to 1213 BCE.

An inscription in one of his temples records the king sending an expedition to Punt, which returned with incense and aromatic plants. As a result, "the marvels of Punt are secure, all the noble houses prosper." Curiously, this inscription appears alongside a list of his conquests in Asia and the Middle East, not his conquests in Africa.

An inscription of Ramesses III provides more details. His great ships, heavy with Egyptian goods, were "sent to the great Sea of Muqed; [then] they reached the mountains of Punt without any misfortune befalling them."

On the return trip, having exchanged their Egyptian goods for Puntite, the merchant fleet sailed to " the mountain of Koptos," the same Nile port by the Red Sea from which Henu had sailed about 850 years earlier.

After this, we stop finding mentions of the kingdom of Punt as a real place. But it retained a presence in Egyptian culture into the Ptolemaic period. It was associated, though the sacred myrrh, with divinity, magic, and botanical splendor. Punt's distance from Egypt made it an exotic and almost unreal land. Punt appeared in love poems, religious hymns, and popular fairy tales.

His fragrance has come from Punt,
And his talons are covered with resin,
But my yearning is toward you.

-- From a New Kingdom love poem

Arabia? Sri Lanka? Sudan?

When early Egyptologists (in many ways indistinguishable from graverobbers) heard of Punt as the land of perfumes, they immediately thought of the Arabian Peninsula. In the height of Victorian orientalism, they recalled the famous "perfumes of Arabia," and that settled the matter. Then excavation began at Deir el-Bahri, uncovering the relief wall.

Based on the people, buildings, plants, and animals in the relief, archaeologists concluded that Punt must be somewhere in Africa. But whether this African kingdom was just south of Egypt itself, around the region of modern-day Sudan, or as far as the Horn of Africa, they weren't sure.

We know that many expeditions took the route over the desert to the Red Sea coast by way of Koptos. But we don't know where they went on the Red Sea from there. Further complicating matters, there seems to have been an overland route as well, via the Nile.

There are hundreds of conflicting details between the different accounts. Old South Arabian languages, for example, do not contain the letter 'P', making it unlikely they would have a kingdom named Punt ruled by a Parehu. Then again, Ramesses' inscriptions describe it as part of the Asiatic territories, to the north and east. As soon as an academic raised their theory, another found a point to discredit it.

Locations for Punt include the Levant, Sinai and Eastern Desert, the upper Nile Valley, the Horn of Africa, eastern Africa, and southern Arabia. Based on a dubiously identified plant specimen, a few have even proposed that Punt was an island near modern-day Sri Lanka. Everyone else can at least agree that this is unlikely.

The port of Wadi Gawasis

With the written record so tangled, archaeologists have increasingly turned to physical evidence. We still have not found any ruins of Punt itself, but we have found the port of Wadi Gawasis, where expeditions to Punt began.

Under Kathryn A. Bard and Rodolfo Fattovich, a joint American and Italian archeological project launched in 2001 to excavate and explore Wadi Gawasis. After nearly two decades of work, they confirmed that the site was the Middle Kingdom port and found clues to the location of Punt.

In one sealed cave, they found over forty sycamore wood boxes with inscriptions on the side. Like a modern packing slip, the inscriptions said the boxes contained "wonderful things of Punt." They also found broken pottery made by the Ancient Ona people of the Eritrea region, and by the Neolithic Gash Group of modern-day Eritrea and Eastern Sudan.

A study summarizing archaeological finds at Wadi Gawasis and at the Horn of Africa found Egyptian artifacts on both the Red Sea coast of southwestern Arabia and on the coast of Somalia. Based on this and the textual evidence, the authors proposed that Punt may have included both sides of the Red Sea, which engaged in trade with each other.

In other words, Punt didn't fit any one place because it was actually two places, closely connected by trade across the narrow strait.

Baboon evidence

It wouldn't be Ancient Egypt without some good mummies, and the Punt mystery is no exception. We don't have the remains of any Puntites, but we do have something that came from Punt: a baboon.

Baboons are not native to Egypt. Yet the Egyptians considered them-- specifically the hamadryas baboon-- as sacred animals. For religious ceremonies, Egyptians imported large numbers of the animals, which they often mummified. Punt was an important source of baboons, which are native to both the Horn of Africa and parts of the Arabian Peninsula.

Hoping to shed light on the Punt question, a team led by Dartmouth researchers tested mummified baboons to see where exactly they'd come from. They used isotopic mapping to measure where the two specimens had been born and where they had moved during their lives.

One specimen had lived for many years in Egypt before its mummification, while the other had died only a few months or even days after arriving. But they both had been born outside the Nile Delta. By testing modern baboon populations and comparing, researchers narrowed down the two baboons' birthplace to an area encompassing modern-day Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti. In other words, they were from the Horn of Africa.

Is the case of Punt solved?

All the evidence we have of the Kingdom of Punt comes from the Egyptians. And the inscriptions of Ancient Egyptian rulers were not always accurate regarding their successes. Ramesses II, for instance, put up inscriptions claiming his victory in the famous Battle of Kadesh. His enemies, the Hittites, also claimed to have won the battle of Kadesh. Considering they were the ones who got to keep Kadesh, I'd say Ramesses' claims may be a tad inflated.

That's all to say, archaeological evidence is key. Just because an inscription says 3,000 men sailed to the end of the earth, doesn't mean they did. Archaeological evidence seems to point to the Horn of Africa. That's what most Egyptologists consider the most likely location.

That doesn't mean we've found Punt. It means we know where to start looking.

Archaeologists have discovered the site of a Neolithic cannibalistic feast in a cave in northern Spain, south of Bilbao. Around 5,700 years ago, when farming communities were spreading across the Iberian Peninsula, at least 11 individuals ended up in the pot, slaughtered, dismembered, cooked, and eaten.

Researchers analyzed over 600 bone fragments from El Mirador cave, and many showed clear signs of "processing after death." The remains came from children, adolescents and adults, with 132 fragments displaying cut marks that indicate defleshing, skinning, and dismembering.

Other bones show smoothed ends, suggesting an act referred to as “pot-polishing,” which occurs when bones are thrown around in cooking pots. Burning and cremation caused distinctive discoloration on many of the bones. Some fragments were even gnawed by human teeth.

Radiocarbon dating suggests this was not a periodic ritual or desperate attempt at survival. All of the victims died at the same time and were quickly butchered. This was a single event that took no longer than a few days.

A single family

The ages of the victims suggest to researchers that they were likely a nuclear or extended family. Strontium isotope analysis shows that the victims were all local to the Iberian Peninsula, ruling out outsiders or migratory groups.

Signs of cannibalism have been seen in this area before, dating back to the Bronze Age.

“The recurrence of these practices at different moments in recent prehistory makes El Mirador a key site for understanding prehistoric human cannibalism," noted Palmira Saladie, lead author of the study.

But while cannibalism was relatively commonplace in this region at the time, this does not seem to have been part of funeral rites or cannibalistic customs. Researchers have called it an act of "ultimate elimination," possibly aimed at obliterating an entire household or group.

The horrific event was most likely rooted in conflict within a community rather than famine, ritual, or desperation. There were no signs of environmental stress or resource scarcity that would lead to survival cannibalism. Instead, the systematic destruction of these 11 people points to war cannibalism. Whoever was killing them wanted to erase them from both the physical and spiritual world. Within such communities, it was commonly believed that eating the flesh of another destroyed their soul completely.

Cannibalism was far more prevalent than at this time than we ever assumed, but often it is impossible to decipher the context -- starvation, war, or ritual tend to leave similar remains.

"It [cannibalism] is one of the most complex behaviors to interpret," said Saladie. [But] societal biases tend to interpret it invariably as an act of barbarism."

Steven Spielberg's portrayal of the Nazis in the Indiana Jones movies is surprisingly accurate. The fictional Nazi villains' attempts to secure the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail were based on real people with the oddest ambition: to weaponize archaeology. 

A disturbed mind

In the early 1900s, a curious boy grew up in an ordinary family in Munich. At age 10, he already buried himself in books about politics and religion. A bright future beckoned, before his life took a dark turn. His parents were unable to financially support his academic endeavors, and he later failed to join the military. Angry with the world, he started to form dangerous ideas. This boy was Heinrich Himmler. 

In the aftermath of World War I, Himmler consumed fringe literature that focused on the occult, antisemitism, and the racial superiority of the "Nordic" race. After joining the Nazi Party and climbing the ranks to sit at Hitler’s side, he saw an opportunity to manipulate academia. 

Himmler eventually became the head of the Schutzstaffel (the SS, an elite paramilitary wing of the Nazi party) in 1929. This allowed him to indulge his occultist beliefs and wild theories. In 1935, he established a special "scientific" department called Ahnenerbe, which translates as "something inherited from the forefathers." Later, it was renamed the Research and Teaching Community in Ancestral Heritage.

Promoting Nazi ideology

The department's primary aim was to promote Nazi ideology through the reinterpretation of ancient history, focusing on the supposed superiority of the Germanic race. The Ahnenerbe tried to find archaeological and anthropological evidence of Germanic civilizations to legitimize Germany's territorial expansion.

Hitler claimed that the German people descended from a pseudoscientific superior race called the Aryans. The term was originally used to describe Indo-Iranian groups in Asia, but was appropriated by 19th-century writers and philosophers like Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain to describe a proto-Indo-European race superior to all others. These ideas formed the basis for Nazi ideology.

The Nazis believed the Aryans were a Nordic people, flaxen-haired, white, physically strong, and the founders of civilization. The hypothesis was that the Aryans/Germanic people built the Northern European culture, from music, art, and religion to value systems and forms of politics. 

Hitler admired Nordic and Greco-Roman cultures, which he claimed emerged from a single Germanic Aryan race.

Ahnenerbe conducted pseudoscientific research, ranging from archaeology to anthropology, to support Nazi racial theories.

Himmler himself stated:

The one and only thing that matters to us, and the thing these people are paid for by the State, is to have ideas of history that strengthen our people in their necessary national pride. In all this troublesome business, we are only interested in one thing -- to project into the dim and distant past the picture of our nation as we envisage it for the future. Every bit of Tacitus in his Germania is tendentious stuff. Our teaching of German origins has depended for centuries on a falsification. We are entitled to impose one of our own at any time.

Himmler hoped to use this "science" to create a new religion. As time went by, what was originally propaganda became fact in Himmler's mind. He started to believe his lies.

Pseudoarchaeology

With considerable funding, the Ahnenerbe started digging. Ambitious young archaeologists saw this as an opportunity to launch their careers. Assien Bohmers, an eager Dutch archaeologist, got a job excavating Palaeolithic sites. Bohmer participated in a dig in Mauern, Bavaria, that unearthed the remains of a Cro-Magnon female who bore "similar" features to German women. The Nazi archaeologists claimed that "the excavations at Mauern have revealed that the Cro-Magnon race must have developed in greater Germany."

Discoveries such as these stirred up excitement in Germany. Writer Bettina Arnold gives an example of a flyer that promoted the importance of archaeology:

Every single find is important because it represents a document of our ancestors! Keep your eyes open, for every Volksgenosse [fellow German] can contribute to this important national project! Do not assume that a ceramic vessel is useless because it falls apart during excavation. Carefully preserve even the smallest fragment!

'Responsibility with respect to our indigenous prehistory must again fill every German with pride!'

Other sites, such as Externsteine and Biskupin, were also used by the propaganda machine.

Externsteine is a series of striking sandstone rock formations in northern Germany, which gained symbolic importance to the Nazis because of their association with ancient Germanic and pagan traditions. The Nazis viewed the site as a symbol of Germany's pre-Christian, "pure," past, which they believed was rooted in a spiritual connection to nature and ancestral heritage. It became the site of Nazi cult rituals.

Excavations in Biskupin, Poland, supposedly showed that the local populations were conquered by the Aryans. Hitler used this as part of his justification for the invasion.

The search for the Holy Grail

Just like in Indiana Jones, the Nazis tried searching for the Holy Grail. This brings us to the bizarre tale of Otto Rahn. Rahn was holed up in a little apartment writing about his greatest passion: Arthurian legend and the Holy Grail. He spent what little money he had trying to track down the Holy Grail, even traveling around France to learn about the Grail from oral tradition.

German folktales state that the Grail was a stone, not a chalice, and Rahn read of a heretical Christian sect called the Cathars who received a stone from heaven. He believed this was the Grail. However, he ran out of money before he could proceed any further with his research. Then came the answer to his prayers.

Himmler also wanted to find the Grail; according to legend, it could provide eternal life. Himmler also wanted to prove that Christ was not a Jew but an Aryan. So, he offered Rahn a job with a handsome salary to search for the Grail. Rahn could not refuse, but his new work came at a cost. The Nazis tampered with his writing, inserting passages about Jews destroying culture. Rahn was also asked to prove his ethnic purity. He was gay, and paranoia that the Nazis would discover this eventually led him to commit suicide.

Himmler had lost an archaeologist but continued the search. In Spain, an obscure monastery in Montserrat featured a local legend that the monks held the Holy Grail in the mountain. Himmler visited the monastery, but returned to Germany empty-handed.

Aryans in Tibet

Perhaps one of the oddest Ahnenerbe expeditions was to Tibet. In 1938, a team led by Ernst Schaefer, a zoologist and SS officer, traveled to Tibet under the guise of scientific research. While the team studied the local flora and fauna, they also searched for archaeological evidence that could prove Nazi theories about the Aryan "race." They believed Tibet could have been the Aryan homeland. They measured and studied the physical features of locals and observed local customs.

South America

Even before the establishment of Ahnenerbe, SS officers and archaeologists were trying their best to find evidence of German superiority. Edmund Kiss was obsessed with the idea that Aryans were descended from survivors of Atlantis. Kiss believed these survivors spread across the globe and built civilizations.

One of the largest archaeological sites on the South American continent is near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. The site was used for astronomy, contained impressive carvings, monoliths, subterranean temples, and high walls. Kiss refused to believe a pre-Columbian culture had built the complex site. Instead, he believed that a Nordic Aryan race that migrated to South America constructed it. He based these claims on the supposed resemblance between carved humanoid figures and Aryans.

A fitting end

After the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Ahnenerbe was disbanded, and many of its members faced prosecution for their roles in Nazi crimes.

On a typically balmy mid-September day in southern Arizona in 1924, WWI veteran Charles E. Manier took his family for a drive. Manier, along with his wife, son, and father, enjoyed a picnic at nearby Picture Rock. Now they were driving back along Silverbell Road.

Many of the homes in the U.S. Southwest are built from adobe, a sort of mudbrick which keeps buildings cool during the day and warm at night. These homes were plastered with lime, leaving old lime kilns scattered across the landscape. Entertainment was hard to come by in 1924, so when they passed an abandoned lime kiln, the family pulled over to have a poke around.

Charles noticed something strange poking out of the ground. A flattish, metal object was stuck in the hard caliche (soil cemented together by lime into a hard concretion). Intrigued, Manier fetched an old pick and began working to free the object.

As the caliche was chipped away, a 46-centimeter-long lead cross emerged. But the real mystery was only revealed later, when Manier, having lugged the 30-kilogram cross home, washed it clean. Free of dirt, Manier was able to see the inscriptions. They were in Latin -- and they included a date: 790 AD.

Unearthing the 'Tucson Artifacts'

Manier was intrigued, to say the least. He enlisted a friend, a lawyer named Thomas Bent, and together they returned to the old kiln site. They found more artifacts, not just crosses but swords and spearheads.

Thomas Bent went all-in on his friend's find. Discovering that the old kiln site land was unowned, he quickly purchased it. Together, with the assistance of several academics from the nearby University of Arizona (my alma mater doesn't come off particularly well in this story, I fear), they set to excavating.

Over the following months, they continued to unearth strange lead artifacts, from more cross tablets to weapons to religious symbols.

Early debate

Manier and Bent had contacted the nearby university -- the University of Arizona-- after the first cross was discovered. A local paper, the Arizona Daily Star, reported on the find. The first academic to examine the cross was Frank Hamilton Fowler, the head (and sole member) of the Classics department.

He found the inscriptions unconvincing, with poor Latin, and expressed his opinion that the oldest the items could be was 900 years old. There was also the use of "AD" for Anno Domini, not in common use until the 11th century.

Enter Andrew Ellicott Douglass, astronomer and inventor of dendrochronology (tree-ring dating). Also at the U of A in 1924, he was intrigued. He started reaching out to experts, including the British Museum.

They replied haughtily, "We all find it difficult to believe that the cross can be anything but the work of a person living not very long ago, and desirous of mystifying other persons." A.E. Douglass was unconvinced by this reasoning.

Then geologist Clifton J. Sarle joined the merry band of Tucson Artifact Believers. Caliche, they noted, doesn't form overnight, and many of the artifacts were over a meter below the surface.

The final prominent member of the "pro-artifact" team was a local art teacher and passionate historian named Laura Coleman Ostrander. Approached by Bent, she took up the challenge of translating and interpreting their finds. For over a year, she pieced together the Latin and Hebrew transcriptions, using them to construct a history of Arizona's lost Roman-Jewish kingdom.

Calalus, the unknown land

In the year 775, her interpretation went, a Roman-Jewish expedition went across the sea to the west coast of North America. They called their landing place "Roman Calalus, an unknown land."

Led by their king, Theodorus, the newcomers soon encountered the Toltezus, a group of people already living in Calalus, who soon became their bitter enemies. In addition to chronicling the list of kings, the rest of the "historical account"-type tablets deal with the Roman Calalus-Toltezus wars.

During his 14-year reign, Theodorus proved himself a brave warrior-king, who "carried on much warfare with the Toltezus." After Theodorus, King Jacobus ruled Calalus, and he rebuilt the city which the Toltezus had sacked late in the reign of his predecessor. After him came Israel I, who ruled for an impressive 67 years. His successor, Israel II, ascended the throne aged only 26, and was killed in battle against the Toltezus six years later.

But the reign of Israel III proved disastrous. As the unnamed chronicler records: "[In] 880 AD, Israel the 3rd was banished since he had liberated the Toltezus. He first broke the custom. The earth trembled. Fear overwhelmed the hearts of mortals in the third year after he fled. They betook themselves within the city and kept themselves within the walls."

The historian writes that 3,000 were killed during this last, terrible outbreak of fighting. The capital city was under siege, and things appear grim: "it is uncertain," our narrator finishes, "how long life will continue."

The record seems to end there, with the Romans of Calalus wiped out by the Toltezus, leaving only one collection of a few dozen artifacts.

Who were the Toltezus?

In the minds of many, the inclusion of the Toltezus people was a huge score on the side of authenticity. Toltezus could very convincingly be read as a Latinization of the Nahuatl word Tōltēkah, meaning "the people from Tollan." This is where we get the English term "Toltec," referring to a pre-Columbian Mesoamerican people.

Believers argued that the seemingly clear reference to a real people from ancient times was too perfect a detail for a fraud to have invented it.

There are some points that don't quite add up here -- Toltec influence did not extend so far north, and they didn't reach prominence until around 900. If the Toltecs had been in the area, why were there no Toltec artifacts? Where was the city of Rhoda, where Theodorus brought up his forces, and where 700 were captured?

That is the central problem with the Tucson Artifacts' believability. Even if the artifacts themselves were perfectly accurate (and they aren't; we'll get to that), the question remains: Where is everything else?

Many buildings built in the Early Medieval era in the Mediterranean survive to this day. Did these Arizona Romans step off the boat and forget what mortar and bricks were? Looking back, it seems obvious. But in the excitement of the moment, even respected historians and archaeologists were taken in by the Tucson Artifacts.

Battle in the press

For over a year after the first find, the papers remained silent on the subject of Arizona's Roman artifacts. U of A scholars remained divided. When A.E. Douglass's absent boss, Byron Cummings, returned from Mexico, he was met with the problem of the artifacts.

He visited the site to help excavate a sword blade, and afterwards released a statement to the press. The object's position in the undisturbed caliche seemed irrefutable. "I am convinced that they are genuine," Cummings announced.

After this statement, newspapers all over the country picked up the story, including The New York Times, which gave it a front-page spot. They presented the claims of the Arizona-based scientists regarding the caliche. But they also dedicated a lengthy section to Dr. Bashford Dean, then Curator of Arms and Armor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a specialist in forgeries.

"The Arizona specimens are modern forgeries, probably local, and certainly without either interest or value," Dean told them.

As evidence, he pointed to the fresh instrument marks which had been deliberately rounded in a few places to give the appearance of age.

The figures, he continued, were crude copies of work the artist had seen, and the crowns and swords were childish imaginings, rather than accurate depictions of items from the period. There was also a very basic Latin mistake; "Gaul," the English form, is written instead of the correct Gallia.

There was a flurry of articles from the Arizona Daily Star, with titles like, If Cummings Says They’re Genuine, They are, Declare Tucsonans. But they didn't speak for everyone. Another local paper, the Tucson Citizen, had been doing some digging.

Timotio Odohui

In January of 1926, the Tucson Citizen began publishing a series of articles. A retired cowboy named Leandro Ruiz remembered "a highly educated young Mexican, a sculptor, who lived at the lime kiln with his parents in 1886."

The Citizen latched onto the lead. They discovered that the man's name was Timotio Odohui, and he had possessed a large library of Hebrew and Latin classical texts. Ruiz further remembered that Odohui had made lead-cast objects, including a marker to indicate where Ruiz had once fallen from a horse.

Another elderly local had confirmed Ruiz's account, recalling both the Odohui family and their son's felicity with lead sculpting. The Times was quick to pick up the story. Timotio's father, Vicenti Odohui, had been forced to leave Mexico with his family due to political instability following the Franco-Mexican War.

An educated man, he'd brought the family library with him, containing a collection of classical works, heirlooms up to 200 years old. For eight or nine years, the family burnt lime in the kiln. But after Vicenti died, his wife and son disappeared, presumably returned to Mexico.

The final coffin nail?

If Odohui was the creator of the Tucson Artifacts, that would explain why the Toltecs, a civilization centered around Hidalgo, appear in the American Southwest.

It would also explain why, as Frank Fowler discovered, every phrase of the inscriptions can be found word for word in one of three dictionaries, all first published after 1864. The Latin and Hebrew writing was copied in chunks, almost verbatim, from phrasebooks, reassembled like puzzle pieces to tell an alternate history.

Cummings, for his part, was unconvinced.

"I am firmer than ever in my belief that they are genuine," he told the Citizen. 

In fact, he argued, the whole story was implausible. "Where did this Mexican boy obtain his reported wonderful university education? There were no universities in Mexico those days."

The first university in Mexico was established in 1551, for the record. But though the Odohui theory, and Fowler's discovery, seemed to doom Cummings' favorite finds, he still had one ace up his sleeve.

The caliche issue

"I am not able to refute Dr. Fowler’s citations and references," he admits, "but how can it be possible that the crosses were inscribed within the past 20 years, when we have positive proof that the relics have been buried in the caliche formation for at least 50, 100, or a longer term of years?”

But the caliche is a double-edged sword. See, they were buried, seemingly, too deep to be recent. They were also buried too deeply to be from 800 BCE. So, how could the caliche be explained?

James Quinlan, a Tucson geologist, undertook a survey of the site to find the answer. In his 2000 report, which he shared with historian of the Southwest Don Burgess, he explained how a recent object could appear to be embedded deeply in caliche. Most of the objects had been found on the edge of embankments, in the softer "horizon" of the caliche.

Then there was the other claim that believers had made: that caliche could not be artificially created. Quinlan decided to test it out. He mixed sand, gravel, and store-bought lime, stuck a lead pipe in, and waited. It quickly dried, and the rod appeared completely encrusted in caliche.

So who did it?

Besides the attribution to Timotio Odohui, speculators have proposed various alternate theories throughout the years. Perhaps, for instance, the artifacts were left by Spanish conquistadores or missionaries in the 16th century.

In a 2010 interview with the Arizona Daily Star, Don Burgess, then president of the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society, expressed his own theory: that the artifacts were being made at the same time they were being discovered.

Quinlan agreed. In his report, he pointed out that the later objects could have been planted in the emerging excavation trenches, so they appeared to be deeply embedded. He concluded that he "would suspect someone close to the project."

Again, the Latin dictionary quotations may be the smoking gun. These three books were Harkness's Latin Grammar, published in 1881, Allen and Greenough's Latin Grammar, from 1903, and Roufs Standard Dictionary of Facts, 1914. The kicker: the 1903 edition of Allen & Greenough's Latin Grammar was the Latin textbook used in Tucson, Arizona high schools in 1924.

We don't know for certain who made the artifacts. Bent and Manier are rarely fingered as the culprits. Rather, AE Douglass, Clifton Sarle, and Laura Ostrander are the usual alternative suspects to Timotio Odohui. Perhaps Sarle, whom the University of Arizona had recently fired, and Ostrander, cut out of the academia she longed to be part of, wanted to pull one over on the scholars. Maybe a joke got really out of hand.

Legacy of the Tucson Artifacts

After the initial dust settled, excavations continued for a few years. They finally uncovered all 32 artifacts: 31 lead, one carved caliche block. But the world of serious archaeology has left them behind.

Nevertheless, over a century on, there are still believers. Certain archaeological (or pseudo-archaeological) circles are eager to find evidence that changes the timeline of European settlement in the Americas.

In 2013, that bastion of credibility, the History Channel, ran an episode of America Unearthed on the Tucson Artifacts. Their conclusion was that they were probably real and probably related to a Masonic and/or Templar conspiracy.

By the way, I didn't mention it earlier, but I think now is the funniest time to bring up the fact that one of the crosses has a drawing of a dinosaur.

Today, most of them are kept in the collection of Tucson's Arizona History Museum. In 1996, journalist Peter Gilstrap, working on an article for the Phoenix New Times, visited the basement of the Arizona Historical Society to see the relics. Since their arrival in 1994, no one else had asked to see them.

The artifacts, abandoned by historians due to being fake, have been left to the crackpots and cranks. Even among that crowd, they aren't very popular.

In a way, this is a pity. Gilstrap's article included an interview with University of Arizona archaeologist Peter Steere, who had recently lectured on the Tucson Artifacts.

"They're a part of the local folklore," Steere said. "A part of archaeology folklore, and a part of the history of southern Arizona."

The average home -- manor, farm, or otherwise -- contains only the skulls which are still attached to living inhabitants. This is almost certainly true of your home, at least. (If not, well, get in touch.)

But scattered across the British countryside, otherwise unassuming manor houses and ancestral halls keep human skulls on display. They have to keep them on display, you see, because otherwise the skulls will start screaming.

Bettiscombe Manor

Bettiscombe is an old manor house in Dorset, built on an ancient site in a small, quiet village. It is known for its gardens and its screaming skull. "Screaming skulls" are human skulls that scream, rattle windows, call forth curses, and otherwise cause bad luck and supernatural mischief when displeased. The chief method of displeasing them is to not put them where they like to be kept.

No one is sure when the Bettiscombe skull arrived at the manor. However, by the time stories began appearing in the 19th century, it had reportedly been there for as long as anyone could remember. It was kept in the house because the other residents claimed it would scream if it was buried in the churchyard.

There was a widely accepted origin story. The skull belonged to an enslaved black man who had died in the house, begging for his body to be sent back to his native land. The owner of Bettiscombe, a member of the Pinney family, instead had him buried in the churchyard.

Immediately, screams began sounding through the house at all hours. Pinney dug up the man's remains, but instead of returning him as he'd promised, he set the man's skull up in his house. This was apparently good enough; the haunting ceased. Whenever anyone tried to bury the skull, it started back up again.

It's a rather terrible story. Luckily, it isn't true. In 1963, a Pinney descendant sent the skull to the Royal College of Surgeons. Dr. Gilbert Causey declared that it was the skull of a young woman. The Pinneys now believe it belongs to the Iron Age Celtic settlements behind the house. Nevertheless, they think it best to keep it inside the house.

Tunstead Farm

One skull, which long resided on the windowsill of a lonely Derbyshire farmhouse, became a beloved local character in the late 19th century. The skull was called Dicky or Dickey, and when exactly it came to reside at Tunstead Farm is a matter of pure speculation.

The earliest published account of a skull named Dicky living at Tunstead Farm is from 1809. John Hutchinson wrote about his travels in the Peak District, including an encounter with Dicky. Hutchinson visited the house and saw the skull on the windowsill and interviewed the farm's owner, Adam Fox. Fox had been raised in the house and claimed the skull had been there for at least 200 years.

Interruptions to that residence produced terrifying disturbances, like ghostly screaming. In general, Fox said, the skull was a sort of guardian. But when it was removed, even temporarily for planned repairs, "There was no peace! no rest! It must be replaced!"

Stories of these incidents are numerous and mostly hearsay. One, for instance, goes that Dicky was thrown into a local reservoir, but had to be removed when all the fish suddenly died.

There are plenty of stories about Dicky's origin. None of them is particularly likely. Interestingly, as Hutchinson noted, most stories imagined that the skull belonged to a woman, though the skull was invariably referred to in masculine terms.

In 1940, historian William Brailsford Bunting claimed a surgeon had examined the skull and determined that it belonged to a young woman. He suggested it likely dated to the Iron Age, as there were multiple ancient barrows in the neighborhood.

An address to Dickie

In 1863, Dicky got involved in local politics. The people who lived and worked around Tunstead had long reported that Dicky was deeply concerned with the area's goings-on. Supposedly, he warned of burglary or illness and woke people to alert them to emergencies.

According to accounts, he was deeply protective of the farm. So when the London and North Western Railway company planned a new line which would run through the farm, he was incensed.

To put in the relevant section of line, the company had to build a bridge. The planned construction ran into constant difficulties with the ground, which repeatedly collapsed and sank into the marsh. Finally, the company was forced to build their bridge somewhere else, rerouting the line to avoid the farm. The new bridge was henceforth called "Dickie's Bridge."

The incident became regionally famous, inspiring Samuel Laycock, a Lancashire poet of that era. The following is the first section of his poem, printed in the Buxton Advertiser in July 1863:

Neaw, Dickie, be quiet wi' thee, lad,
An' let navvies and railways a be;
Mon, tha shouldn't do soa-- its to' bad,
What harm are they doin' to thee?
Deod folk shouldn't meddle at o',
But leov o'these matters to th'wick;
They'll see they're done gradeley, aw know--
Dos't'yer what aw say to thee Dick?

In his heyday, Dicky was the subject of poems, ballads, and plays. You can't see him today, however. Sometime around 1977, he was buried in secret by a new owner who did not care for him. The new owner moved away soon after.

Wardley Hall

While it is now home to the Catholic Bishop of Stanford, Wardley Hall was the property of the Downes family starting from 1601. By 1745, both the hall and its owners had fallen on hard times. Troops of the would-be English king, Bonnie Prince Charlie, had sacked the Hall during his invasion of England.

Matthew Moreton, who held a life-lease on the Hall, decided to kill two birds with one stone. He'd tear down the most badly damaged section and install hand looms. He hoped the money from the weaving business would keep him afloat. He did not hope to find a skull, but we can't always get what we hope for.

When workmen tore down the wall of the old chapel, they found a small chest containing a human skull. It purportedly had a good set of teeth and "a good deal of auburn hair."

The verifiable timeline is vague. We know at least that Moreton kept the skull in a special niche in the staircase. There it mostly remained, while a local legend sprang up around it. Oral tradition reports the usual skull admonitions: It must not be moved from its place, or screaming will be heard throughout the house.

In 1782, a Manchester antiquary named Thomas Barritt reported that he'd been part of a group that removed the skull one night. Soon afterwards, "such a storm arose about the house, of wind and lightning...!"

The Saint in the wall

Moreton thought the skull belonged to a persecuted Catholic, executed in the previous century. Local legend offered another, more romantic explanation, involving a nobleman's murder. But in 1799, the nobleman's body was exhumed and found to have its head firmly attached.

Wardley Hall was sold to the local diocese in 1930. They favored the martyr theory, and had a specific martyr in mind: Father Ambrose Barlow, now (since 1970) Saint Ambrose Barlow.

Barlow was an auburn-haired priest living and preaching near Wardley during the 17th century. This was a risky business to be in, as waves of Catholic persecution swept the country. Barlow was a cousin of the Downes, who sheltered him and even allowed him to give forbidden Catholic masses in Wardley Hall.

But in March of 1641, King Charles I ordered all Catholic priests out of the country by the end of the month. Barlow stayed and was arrested on Easter Day. At his trial, he did not deny his Catholic faith, but defended his right to practice it. The judge was not convinced. He was hanged, and then, since apparently that was not enough, he was beheaded, quartered, boiled in oil, and had his head put on a pike.

Many locals, including the diocese, believed that Francis Downes had taken his cousin's head back to Wardley and hidden it in the chapel. Secreting away the heads of murdered Catholics was very much the done thing at the time.

In 1959, the skull went to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London for testing. The physical clues support the Barlow theory: The skull belongs to a man in his fifties, the same age as Barlow, who had been beheaded and piked.

In 1961, the Diocese officially recognized the skull as that of the martyr Ambrose Barlow.

The 'Cult of the Head'

In the folklore of the United Kingdom, the human head and the skull in particular seem to hold a place of special importance. The motif of the severed but conscious head appears over and over across the British Isles.

An index of folk story motifs records tropes like "Return from dead to punish theft of skull," "Severed head cannot be moved from helmet," "Severed head of saint speaks so that searchers can find it," and "Severed head moves from place to place" all come from the region. Then there is the "beheading game," appearing most famously in the Arthurian Middle English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Some archaeologists and historians think this focus on the skull has deep cultural roots. Classical sources and physical evidence suggest a Celtic "cult of the head." Ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that Celts would collect the heads of defeated enemies. The ancient warriors would then take the heads home, preserve them in cedar oil, and keep them in their homes.

Carved stone heads appear all over Iron Age Celtic sites. These life-sized heads were still being produced in Britain into the 17th and 18th centuries, at the same time all these screaming skulls were showing up.

And they kept showing up -- the few I've outlined here are only a selection of the most well-documented. We know of dozens more. Perhaps the cult of the head does live on.

'Alas, poor Yorick'

There's something rather special about a human skull; it seems to hold a unique fascination. Somehow, one just can't see Hamlet waxing poetical to a tibia or rib cage.

Severed head historian Frances Larson writes that "Once a fragment of the human body is preserved and kept above ground for any length of time...it develops an identity of its own and tends to resist its own burial."

She wrote this in relation to Saint Oliver Plunkett, who has a very similar story to Saint Ambrose Barlow. Plunkett's decapitated head didn't scream, but it did communicate to the living through the performance of miracles.

The head is the seat of the brain and thus, the intelligence. People forced to survival cannibalism will often avoid eating the head, because even after death, they cannot separate it from a living person. The skull is both an object and a person. Like an object, it's kept in a place. Like a person, it's liable to scream if that place is not where it likes best to be.

While Egyptian kings and queens are the most famous examples of mummification, the practice wasn’t just for pharaohs. It expanded over time until everyone from the poor up were being preserved for eternity.

So, where are all the mummies? Well, unfortunately, 700 years of rich Europeans ate them. For their health, of course.

From a 12th-century translation error, a massive trade kicked off, depopulating the tombs of Egypt to populate European apothecaries -– and starting an underground market in fake mummy powder.

Bitumen and mūmiyah

Why did Europeans think that eating mummies was a good idea? It's all to do with bitumen. Bitumen is a viscous petroleum product, which occurs naturally in a semi-solid form. Bitumen is particularly common around the Dead Sea, and is useful for waterproofing and as a glue. Archaeological evidence shows that both early humans and their Neanderthal cousins used bitumen tens of thousands of years ago. It even appears in the Bible as the mortar which was used in the tower of Babel.

By the classical era, bitumen was used in everything from shipbuilding to jewelry. People also started using it as medicine. Pliny the Elder, a Roman author and naturalist, lists 27 discrete medicinal applications for it. These include staunching blood flow, diagnosing epilepsy, treating leprosy, dysentery, and gout, and curing toothache.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Muslim scholars took pains to preserve classical learning. By the Middle Ages, Arabic authors were considered the foremost medicinal experts throughout Europe and the Middle East. The tradition of using bitumen as medicine continued through the works of scholars like Avicenna, who prescribed it for concussions, paralysis, and more. He didn't call it "bitumen," though. He called it mūmiyah, from the Persian word mum, meaning wax.

A medieval game of telephone

The Ancient Egyptians didn't use bitumen for their mummies. However, the dark resin they used resembled bitumen, leading many classical and medieval observers to believe that bitumen coated Egyptian mummies. So the same word came to refer both to naturally occurring bitumen and the dark waxy coating found on Egyptian mummies.

In the 12th century, an Italian translator of Arabic texts named Gerard of Cremona came across Rhazes of Baghdad's reference to mūmiyah. Gerard said the product was created when "the liquid of the dead, mixed with the aloes, is transformed and is similar to marine pitch.”

Another European, Simon Geneunsis, translated a work by Arab physician Serapion the Younger that referenced medicinal bitumen as "mumia." Geneunsis interprets the word along the same lines as Gerard of Cremona, calling it "the mumia of the sepulchers," which is formed when the aloes and spices used to prepare the dead mix with the liquids the corpse itself expels."

Meanwhile, crusaders were bringing back the bitumen medicine fad from the Islamic medical traditions of the Middle East. Unfortunately, the easily accessible supplies of bitumen in the area were limited. Shrewd Alexandrian merchants realized that there was all this mumia lying around, coating the bodies of the dead. They began raiding tombs, breaking the resinous bodies up, and exporting them to Europe.

The fact that the mumia came from corpses didn't bother people much, possibly due to the confusion between medical mumia and Egyptian mummies. Before long, mumia stopped being the substance on the mummy and became the mummy itself.

It's good for what ails you

Mumia became a wildly popular remedy in Europe, sold in every well-stocked apothecary. One influential pharmacopeia, Theatrum Botanicum, contains a long list of conditions mumia is useful for, including headaches, colds, coughs, seizures, heart problems, poisoning, scorpion stings, snake bites, bladder ulcers, paralysis, and retention of urine. Treatments involved combining mumia with other ingredients, usually a liquid like wine or goat milk.

Genoese physician Giovanni da Vigo considered mumia an essential medicine for ship's physicians and village doctors. He claimed it promoted wound healing and staunched bleeding. Sir Francis Bacon, the eminent English philosopher, and the physicist Robert Boyle, both considered it useful for wounds, falls, and bruises.

The French king, Francis I, was a habitual mummy consumer; contemporaries reported that he always carried a mixture of rhubarb and mumia on his person, just in case. Nicasius Le Febre, chemist to England's King Charles II, recommended mummy from Libya specifically.

By the way, if you were wondering how it tasted, the English College of Physicians has the answer. Mummy was listed in their official pharmacopeia from 1618 to 1747, where it is described as being "somewhat acrid and bitterish."

Supply chain issues

Egyptian authorities were not actually keen on all the grave robbing and corpse exporting that was happening. In 1428, authorities in Cairo captured and tortured several people connected to a mummy scheme. They confessed to robbing tombs, boiling the mummified bodies in a pot, and selling the oil which rose to the surface.

It was illegal to export Egyptian mummies out of Egypt. But enforcement could be lax, especially if you had money to grease the wheels. Englishman John Sanderson visited Egypt in 1586, where he explored a sepulcher and broke off chunks of blackened mummified flesh. He applied the correct bribes and compliments, and sailed off with 600 pounds worth of "divers heads, hands, arms, and feete."

For every literal boatload of real pillaged mummies, there was at least an equal measure of mummies created specifically for export. Many mummy sellers in Egypt found it was easier to source fresh corpses and dry them than it was to dig up old ones. These fresh corpses mostly came from executed criminals, plague victims, and enslaved people.

The Italian traveler Ludovico di Varthema wrote about the local production of mumia during a visit to the Arabian Peninsula. According to him, there were two kinds; the first was made from the dried-up remains of people who had died recently while crossing the desert. The other, nobler and more pure kind, was "the dryed and embalmed bodies of kynges and princes."

In truth, even authentic mumia wasn't made from rulers, but from their subjects. European nobles liked to imagine their healthful powder came from ancient priestesses and kings, but the remains of the poor were far more plentiful and accessible.

Paracelsus and domestic mummy manufacture

Though a fair amount of the mummy product on the market was inauthentic, the real stuff was still being sold into the modern era. One recent study analyzed the contents of an 18th-century pharmaceutical jar labelled "mumia." They found that the contents really were the remains of an Egyptian mummy from the Ptolemaic period.

But without our modern analysis tools, the question of mumia authenticity was an ongoing problem for physicians. As the supply became more questionable, some medical authorities began to wonder whether mumia being "authentically Egyptian" was even important.

Some definitions of mumia dropped the ancient Egyptian element entirely, ascribing benefits to any old preserved human flesh. The influential physician Paracelsus, who spawned a legion of followers, believed the medicinal benefit of mumia came from a transfer of life energy. To make his mumia, he left a fresh body out exposed. The best bodies were of young, healthy men who died suddenly. Other recipes in this line were even more specific, preferring a 24-year-old redheaded man who was recently executed.

There was a persistent belief that there was a vital animating force remaining in corpses, and one could benefit from this force by consuming corpse products. In the time of Paracelsus, for instance, executioners would collect and sell the blood of those they executed. People believed that drinking it promoted general health and cured epilepsy. Bandages soaked in human fat were applied to wounds, and powdered human skull was prescribed for headaches.

The broader genre of corpse medicine is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that mumia wasn't always the only human-derived medicine available.

Some reasonable concerns

Now I'm not a doctor, but I feel confident in saying that "you should eat powdered human corpses for nosebleeds" is not best practice. By the 16th century, many doctors were starting to think along the same lines.

Ambroise Pare, surgeon to four French kings, published a 1582 treatise decrying the use of mummy. He argued that most mummy sold was actually manufactured in France from the recently dead, and also didn't work. In his professional experience, it had not only failed to stop bleeding but had unsurprisingly caused the patient to have an upset stomach and bad breath.

Pare's German contemporary, Leonhart Fuchs, made similar arguments. He also laid out the series of medieval translation errors which had led to the idea of mumia. Fuchs decried the "stupid...credulity of certain doctors of our age," who still prescribed mummy.

Additionally, some commentators were beginning to recognize the historical and cultural wealth that was being ground up for tinctures. English natural philosopher Thomas Browne opined that "The Ægyptian Mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams."

There was also cannibalism. Michel de Montaigne, a 16th-century French writer and early critic of colonialism, pointed out the hypocrisy of demonizing cannibalistic practices in the New World while taking medicinal human flesh at home. But most people didn't think of it as cannibalism, any more than people today would consider a blood transfusion cannibalism. Mumia wasn't food, it was medicine.

Still, as time went on, people were increasingly wondering if it was medicine they should be taking. Mumia mania peaked in the 18th century, but took much longer to fade entirely.

Consuming Egypt

For wealthy Europeans, part of the appeal of mumia was the mystical, exotic associations. For centuries, Europeans treated the bodies of deceased Egyptians with a combination of fetishistic fascination and blatant disrespect. They were curios and collectors' items, souvenirs of exciting trips turned household decor.

Mummy unwrapping parties were popular in 19th-century Europe, where middle and upper-class men and women would watch a mummy's bandages be unwound, revealing its body as the finale of the morbid show.

The remains were consumable as a variety of commercial products. A popular paint color from the mid-18th to 19th centuries was "mummy brown." This pigment was made from ground-up mummified bodies. Art historians believe this rich, warm brown pigment appears in a number of well-known paintings, including Eugene Delacroix's famous Liberty Leading the People. The last tube of mummy brown was produced, unbelievably, in 1964.

There are also accounts, of varying reliability, that both human and animal mummies were used as fertilizer, paper (from their bandages), and fuel for locomotives. These claims are likely exaggerated, but they speak to the manner in which mummified Egyptian remains were treated at the time. As Imperial plunder, they were, literally, things to be consumed.

The end of the mummy-eating era?

By the end of the Victorian period, mumia had fallen out of popular use. But it was still available for sale, and occasionally prescribed, into the beginning of the 20th century. The last known appearance of the drug for sale is in a 1908 Merck catalogue. The German pharmaceutical advertised, "Genuine Egyptian mummy as long as the supply lasts, 17 marks 50 per kilogram."

Rich old Europeans didn't actually eat up all the mummies. Archaeologists are still finding them, for one. It's impossible to say how significantly the manufacture of mumia impacted the number of surviving mummified remains. It's safe to say, though, that nearly a millennium of looting Egypt led to the loss of untold historical and cultural knowledge.

The 1908 example is troublingly recent, but we might still be tempted to dismiss mumia as something from another, less enlightened age. Exporting ground-up mummy to eat as a health supplement is something so patently absurd that a modern reader might make the mistake of smugly holding themselves above all those involved in the practice.

It's true that we don't eat mummies anymore. But physical and cultural wealth is still extracted from exploited nations for the consumption of the global north.

Most human bones available for sale in the West, as curios or medical teaching tools, come from India, though the export of human skeletons was officially banned in the 1980s. World-class museums still display cultural artifacts and remains of colonized people for the predominantly white public to gawk at. Mummy remains merchandise.

"Herds and flocks lie on verdant pastures

Wealth and splendor..."

More than a thousand years after it was last heard, a long-lost hymn to the ancient city of Babylon has been brought back to life, thanks to AI. This remarkable rediscovery gives us new insights into this ancient city. 

The hymn came from a collection of thousands of fragmented cuneiform tablets stored in the Sippar library in Iraq. The former city of Sippar lies about 70km from Babylon.

The breakthrough came when Professor Enrique Jimenez of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich teamed up with researchers from the Electronic Babylonian Literature project. This aims to digitize text fragments from cuneiform tablets worldwide.

By the rivers of Babylon

In recent years, they have started using AI to analyze the ancient fragments and recognize patterns in the cuneiform writings. What emerged was a 1,000-year-old hymn devoted to the Mesopotamian city of Babylon. Babylon was founded around 2000 BCE and was once the largest city in the world.

“Using [AI], we managed to identify 30 other manuscripts that belong to the rediscovered hymn -– a process that would formerly have taken decades,” Jimenez said in a statement. 

Legend tells us that Noah hid the city's library of cuneiform clay tablets in Sippar before the biblical flood. The newly rediscovered hymn praises the city and gives an insight into the daily lives of the people who lived there.

“The hymn was copied by children at school," said Jimenez. "It’s unusual that such a popular text in its day was unknown to us before now.”

Role of women

Another striking aspect of the 250-line hymn is the numerous references to the roles of women and priestesses and the tasks they performed in the city. No other cuneiform tablets have these references.

“This is the first time we have found such explicit details about the lives of Babylonian women, especially in priestly roles,” he said. 

Mesopotamian writings typically focus on wars, royalty, and the gods of the ancient world. While the hymn does mention deities, it also highlights the beauty of the natural world and the farming lives of common people.

“It was written by a Babylonian who wanted to praise his city,” explained Jimenez. "The author describes the buildings in the city, but also how the waters of the Euphrates bring the spring and green the fields. This is all the more spectacular since surviving Mesopotamian literature is sparing in its descriptions of natural phenomena.

Researchers have shared a short translated excerpt of the hymn that describes the Euphrates River and its importance to the city on its river banks.

The Euphrates is her river — established by wise lord Nudimmud —

It quenches the lea [open land], saturates the canebrake,

Disgorges its waters into lagoon and sea,

Its fields burgeon with herbs and flowers,

Its meadows, in brilliant bloom, sprout barley,

From which, gathered, sheaves are stacked,

Herds and flocks lie on verdant pastures,

Wealth and splendor — what befit mankind —

About 30,000 years ago, humans arrived in Japan's southern Ryukyu Islands, 110km from Taiwan.

The archaeological record hasn't preserved any clues as to how these Paleolithic people made the crossing to this new land. But the obstacles to doing so seem, at first glance, insurmountable without modern technology and knowledge. So in 2013, a group of Japanese archaeologists set out to recreate the trip using only Paleolithic tools.

This week, they published the results of their experiments in the journal Science. 

A challenging crossing

Archaeologists find evidence of humans in the Japanese archipelago as early as 35,000 BCE. Judging from the dates at different archaeological sites, the earliest inhabitants of Japan seem to have migrated both northward from Taiwan and southward from Korea.

But from the Taiwanese coast, the low-lying islands of Ryukyu sit below the horizon. One of the strongest currents in the world, called Kuroshio ("Black Tide"), runs northward from Taiwan. It carries any lackadaisical drifters west of the Ryukyu Islands at a velocity of one meter per second. And a distance of 110km from Taiwan to the nearest Ryukyu island, Yonaguni, was no joke for people without metalworking or sails.

Yet they made it.

When the Japanese archaeologists set out to recreate this trip, they didn't have an easy time. They tried reed-bundle rafts and bamboo rafts, both of which floundered in the strong current. The bamboo also began to crack and fill with seawater, further weighing it down.

The beginning of the voyage

In July of 2019, the team attempted one final trip. They launched Sugime, a hand-made dugout canoe, from the coast of Taiwan in typical calm summer weather.

Construction of the dugout started in 2017. The team used replicas of stone axes found in Japanese Paleolithic sites to fell a one-meter-thick Japanese cedar tree. They peeled off the bark and carved a seating area in the center of the trunk. While dugout canoes from the Paleolithic haven't survived in Japanese archaeological sites, dugouts from the later Jōmon period (starting around 14,000 BCE) boast burn marks on the inside. In turn, the team polished the inside of their craft with fire.

The plan was simple: to row from Wushibi, on the eastern coast of Taiwan, across the strait to the small Ryukyu island of Yonaguni. A motorized ship with safety supplies would escort the Paleolithic reenactors.

Sugime's crew consisted of five paddlers, four men and one woman. For the first hour and a half of their journey, they skidded over a calm sea, with only wispy clouds on the horizon. Then the water depth dropped, and they hit the edge of the Kuroshio. The wind slammed into the current, giving rise to choppy water and an ever-present swell as high as the side of their boat. One of the crew had to pause paddling to bail out the dugout over and over again.

They kept rowing into the night. The wind dropped slightly, but the dugout kept threatening to capsize in the strong swell. There was no rest that night, and it was a constant fight to keep the nose of the dugout pointing northeastward. As the water approached a flow of 1 m/s, the dugout pivoted northward along with the current.

Just as steering the boat was a challenge, so too was figuring out where to steer it. Clouds obscured the stars, and GPS wasn't an option in the Paleolithic. Only the direction of the swell indicated which way was north.

As midnight approached, the wind dropped and stars appeared. The paddlers took turns resting. But in the early hours of the morning, clouds once again obstructed the stars. At 3:40 am, while the captain was taking his rest, one crew member thought she saw dawn on the horizon. The crew pointed the dugout accordingly.

Then the captain woke up. The dugout was traveling due north, dragging them off course from their destination. He realized that far from being dawn, the light on the horizon was from the northern cities of Japan and was reflecting off the clouds. Sugime turned eastward once more.

Exhaustion and triumph

The next day dawned bright. Still unable to see their destination, Yonaguni Island, the crew kept paddling east-southeast to combat the current of the Kuroshio. Unbeknownst to them, however, they had left the Kuroshio behind them. They were now heading due east, away from Yonaguni.

They had already exhausted all the water they had packed for the voyage. Tired and thirsty, they called in a resupply. At noon, finding themselves in calmer waters and realizing they had left the Kuroshio, the whole crew slept for half an hour.

As they paddled into the afternoon, Yonaguni still failed to appear. They steered the dugout this way and that, hoping it would peek above the horizon. It didn't. Moreover, the crew was exhausted. Some of them jumped into the ocean to rest in the cool water. But nothing prevented the onset of excruciating muscle cramps and, as evening drew close, hallucinations.

Then, just before the sun set, a bird flew overhead. Before this, the sea had been lifeless and isolated. Now, land was near, even if they couldn't see it.

The sun was so intense that the food they had brought with them began to rot. They obtained replacements from the escort ship and ate a dinner of rice balls and noodles. As night slid in, the crew rested while the boat drifted loose on the water.

The captain kept watch. He thought he saw the glint of a lighthouse on the horizon that he hoped was from Yonaguni. As it turned out, it was an optical illusion, but the swell carried the dugout gently northeastward. In the early hours of the morning, the actual light from Yonaguni's lighthouse appeared on the horizon.

When the crew awoke in the dark hours before dawn, they began the final stretch of their journey toward it.

It was not until just after dawn on the third day that the crew finally saw Yonaguni Island. They were 20km from shore and had been rowing for over 40 hours.

Five hours later, they reached land. Since their crew included Taiwanese paddlers, they had to follow immigration protocol and land Sugime at a predetermined beach. Paleolithic explorers, presumably, did not have this restriction.

Piecing together a Paleolithic voyage

The crew had made it. Dugout canoes, unlike reed and bamboo rafts, can cross the Kuroshio. But at various points during the trip, the crew's mistakes had worked in their favor. When they rested, the swell naturally carried them in the right direction. And the first hint they saw of Yonaguni was from a lighthouse, which does not feature in Stone Age archaeological sites. Was their success a fluke?

To test this, the team used the data from their paddling to simulate hundreds of dugout voyages starting from different points in Taiwan. They used both modern and Paleolithic oceanographic models to approximate the flow of the Kuroshio, varying the strength of the current between ebbs and peaks. As long as the virtual boats paddled in the right direction, they made the crossing, even when the Kuroshio was at its strongest.

But the voyage could not be completed by accident. The Kuroshio does not carry mariners from Taiwan comfortably to the shores of Yonaguni. Paleolithic humans had to identify the direction and strength of the Kuroshio and plan their voyage accordingly.

They also had to know Yonaguni was there. From the coast of Taiwan, it is not visible. Only when one climbs the mountains in the north does the little speck of island appear over the horizon. The summit of the highest of these mountains sits at nearly 4,000m.

This research in experimental archaeology shows that inhabitants of Taiwan 30,000 years ago did not drift aimlessly towards the Ryukyu Islands. They climbed mountains, they built sturdy boats, and they knew how to chart a course against one of the strongest currents in the world.

Deep in the northern Ontario bush, there is a stone covered in strange markings. No one knew it existed until a tree fell over and exposed it. Carved into the slab of rock are a series of ancient runes that archaeologists have been trying to decipher for years. 

The stone was found in 2018, and pictures of it were quickly sent to Ryan Primrose, the director of the Ontario Centre of Archaeological Education.

“It's certainly among the least expected finds that I think I've encountered during my career. It's absolutely fascinating," he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Primrose was worried people would assume that the markings on the stone slab were created by Vikings, so he has been quietly working on the mystery for seven years.

"We didn't want to release information publicly until we had done as much as we could at the time to understand exactly what it was," he said. 

The stone slab, about the size of a small tabletop, is half-buried in the rocky ground. From a distance, it looks as though it is covered in scratches. It is actually a series of 255 runes alongside an illustration of a boat and 16 further runic symbols that have been purposefully carved into the rock. 

Primrose decided to bring in runology expert Henrik Williams. He flew over from Sweden and sat under a tarpaulin for three hours with a flashlight, looking at the runes. He realized the symbols were Futhark alphabet runes, which were originally used in Scandinavia.

A confusing timeline

Etched into the bedrock is an early Swedish rune version of The Lord’s Prayer. The prayer can be traced back to 1611. This initially caused confusion. There were no Swedes in the region at that time, so who could possibly have carved this into the rock? But the prayer was republished in the 19th century, and at that time, the Hudson’s Bay Company did employ some Swedes. They had a trading post in Michipicoten, which is relatively close to the runes. 

There is no way to know exactly how the carvings came to be, but Primrose and William reasonably think that someone working for the Hudson’s Bay Company is responsible. Etching all 255 runes into the rock is a task that would have taken days or weeks. Once created, they believe it might have been a central point for religious prayer or for Swedes to come together. 

This timeline means that the stone is much newer than many would assume. Researchers estimate that it was carved around 1800. The team admitted they were a little disappointed to discover that the runes were not older. 

The deepest shipwreck ever found in French waters has been discovered in the Mediterranean off southern France. The 16th-century merchant ship lies an astounding 2,567m down. 

The French Navy stumbled across the wreck in March 2025, south of Saint-Tropez, during a routine seabed mapping mission. When the drone's sonar picked up an unusually large structure, the curious operators sent down a remotely operated vehicle to investigate. What it captured was incredible -- the remains of a wooden ship that has laid untouched for centuries.

The wreck, now called Camarat 4, is a Renaissance merchant vessel, roughly 30 meters long by 7 meters wide. Experts believe it sailed from Italy, loaded with ceramics, cookware, and metal bars. Images show around 200 glazed ceramic jugs, 100 yellow plates, two cauldrons, and six cannons among the wreckage. 

Many of the jugs bear the monogram “IHS” etched into them, the first letters of the Greek name for Jesus, or are adorned with geometric and plant-based patterns. The detailing on the jugs suggests they came from the Liguria region in Italy.   

Frozen in time

Marine archaeologist Marine Sadania, who is part of the team leading the study, described the wreck as “frozen in time.” Its depth has kept it almost perfectly intact, preventing looting of any of the items. As a result, it offers an incredibly rare window into Renaissance maritime trade and shipbuilding.

This shipwreck now holds the record as France’s deepest ever discovered, surpassing the previous title holder, the submarine La Minerve, found in 2019 at 2,300m down. 

Researchers plan to digitally map and study the wreck. Using high-resolution photography, they are building a complete 3D model of the site that will capture every detail, from the woodwork to the ceramic decorations. Robotic arms will recover a few select objects to gain a fuller picture of life aboard the ship; the rest will remain in place.

It seems that people 1,700 years ago enjoyed the same battles of endurance that you might find today in a country pub. Archaeologists have uncovered a marble sarcophagus from the Roman era in Caesarea, Israel. Haut-relief sculptures on the sarcophagus show a wine-drinking contest between Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, and the legendary Roman hero, Hercules.

A joint team from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and the Caesarea Development Corporation found the sarcophagus buried beneath a sand dune outside the city’s ancient walls. Excavation leaders Nohar Shahar and Shani Amit described the discovery as something out of a movie.

“We began brushing away the light sand of the dune when the tip of a marble object suddenly emerged,” they recalled. “The whole team gathered around, and as we cleared more sand, we could hardly believe what we were seeing.”

A defeated Hercules

A main panel shows a defeated Hercules clutching a cup and apparently unable to stay upright. Meanwhile, a victorious Dionysus celebrates with an entourage of mythological creatures and revelers.

Researchers believe the scene represents more than a mythological boys' contest, that it symbolizes the soul’s passage from the physical world to the afterlife.

“The figures are not only celebrating, they are accompanying the dead on their last journey, when drinking and dancing are transformed into a symbol of liberation and transition to life in the next world,” said Shahar.

Shahar also noted that this is the first time archaeologists have found the Dionysus-Hercules wine contest depicted on a burial coffin in the region. Similar scenes appeared in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, but they were typically found in mosaics, not sculpture.

Although discovered in Israel, the artists likely used marble quarried from northwestern Turkey, since there were no local marble quarries in ancient Israel. Archaeologists think that the piece was created in Turkey, with some final details added after it arrived in Israel. The elaborate design and imported materials make it very clear that a wealthy family that “enjoyed a certain lifestyle" commissioned it "as a fitting reflection of their identity.”

Researchers have finally confirmed that a long-sunken hulk off the coast of Colombia is none other than the San José. The legendary Spanish galleon, which vanished beneath the waves of the Caribbean 300 years ago, has been dubbed the “world’s richest shipwreck.” Now the big question is, who does the treasure belong to?

The San José was first launched in 1698 and was the flagship of the Spanish treasure fleet. In 1708, it was carrying gold and jewels from Peru to Spain that would help fund the War of Spanish Succession. As the ship approached Cartagena, Colombia, British naval forces attacked. During the melee, the gunpowder stores on the San José ignited, sinking the ship. Nearly 600 crew members perished as the ship went down with its vast cargo of gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, and other treasures.

For centuries, the wreck remained lost beneath the sea. Two groups claim they discovered the famous shipwreck. U.S. salvage company Glocca Morra (now Sea Search Armada) insists that it first found the location of the ship in 1981. Then, in 2015, the Colombian navy, working with marine archaeologists, located the actual remains of the galleon using underwater drones.

At a depth of around 600m, it is too deep for divers to access. This made it hard for researchers to confirm that it is definitely the San José. The Colombian navy has been using remotely operated vehicles to survey the wreck. The key to proving that it is the San José has been the gold coins scattered on the ocean floor. 

Process of elimination

​​The lead author of a new study, Daniela Vargas Ariza, explained how these coins allow dating of the wreck and its demise through a process of elimination. These particular coins, known as "cobs," show mint marks from Lima, dated 1707. They also have castles, lions, Jerusalem crosses, and other Spanish imperial symbols imprinted on them.

“The finding of cobs...points to a vessel navigating the Tierra Firme route in the early 18th century," said the paper. "The San José galleon is the only ship that matches these characteristics.”

This Holy Grail of shipwrecks is now at the center of a legal battle. Colombia claims it is the sole owner of the wreck under its national heritage laws. They argue that as the ship lies within its territorial waters, it belongs to them. But others want to stake their claim over the ship and its $16 billion of treasure. 

Spain contends that the San José is a Spanish ship and so it is Spanish state property. Sea Search Armada says it was the first to identify the general location of the wreck in the 1980s and so should receive some of the compensation. Indigenous communities from countries like Peru and Bolivia are also asserting claims to the treasure since most of it was pillaged from them when they were under Spanish colonial rule. 

After hearings in Colombia and the U.S., the decision about who owns the most valuable shipwreck in the world will lie with the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague. 

Earlier this year, two amateur metal detectorists unearthed a pair of striking 1,400-year-old artifacts in Wiltshire, England. The gold-and-garnet raven's head and a gold ring with triangular garnet detailing date back to the Anglo-Saxon era. 

Paul Gould and Chris Phillips made the discovery on January 8, during a metal detecting rally organized by the 9th Region Metal Detecting Group. Gould found the flattened gold and garnet ring. Shortly after, Phillips uncovered the intricately decorated raven's head. Experts believe the raven's head, which weighs 57 grams, was likely part of a larger object, possibly a drinking horn.

“This is the find of a lifetime…It's unbelievable — I'm a bit emotional," Phillips said in a YouTube video. 

In early Europe, ravens were often associated with death. In German and Norse mythology, they were linked with Odin, the Norse god of war. Whether this artifact represented these themes is unclear. The use of garnet and gold was not uncommon during this era. It accurately reflects the level of craftsmanship and techniques from other notable finds, such as those of the Anglo-Saxon burial ship site at Sutton Hoo. 

Following the correct procedure, Gould and Phillips properly reported the objects to the local finds liaison officer. Both items are now being cleaned and studied by experts at the British Museum.

Speaking to Live Science, Phillips said, "The finds will go through the treasure process now, which will take a while.” Anything with precious metals that is over 300 years old qualifies as a piece of treasure under the UK Treasure Act. The discovery of two objects so close together suggests the area may yield further treasures from the past.

Two Czech hikers have unearthed nearly 600 gold coins in the Krkonose Foothills, near the Polish border. The pair stumbled across an old metal can sticking out of the ground and opened it to find a cache of coins that date back to 1808.

Beside the can, the hikers found a small iron box filled with cigarette cases, bracelets, combs, a key, and a powder compact. The pair took them to the Museum of East Bohemia. Its chief archaeologist, Miroslav Novak, told the Daily Mail, “I was called to say that a person who had found something was coming to see me. When he opened it, my jaw dropped.”

The 598 coins are all solid gold. Experts estimate that they and the rest of the items are worth an incredible $340,000. Novak added, “The historical value of the treasure, however, is incalculable.”

Mysterious backstory

The coins date from 1808 to 1915, with some extending into the 1920s and 1930s. They also originate from several countries, including France, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Russia, and Turkey. All of the coins are stamped with dates, but some also contain a countermarking. This tells us that the coins were reissued in 1921, most likely in the region of modern-day Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Why the hoard was originally buried is a mystery. One theory is that Czech or Jewish individuals concealed the valuables to protect them from the invading Nazis. Another is that fleeing Nazis might have hidden the hoard at the end of the war. The presence of coins from so many countries adds to the intrigue, suggesting a complex backstory.

“It was clearly not about the nominal value of the coins. It’s not about what the coins could buy — that’s not what mattered. It was deliberately hidden because it was precious metal,” explained Vojtech Bradle from the Museum of East Bohemia. After finishing their analysis and conserving the artifacts, the museum will display the collection to the public.

Under Czech law, individuals who discover treasure are entitled to 10% of its value. Given the estimated worth of approximately $340,000, the hikers will receive a substantial reward.

Animals that evolved in warm, tropical climes rarely decide to move to cold, snowy ones. Take any creature from the African grassland and drop it in Austria during an Ice Age, and the poor creature would surely not fare well.

Except Homo sapiens. We did just that, expanding into some of the coldest regions on Earth. New research into a 24,000-year-old site shows how technological innovations helped early humans keep warm during the Last Glacial Maximum.

The early humans of Kammern-Grubgraben

While we tend to associate early humans with caves, Austria's Kammern-Grubgraben site is open air, with a highland on one side and a sloping river valley on another. Between 20 to 24 thousand years ago, humans frequently lived there.

Nearby sites had an even older human history -- 33,000 years. They were hunter-gatherers, who moved with the seasons, returning to the same camps year after year. Sophisticated tool users, they produced a wide range of stone tools, as well as jewelry.

The Kammern-Grubgraben site also contains a wealth of organic remains. Those remains belong almost entirely to one species: Rangifer tarandus, the caribou, or reindeer.

The people of Kammern-Grubgraben hunted caribou almost exclusively during the winter. Researchers knew the hunts had taken place in winter because the skulls still had their antlers, and reindeer shed their antlers after winter. Tooth wear also indicated winter or late autumn deaths.

Why were they only hunting caribou during the winter and autumn? Researchers believe that it was for their hides.

Sewing for survival

As the Thule people in the Arctic discovered much later, caribou hide makes clothing warm enough for almost any conditions. Their thick pelts of hollow, air-trapping hairs conserve heat like nothing else. Once the people of Kammern-Grubgraben acquired these hides, they used sophisticated sewing tools and techniques to create cold-resistant clothing. Sewing traditional fur clothing requires incredible patience and skill, but it can also be incredibly effective. Recreations of Stone-Age clothing handled even in harsh Northern winters.

In the same chronological layer as the caribou bones, archaeologists found eyed bone needles. Eyed needle technology allowed them to sew tight, fitted seams, making clothing much warmer and sturdier than simple draped pelts.

Around 24,000 years ago, the Last Glacial Maximum caused temperatures to plummet. In nearby sites that dated from before this Ice Age, archaeologists found a much broader range of animal remains, and no eyed needles. Here, the most commonly hunted animal was the mammoth, suggesting that hunters prioritized calories over clothing.

When their environment changed, the Stone Age people adopted new lifestyles and techniques to suit their new, chillier environment. This superior winter clothing allowed them to survive an increasingly harsh and unstable climate.

We imagine the ancient world as one made of stone. Marble temples, megalithic structures, and rock-hewn tombs dominate the modern image of the pre-modern period. That image is, of course, an inaccurate one. Stone is all that remains of sites whose flesh was largely made of wood and other fast-decaying plant materials.

This problem of materials is especially relevant to ancient seafaring. Up until the mid-19th century, ships were practically all wood. Worse, the bottom of the oceans tends to be a uniquely bad place to preserve things. Even vessels that sank fairly recently, such as the Titanic and HMS Erebus, are already decaying.

Because of the simple realities of rot, there are very few physical remains of classical-era ships. There is one place, however, where they can be found: the Black Sea.

The Hospitable/Inhospitable Sea

The Black Sea's unique ecological environment allows it to preserve ancient shipwrecks. Its 436,400 square kilometers fill the space between Asia and Europe, but its secret lies beneath that surface.

Ancient Greeks first called the Black Sea Pontus Axeinus -- the Inhospitable Sea. However, as the centuries went on and they established colonies along the coast, they called it Pontus Euxinus, which had the exact opposite meaning from the original name. They couldn't have known this, but these two contrasting names reflected the hidden duality of the Black Sea.

The top layer of the sea is oxygen-rich and therefore able to support complex marine life. Below 100-200m, however, all oxygen is gone. The Black Sea is the world's largest meromictic body of water -- a marine environment with two stratified layers that never mix.

The two layers exist because water only enters the sea near the surface, from rivers like the Danube and Kuban, and out through the shallow Bosphorus Strait. No water mixing happens below 150m.

Honestly, I was simplifying too much when I said there were only two layers. There are actually secret intermediate layers that keep the upper and bottom from mixing, but for our purposes (shipwrecks) there are two: oxygen-rich upper, anoxic bottom.

That bottom layer is actually most of the sea. Only 13% of the Black Sea is oxygenated. The anoxic layer is a pretty bad place to be alive, but a good place to be a shipwreck.

A hot spot for shipwrecks

The same currents and tides that wreck ships on the surface can also damage them once they've already sunk. Wrecks near rocky coasts are particularly vulnerable and are soon smashed to bits and dispersed.

In addition to those ocean forces, the shipwreck has many natural predators. Organisms like shipworms, gribble (a type of marine isopod), and other wood borers quickly attack exposed beams. Materials buried under sediment will be eaten by bacteria, which feed off sugars like the cellulose and hemicellulose in wood.

So the quiet, deep waters of the Black Sea anoxic zone present an ideal, shipworm-free environment. In 1976, Willard Bascom, an engineer and marine archaeologist, wrote about the possibility of Black Sea anoxic waters preserving a wealth of ancient wrecks.

The Black Sea is also well-situated for wrecking ships in the first place. People have lived along its coasts for tens of thousands of years. Over the centuries, its location between Europe and Asia, connected to the Mediterranean and several major rivers, made the Black Sea a locus of ancient travel and trade.

Its waters were a theater for maritime history, hosting Hittites, Thracians, ancient Greeks, Persians, Scythians, Romans, Byzantines, Huns, ancient Slavic groups, Goths, Vikings, medieval Italian traders, Ottomans, and more.

Technological limitations, however, long prevented investigation of its depths.

Testing the waters

In 2000, Robert Ballard led an expedition to the northeastern Turkic coast of the Black Sea. Ballard pioneered new deep-sea exploration techniques that led him to discover the wreck of the Titanic. Searching off the coast between the Bosphorus and Sinop, the team was also looking for Bronze Age coastal settlements.

The Black Sea Deluge hypothesis proposes that until about the 7th millennium BCE, the Black Sea was a smaller freshwater lake, and people lived on its banks. When the Bosphorus opened, the Mediterranean flowed in, transforming the lake into an inland sea. Finding evidence for this theory was a major goal of Ballard's expedition.

Using a combination of sonar and remotely operated vehicle (ROV) technology, the 2000 expedition surveyed the sea floor. Argus, a small imaging vehicle equipped with lights to illuminate the ocean floor, was dropped over the side and dragged behind a boat. The other vehicle was remotely operated and attached to Argus. Called the Little Hercules, researchers deployed it to recover objects or samples.

Under 100m of water, researchers traced what they believed to be an ancient shoreline, finding freshwater snail shells and a possible Neolithic settlement, which they named Site 82. Ballard and his team theorized that the regular limestone blocks were the remains of a manmade settlement.

Twenty-five years later, we still aren't completely sure how the water level in the Black Sea has changed over time. But it probably isn't as simple or dramatic as the Flood Theory posits. For half a million years, the Black Sea has been repeatedly isolated and connected as water levels fluctuated. But these are gradual processes -- there just isn't a lot of physical evidence for a catastrophic, sudden deluge.

But what about the shipwrecks?

Whether Site 82 is a neolithic settlement or just some squarish limestone, it was only one of several key finds. Up to about 85m of depth, years of bottom-net fishing have effectively destroyed the archaeological record. So they began at that depth, scanning a 50km stretch of coast between 85 and 150m.

In a fairly short time, they began getting hits. First, Shipwreck A: two clusters of ceramic vessels and a few half-buried planks, dated to the Late Roman era. Shipwreck B: more ceramic jars and submerged hull planks. The outline of this vessel is larger, and it appears to have a bilge pipe to pump water out of the ship. Based on this, researchers dated it to the Byzantine era. Shipwreck C was similar to Shipwreck A.

Shipwreck D

The promising findings offered new information on the location of an ancient trade route. But very little remained of the ships themselves; the water wasn't deep enough to preserve them. Off this coastal shelf, the sea bottom slopes abruptly downward to depths of 1,000m and more.

They turned to the trickier, deeper waters, with little initial success. With the expedition about to end, Ballard and his team made one final sweep -- and found something.

Shipwreck D sits upright in 320m of water. It's remarkably well preserved, with a deck structure, rudder, and mast rising 11m from the hull. There is even cordage wrapped around the top of the mast. Little Hercules collected a sample of the wood from the rudder area. The samples dated to 410-520 AD.

For such an old ship, it was shockingly well preserved, giving archaeologists insight into the construction of Byzantine ships. However, Shipwreck D, now called Sinop D, is most important as a sign of what else could be out there.

What else was out there?

Ballard and his team returned several times during the 2000s on further expeditions. They continued deploying Argus and Little Hercules to investigate sonar hits.

The technology continually improved, but was still a work in progress. Out of 500 hits, only 44 could be identified, and some of them turned out to be trash. The non-trash spanned a thousand years of history: An early medieval jar wreck, a 19th-century warship, three airplanes and even a WW2 Soviet destroyer, the Dzerzhynsky, named after the founder of the KGB.

Almost 10 years later, The Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project used its ROVs in the Black Sea. A team from the University of Southampton set out on Stril Explorer, a state-of-the-art offshore survey vessel. They were there for the same ancient coastline debate Ballard investigated in 2000. It was almost by accident that acoustic and sonar data, combined with over 250,000 photographs, allowed them to find, map, and model 65 shipwreck sites.

Like the Ottoman ship above, most of them were trade vessels that sank in bad weather. They were far out to sea, along known routes. All were remarkably well preserved. One 13th or 14th-century Venetian vessel was the most complete of its type ever discovered. But the most impressive find was still yet to come.

The world's oldest intact shipwreck

More than two kilometers under the surface of the Black Sea, off the coast of Bulgaria, lies a ship that is more than 2,400 years old. It was an Ancient Greek trading vessel, loaded up with goods meant for Greek colonies on the coast of the Black Sea.

The anoxic water has done its job; the 23m-long ship has an intact hull, with its precious cargo still hidden inside. The mast stands ready for winds that blew before the birth of Alexander the Great. There are intact benches for rowers who died before the invention of the number zero.

Because the cargo, which would usually be used to date the vessel, was inaccessible, the ROV took a small sample to carbon date. The result confirmed what the ship's design had suggested: It came from the 4th century BCE.

University of Southampton Archaeology Professor Jon Adams, who led the Black Sea MAP project, was stunned. An intact shipwreck of this age was unheard of. In fact, they could only recognize the ship's design from depictions on ancient pottery.

"This will change our understanding of shipbuilding and seafaring in the ancient world," Adams said in a press release.

This find is the world's oldest known intact shipwreck. Ships have sailed the Black Sea for over 2,400 years, though. Only a small fraction of its depths have been explored, and even older shipwrecks are still waiting to be found.

For over fifty years, a prehistoric rhinoceros mass grave has baffled paleontologists. Over one hundred rhino skeletons were found in the same spot, having all died together 12 million years ago. Now, a new study has revealed that this mass of animals, which died together, also lived together in one huge herd. How do we know? Their teeth.

Rhinos buried in ash

Located about 160 km from Sioux City, Iowa, the Ashfall Fossil Beds were created by the Yellowstone volcanic eruption 11.9 million years ago. When the volcano blew, a dense blanket of ash covered the entire region. Smaller animals died almost instantly, suffocating on the abrasive ash.

For larger, hardier creatures like the Teleoceras major, the barrel-bellied rhino, it was slower. Volcanic ash, on a microscopic level, is actually quite sharp, like tiny shards of glass. As it filled their lungs, animals slowly sickened and died. They came to the watering hole, seeking some relief in the cool water. There they died, and the wind swept more ash on top of them. What had killed them also preserved them perfectly.

In 1971, Michael and Jane Voorhies were walking down gullies in Northwestern Nebraska. Michael was a University of Nebraska State Museum paleontologist who hoped that erosion by nearby Verdigre Creek had revealed fossils.

It had. Emerging from the side of a gully was a flash of white bone, suspended in ash. Michael had found the skull of a baby rhinoceros. Excitingly, the skull was still connected to the neck, and the neck to the body.

Six years later, Dr. Voorhies came back with a crew from the University. The site is now part of a national park and is still an active dig site. The animals are suspended in layers showing their order of death: Small birds at the bottom, which succumbed first, then horses and camels, and rhinos last. There are over 20 species in total, and hundreds of skeletons, most of them rhinos.

Enamel revelations

However, paleontologists weren't sure at first why the rhinos had all come together in such huge numbers. Were these separate individuals and small herds, all fleeing to the same hole? Or could they really be part of a single massive herd? Researchers at the University of Cincinnati set out to answer the question.

They took samples from the tooth enamel of more than a dozen individuals. Then they analyzed the isotope ratios present in the enamel. Atoms of the same element can have different numbers of neutrons, resulting in different "species" of a given element. Isotope analysis measures the relative amounts of these different species of element. Because different isotopes occur in different environments, and therefore different foods, isotope analysis tells scientists what (and therefore where) an animal was eating.

Using this analysis method, they were able to examine where and why the individuals were moving. Had they traveled a long distance to avoid destruction? Did they migrate seasonally, or leave for new territory upon reaching adulthood?

As it turns out, the answers to those questions are no, no, and no. All the individuals they sampled had been eating the same local food for their whole lives. Comparing their isotopic signatures to another local animal, a sabre-toothed deer, revealed a more aquatic diet. If T. Major was semi-aquatic, like modern rhinos, this would have restricted its movement, explaining the lack of migration.

The hundred-strong rhino group at Ashfall hadn't come together by chance, all fleeing the same disaster. They were one large herd, who had lived together and died together.

A stroll through prehistoric Nebraska

Before the eruption, Mesozoic Nebraska was a vast savannah, crisscrossed with streams and watering holes. Grazing animals fed on the open grasslands. The long-necked Aepycamelus, a giant extinct camel, grazed on the treetops, while small three-toed horses like Pseudhipparion gratum and Neohipparion affine munched on the grass beneath them.

The smaller grazing animals and the young of their larger cousins had a number of canine enemies to watch out for. The deadliest of them was Epicyon, the massive "bone-crushing dog" that weighed up to 170 kilograms.

Moving placidly along riparian corridors were great masses of barrel-shaped T. Major. Growing up to four meters long, they were low to the ground, built more like the modern hippopotamus. In massive herds of dozens of these fleshy, tusked tanks, they enjoyed their muddy wallows, unconcerned by the bone-crushing dogs.

The volcanic eruption was not the end of T. Major. The rhino species persisted for another seven million years, until climate change froze its wet, temperate grasslands.

Archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania were investigating Abydos, one of Egypt's most ancient cities, when they found a 3,600-year-old royal tomb.

From its location near the Mount Anubis necropolis and the surviving inscriptions, Egyptologists know the tomb belonged to a little-known royal family, the Abydos pharaohs. The discovery sheds light on a lost dynasty whose very existence scholars have debated.

Who were the Abydos pharaohs?

It's difficult to imagine how long the Ancient Egyptian civilization persisted. In England, there have been seven different ruling dynasties since the Middle Ages. Egypt had roughly 33 dynasties.

This makes it a little easier to understand how an entire ruling family could slip through the cracks of history. The existence of the Abydos dynasty was first proposed in the 1990s and only confirmed by the discovery of a tomb in 2014. This second tomb provides more evidence.

Egyptologists believe the Abydos pharaohs ruled from 1700 to 1550 BCE. This Second Intermediate Period marked the chaotic transition between the Middle and New Kingdoms, a time of famine, warring dynasties, and rapid regime change.

The last Middle Kingdom dynasty was when the Hyksos people swept into Egypt. They conquered the Nile Delta area known as Lower Egypt, becoming the 15th Dynasty.

Upper Egypt, meanwhile, was split in two. The 16th dynasty ruled Thebes and its surrounding area. The area around Abydos was ruled by, you guessed it, the Abydos Dynasty. The area was fairly small, and the Abydos reign short. They left few monuments behind.

Turin King List

The Turin King List, compiled by the famous 19th Dynasty King Ramesses II, only chronicles four Abydos rulers. The list detailed every pharaoh before Ramesses II.

However, the list was discovered in fragments, with some sections lost, so a degree of guesswork is involved. Pharaoh Senebkay, whose tomb was discovered in 2014, is not one of the four Abydos rulers on the Turin King List.

The new grave belonged to someone who was likely an ancestor of Senebkay, as they were buried in a similar style. Beyond that, Egyptologists can only guess.

Looters stole the grave goods and the mummy and damaged the inscriptions. On either side of the tomb entrance, yellow bands once showed the pharaoh's name and images of the goddesses Isis and Nephthys. You can still make out the sister deities, but the name has vanished.

The Pennsylvania team, led by Josef Wegner, believes the tomb could belong to either Senaiib or Paentjeni. Both have monuments in the area, and researchers have not found either of their tombs.

More to find

The Abydos tomb is the second royal grave Egyptologists have unearthed this year. The first belonged to Thutmose II, husband of the famous female pharaoh Hatshepsut.

Wegner and his team will continue excavations near Mount Anubis. More Abydos dynasty and Middle Period kings may be in the necropolis, Wegner believes.

For the Ancient Egyptians, Abydos was the burial place of the god Osiris, ruler of the afterlife. This made it a sacred city and the burial site for many of the earliest pharaohs. The kings buried here are much older than Thutmose II or the famous Tutankhamun, and their lives are much more mysterious. The Mount Anubis excavations may unearth their long-buried history.

Lush greenery is as unexpected in the Sahara as it is in Antarctica. Yet both were once home to more temperate ecosystems. Unlike the jungles of Antarctica, which froze away many millions of years ago, the Green Sahara was recent enough to host early humans.

Every 21,000 years, the Sahara experiences a wet, rainy period, turning it into a woodland. The last North African Humid Period occurred between 14,500 and 5,000 years ago. During that time, an enigmatic group of pastoral people called the region home.

But who exactly were they? Where did they come from? What happened to them when their home became a desert again? All this has long been a matter of debate.

A new study in Nature reveals the results of DNA testing, suggesting a clearer origin for the Green Sahara people.

Deciphering an ancient genome

The Takarkori rock shelter is tucked against the Tadrart Acacus Mountains of southwest Libya. Humans lived here from 10,200 to 4,200 years ago. Archaeologists have unearthed a number of artifacts, the most important finds are the 15 sets of human remains in the back of the cave.

A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany decided the most likely remains for testing were a pair of adult female mummies carbon-dated from 6,800 to 6,300 years ago. Carefully, researchers extracted genetic material from their naturally mummified remains.

Conditions in the Sahara degrade DNA, making research into population change extremely difficult. The DNA was too damaged to construct a complete genome, but researchers were able to compare specific sections of code to almost 800 individuals from modern Africa, the Near East, and Southern Europe.

The unique people of the Green Sahara

Genetic analysis revealed that the Takarkori people were part of a unique, somewhat isolated group. Their overall ancestry was North African, and significant migration in or out of their population had not occurred.

This runs counter to previous theories, which suggested northward migration from sub-Saharan Africa. Around the height of the last humid period, the Green Sahara people moved from hunter-gathering to a more sedentary herder's life. Previously, researchers believed that sub-Saharan people moving through the area had introduced domestication.

The Takarkori people. also had far less Neanderthal DNA than other North African populations. They were fairly isolated genetically, but with a moderate population of around 1,000 people, they weren't in a population bottleneck.

When kids are outside they pick up anything that catches their eye -- an oddly shaped rock, leaves, sticks, bugs. There are endless possibilities. But when three-year-old Ziv Nitzan was out walking with her family near Tel Azekah in central Israel, she picked up something far more unusual: a 3,800-year-old Egyptian artifact.

The small object she found is an ancient scarab amulet dating back to the Middle Bronze Age.

“Out of the 7,000 stones around her, she picked up one stone,” Omer Nitzan, Ziv's older sister, said in a statement. "Then she brushed off the sand and saw that something was different about it. I called my parents to come see the beautiful stone and we realized we’d discovered an archaeological find!"

Ancient scarab

Tel Azekah is a known archaeological site, and excavations have taken place there for around 15 years. Shaped like a beetle on one side and with engravings on the other, Nitzans' parents knew they might be looking at something old and valuable. They contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).  

The IAA confirmed the authenticity and significance of the Canaanite scarab. The Canaanites were an ancient Semitic people who lived across parts of modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.

“Scarabs were used in this period as seals and as amulets," explained Daphna Ben-Tor from the IAA. "They were found in graves, in public buildings, and in private homes. Sometimes they bear symbols and messages that reflect religious beliefs or status.”

Tel Azekah was an important city in the Judean Lowlands during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. Archaeologists have discovered many Egyptian and Canaanite objects in the area.

“The scarab found by Ziv joins a long list of Egyptian and Canaanite finds discovered here, which attest to the close ties and cultural influences between Canaan and Egypt during that period,” commented Oded Lipschits, director of the Tel Aviv University excavations at the site.  

How did it wind up on a hiking trail?

Lipschits also explained how the ancient artifact ended up on a hiking trail. In 1898, when excavations first took place at that site, British archaeologists found an acropolis, a citadel, and an array of artifacts. After their dig, the man who owned the land asked them to fill the area they had excavated so he could farm there.

“So the modern layers are now inside, and the old layers that used to be very deep in the ground are now on the surface, Lipschits told The New York Times. "This is why people can find all kinds of ancient items like these scarabs on the surface.” 

Experts will now study the amulet further. Nitzan and her family received a certificate of appreciation from the Israel Antiquities Authority for their “good citizenship.”

In the dying years of the Roman Empire, a vassal king in the distant territory of Wales rallied his forces to shake off Roman rule. When the Saxons, too, turned their eye on his kingdom, that Welsh king joined with his northern confreres to beat them back. Eventually, he founded a model kingdom 800 years ahead of its time, complete with knights, metal armor, and even an early form of parliament.

His name was King Arthur, and unfortunately he did not exist, at least in a recognizable way. But the late medieval writers who crafted his legend would have had cause to rejoice this week. Digital archivists at the Cambridge University Library have just recovered a new fragment of their work, hidden in plain sight for centuries. It had been used as the binding for an Elizabeth property register.

How a 13th-century story became the cover of a 16th-century book

Stories of King Arthur were all the rage in the 1200s. After the self-described historian Geoffrey of Monmouth popularized Arthur's legend in the 11th century, the setting of the Round Table spread across the Channel. What had once lived in the realm of pseudo-historical tracts and Welsh oral tradition reached the courts of France.

The defining stories of early French Arthuriana were poems. Marie de France, one of the most famous female French authors in history, wrote short, often satirical verse set in Arthur's court. At the same time, the daughter of Eleonore of Aquitaine, Marie de Champagne, commissioned the first stories of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere's forbidden love and of the Grail Quest.

These stories captured the imagination of the French and English nobility, culturally bound from the Norman conquest of England in 1066. In about 1200, an anonymous coalition of authors adapted them into what may be the first European fantasy blockbuster: the five-book series known as the Vulgate Cycle.

The Vulgate Cycle

Novels were a new concept in Europe. But the magical quests, epic sagas of family strife, and heart-rending character arcs of the Vulgate Cycle were so successful that they endure even today. If you've heard of the Lady of the Lake, of Lancelot and Guinevere's affair triggering the downfall of Camelot, of the Holy Grail being the cup that caught Christ's blood on the cross, then that's the Vulgate Cycle at work.

By the 16th century, though, stories of the Round Table were passé, especially in England. In the same way that a 21st-century scrapbooker might dismember an old novel, Elizabeth bookbinders yanked out a handful of pages from a copy of a Vulgate book. The copy they used dated to about 1300. They needed to bind a register of property deeds, and parchment was precious. So they folded up the Vulgate pages and sewed them into a new cover. There, the pages sat for half a millennium.

Recovering the story

In 2019, archivists at Cambridge University were sorting through the records of an estate in Suffolk when they realized that the cover of the property register contained fragments of a much older text. But it would be impossible to unfold the fragments without damaging the cover it comprised, an important historical artifact itself. More advanced methods would be needed to read the cover text, and in 2023, Cambridge began a new program to do so.

Just this week, the Cambridge Digital Library released the first results from this project. Archivists used multispectral imaging (MSI) to scan the whole text without unfolding the cover. MSI breaks images down into color categories, allowing conservationists to deblur old writing or even recover the traces of erased text.

CT scans probed through the folded layers of parchment. Finally, new techniques in digital image manipulation allowed the team to "unfold" the text and read it.

The wizard Merlin greeted them.

Merlin's magical shenanigans

Nowadays, images of Merlin are dominated by two pop culture phenomena. Either he's a spry old wizard in a blue hat who ages backward (as portrayed in TH White's The Once and Future King and its Disney adaptation, The Sword in the Stone), or he's Arthur's 20-something best friend, as in the BBC TV show Merlin.

The medieval Merlin was a lot stranger. He was born speaking like an adult, the child of a human woman and a demon. He could disguise himself however he wished and was prone to prophesying the downfall of those around him. (Personally, if my wizard advisor handed me a sword inscribed with the words, "With this sword, Sir Lancelot shall kill the man he loves most, and that man shall be Sir Gawain," I wouldn't let anyone named Lancelot or Gawain anywhere near my peaceful Round Table.)

On one occasion, Merlin arrived at Camelot disguised as a blind harpist: "While they were rejoicing in the feast, and Kay the seneschal brought the first dish to King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, there arrived the most handsome man ever seen in Christian lands. He was wearing a silk tunic girded by a silk harness woven with gold and precious stones, which glittered with such brightness that it illuminated the whole room."

This is the excerpt that made up one of the two pages sewn into the cover. So far, the Cambridge Digital Library has only released the above passage, which agrees with other copies of the Vulgate Cycle. They are currently working to produce an annotated version of the whole text. Medieval scribes often edited or even rewrote the stories they copied, so it's possible this text could differ substantially from other manuscripts.

A medieval action hero

Although nowadays Arthur and Merlin are probably the most famous characters from the Arthurian canon, medieval readers had a favorite knight, and it wasn't Lancelot. It was Arthur's hot-headed, charismatic nephew Gawain.

Arthur has a relatively idyllic childhood in the Vulgate Cycle. A kindly knight raises him alongside his own son. But the children of his elder sister Morgause are less lucky. From a very young age, they fight alongside their father in wars against the Saxons. In addition to the Merlin episode, the property register cover text also includes a scene from this plot arc, in which Morgause's eldest son Gawain rides his beloved horse Gringolet into battle.

This is one of the final snapshots of Gawain as a teenager in the Vulgate Cycle. Soon after, one of Arthur's knights kills his father in battle. The young Gawain vows revenge, and although he later joins the Round Table, his vendetta against his father's killer spirals into a vicious blood feud that contributes to the fall of Camelot.

Of course, that's the version in other manuscripts. In the property register folio, none of that ever happens. Merlin dazzles Arthur's court, and Gawain rides victorious into battle. The rest is left to the reader.

When exactly did human language emerge? A new study suggests that humans have been chatting away for at least 135,000 years.

Researchers from MIT took a new approach to unravel that old mystery. Rather than look at fossils and artifacts, they studied the movement of ancient populations via 15 genetic studies conducted over the past 18 years. Three featured Y chromosome analysis (tracing paternal lineage), three examined mitochondrial DNA (tracing maternal lineage), and nine were whole-genome studies. All indicated that early Homo sapiens began diverging around 135,000 years ago.

The researchers believe it is likely that all languages stem from a single original one. This would mean that ancient humans had the capacity for language before we spread across the planet.

"All languages are related," explained lead author Shigeru Miyagawa. "The first major split among humans occurred around 135,000 years ago, so we can infer that language must have existed by then — or even earlier."

All languages linked

Previous 2017 research suggested a similar idea but was based on fewer studies. “Quantity-wise, we now have more studies, and quality-wise, we have a narrower time window,” Miyagawa said. A linguistic expert, he believes that all languages are linked. In the past, he has studied the similarities between English, Japanese, and some Bantu languages.

Some believe that language can be traced back millions of years based on the vocal abilities of other primates. But while primates can make sounds and communicate with each other, it is nothing like human language. For Miyagawa, the question is not when primates could make certain sounds but when ancient humans developed the cognitive ability to develop a language.

“Human language is different because there are two things –- words and syntax -- working together to create this very complex system," he explained. "No other animal has a parallel structure in their communication system. And that gives us the ability to generate very sophisticated thoughts and to communicate them to others.”

A second question is when we started using language socially and in our daily lives. Archaeological evidence suggests that widespread symbolic behavior emerged around 100,000 years ago. Artifacts such as engravings on stone walls show abstract thinking and the ability to convey a message or piece of information.

“Language was the trigger for modern human behavior,” Miyagawa says. “Somehow, it stimulated human thinking...If we are right, people were learning from each other [thanks to language] and encouraging innovations of the types we saw 100,000 years ago.”

DNA analysis has revealed that Stone Age people from North Africa descended partly from European hunter-gatherers. This shows that early people not only came out of Africa but, much later, some returned to it by boat across the Mediterranean.

Researchers analyzed the genomes of nine individuals from archaeological sites in present-day Tunisia and Algeria, all dating from 6,000 to over 10,000 years old. The remains showed genetic markers that linked them to Europeans.

One individual from Djebba, Tunisia, had approximately 6% of his DNA traced back to European forebears. The intermingling took place around 8,500 years ago. A woman from the same site showed similar European genetics.

It is difficult to determine exactly where European ancestry comes from. It could have come from Sicily or a small island called Pantelleria between Sicily and Africa.

Island hopping

It seems unlikely that prehistoric humans crossed the Mediterranean in a single journey. Instead, the new study suggests that they island-hopped across the Sicilian Strait. Proving this theory will, however, be difficult. Many of the islands that could have acted as natural stopping points are now completely submerged, alongside any archaeological evidence they might have held.

No boats from this period have ever been found in North Africa, but dugout canoes of that age have turned up in Bracciano Lake, Italy. This proves that ancient Mediterranean populations were capable of creating seafaring vessels that could have made the journey.

Archaeologists have unearthed five ceramic puppets from a pyramid in San Isidro, El Salvador. The figurines date back 2,400 years, and significantly, all have dramatic facial expressions.

The figures depict four women and one man, and their expressions change depending on the viewer's perspective. At eye level, they appear angry; from above, they seem to be grinning; and from below, they look scared. Researchers believe this enhanced the puppets' roles in rituals and storytelling.

Each of the small statues has small holes drilled into it so that string can pass through, suggesting that they were operated like marionettes. Part of the smallest figure fits neatly inside the hollow torso of another and was possibly used to represent birth.

All five ceramic figurines lay near the top of the pyramid, less than half a meter below its apex. Three are about 30cm tall, while the other two measure 18cm and 10cm. The larger figures are unclothed and feature movable heads with open mouths, allowing dynamic expressions during performances.

“They are clay actors...When you hold them in your hand, sometimes they even look creepy because of their vivid expressions,” Jan Szymanski, co-author of the study, told Science magazine.

Researchers first discovered the puppets in 2022. At first, they thought the figurines were part of a burial offering, but the lack of human remains nearby suggested that instead, they served for public rituals or displays. Archaeologists have found similar figurines in Guatemala. 

It seems that El Salvador was not as isolated as researchers have suspected until now. Similar items cropping up in various countries suggest a cultural interexchange or shared tradition among ancient Mesoamerican communities.

At White Sands National Park in New Mexico, archaeologists identified 20,000-year-old human footprints and parallel drag marks that they believe were left by a travois.

A travois is a simple wooden frame made from two intersecting poles bound together in an A or X shape. Heavy loads rest on the frame, which a person then drags behind them. This new finding is the earliest proof of human transportation technology in the Americas.

Indigenous people in the Great Plains regularly used travois to haul their goods and tents around. While dogs or horses pulled more modern travois, the ancient tracks at White Sands indicate a time when humans themselves dragged them from place to place. Modern indigenous people from the region agree with these conclusions.

A shopping cart minus the wheels

The presence of both adult and children's footprints beside the drag marks paints a vivid picture of prehistoric family life. Adults transported the belongings while kids walked nearby. Matthew Bennett, the lead author of the study, likened it to the modern use of shopping carts.

"Many people are familiar with pushing a shopping trolley around a supermarket...with children hanging on," he said. "This appears to be the ancient equivalent, but without wheels.”

We know that our earliest ancestors must have used some form of transportation to carry their possessions, but any wooden vehicles have long rotted away.

"These drag marks give us the first indication of how they moved heavy, bulky loads around before wheeled vehicles existed," says Bennett.

The team began excavating the site four years ago. In 2023, they dated footprints to somewhere between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. If they are correct -- there remains some debate around the topic -- then humans arrived in North America a few thousand years earlier than we've believed.

The drag marks, some of which extended over 50 meters, were preserved in dried mud and buried under sediment. Some were single lines, others two parallel lines very close together. The team thinks this shows the two types of travois used by the ancient humans. The single lines show the tracks made by an A-shaped frame. The parallel lines show tracks made by an X-shaped frame.

To test their hypothesis, the research team constructed replica travois and dragged them across mudflats in Dorset, UK, and Maine in the U.S. The resulting marks closely mirrored the ancient tracks at White Sands.

Some sections of Great Wall of China in Shandong Province are 300 years older than previously believed, according to recent excavations. Those ancient sections date back to the late Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC).

Researchers believe that the joining of regional walls to create a single defensive structure against northern invasions occurred much later, in the Qin Dynasty, around the 3rd century BC.

“The layout, location, and infrastructure of the Great Wall of Qin reflect the advanced military planning and strategy of the Qin State to external threats,” project leader Zhang Su said in a statement. 

Scholars previously thought that the oldest sections of the wall dated back to the 7th century BC. Recent excavations showed that was an underestimate.

Archaeologists used various techniques, including carbon dating, on a 1,000-square-meter section of the wall to discover that it was three centuries older than suspected. The study also revealed that there were distinct phases during its construction. 

The oldest parts of the wall are about 10 meters thick and used rudimentary construction techniques. Though parts dated back to the early Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BC) as expected, some of the foundations were much older -- as late as 1046 BC. 

Sections built during the later Warring States Period (475 BC-221 BC) are almost three times as wide, spanning 30 meters at some points. These newer parts of the wall are also significantly more sophisticated.

Archaeologists also uncovered two residential structures beneath the early wall sections. These dwellings have square foundations with rounded corners -- typical of the Zhou Dynasty. 

As research continues, we will learn more about the Great Wall's evolution from a series of regional fortifications to the 641km structure it became. 

Eighteen thousand years ago, our Ice Age ancestors practiced both cave art and cannibalism. Human remains found deep in a Polish cave bear unmistakable signs of butchery. These people came from the same stock as those who created the famous cave paintings at Lascaux, France and elsewhere in Europe.

Archaeologists made the discovery in the Maszycka Cave in southern Poland, near modern-day Krakow. Over the last century, researchers have excavated the cave often and found human remains and bone tools. This new study focuses on 63 human bones from 10 individuals. 

Of these fragments, 68 percent show clear marks of human manipulation. In over half the fragments, the individual was dissected almost immediately after death. The cannibals had extracted muscle and bone marrow and removed scalps to give them access to brain tissue. 

A widespread practice

Earlier researchers noticed the cut marks on the skulls and speculated that this was due to cannibalism, but they had no proof. Now, new 3D scans of the bones allowed them to look at the cut marks and scratchings in more detail.

“The position and frequency of the cut marks, as well as the targeted smashing of bones, leave no doubt that their intention was to extract nutritious components from the dead," said lead author Francesc Marginedas. 

Maszycka Cave is just one of a growing list of sites revealing this brutal aspect of late Ice Age life. Similar evidence has emerged from Gough’s Cave in England and Brillenhohle in Germany. Human skulls had been carefully shaped into cups, suggesting a ritualistic use of body parts. Remains found in France and Spain also show signs of marrow extraction.

The researchers say that the increasing number of such sites indicates that cannibalism was an “integral practice within the cultural systems of these Magdalenian groups.” The term "Magdalenian" refers to prehistoric humans who lived in Europe between 23,000 and 14,000 years ago.

Alongside their appetite for human flesh, the Magdalenians are famous for their exquisite cave paintings, such as the ones at Lascaux in southwestern France. These paintings depict mainly large animals that were once native to the area and are one of the most significant discoveries of prehistoric art to date. 

Humiliating enemies?

Co-author Thomas Terberger believes that the creation of art at this time hints that their cannibalism was not due to a scarcity of other food.

“The wide range of artistic evidence points to favorable living conditions during this period," he said. "It therefore seems unlikely that cannibalism was practiced out of necessity.”

Marginedas speculates that the disrespectful burial suggests this was a form of violent cannibalism, where the aim was to humiliate their enemies. 

In northwestern New Mexico lie the architectural remnants of the Chaco Culture. Starting in the 9th century AD, these ancestors of the Pueblo built multi-storied houses, long-distance trade networks, and broad roads carved straight into limestone.

When the U.S. government first started mapping the ruins in the 1980s, they assumed the Chaco roads were merely for transport. Today, archaeologists disagree. The recent discovery of a six-kilometer-long Chaco road that aligns, Stonehenge-like, with the winter solstice highlights how far our understanding of these roads has come.

Astronomical symbolism

The most famous site in the Chaco Culture is Chaco Canyon. This metropolitan sprawl features massive stone mansions known as Great Houses, more modest dwellings, temples, and burial grounds. The Chaco elites nibbled chocolate from Mesoamerica and kept macaws as pets. When they died, they were buried beside their ancestors in multi-generational crypts, evidence of some of the earliest known class divisions in America.

Chaco Canyon also records celestial symbolism. Astronomers often cite a strange painting of a fiery star as a record of the supernova of 1054 -- an interpretation many archaeologists and modern-day Pueblo dispute. Many buildings aligned with the cycles of the Sun and Moon. And one of the most famous sites, known as the Sun Dagger, manipulates the light of the summer solstice to illuminate an elaborate carving.

Broad roads

Elaborate three-meter-wide roads extend out from most major Chaco settlements. Early surveyors for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management assumed these roads served the same purpose that modern American roads do: to move people and goods from one settlement to another. But while most of the roads start at a settlement, many end seemingly in the middle of the desert.

In recent years, archaeologists have started investigating the road networks with a more open mind. The field also became a more hospitable place for Pueblo and Diné scholars. They contributed to our present understanding that many Chaco roads led to herraduras, horseshoe-shaped buildings thought to be roadside shrines. But are the shrines there because of the roads or are the roads there because of the shrines?

We certainly don't know everything about Chacoan architecture, but a paper published last month in Antiquity gave us another clue. Archaeologists used LiDAR to map a small, oft-forgotten ruin 70km from Chaco Canyon called the Gasco site. The Gasco site had the largest herradura of all, and archaeologists had also previously identified about 75 meters of road.

The new LiDAR mapping showed that the road was actually six kilometers long. And it wasn't one road but two, running parallel beside each other.

Sunrise over Mount Taylor

Both roads point straight at Mount Taylor, also known as Tsoodził in Navajo. The gentle slopes of this volcano rise to the east of the Gasco site. Uranium mining in the 20th century has left them riddled with rusting fences and radioactive debris. In 2009, though, an alliance of five tribes succeeded in protecting Mount Taylor from further mining due to its importance in local belief.

When the authors of the new paper saw the roads led to Mount Taylor, they carefully noted its orientation relative to the sky. They found that it aligns with the path of the Sun through the sky during the winter solstice.

On a hunch, they returned to the site during the 2022 winter solstice. As expected, the Sun breached the horizon right above Mount Taylor, casting the landscape in gold against the deep blue sky.

Roads, the solstice, and water

"One of the really exciting things about the work we've been doing with Chacoan roads is that they're forcing us to reconceptualize what a road might be, what a road might mean," lead author Robert Weiner told Live Science.

In fact, the roads don't just point at Mount Taylor. They start and end at water sources: a spring and the head of a canyon river. River pebbles have been found at the Gasco herradura, too, linking the roads to their shrine.

Archaeologists need more time to understand the exact relationship between these roads, the herradura, and the local villages around the Gasco site. That's something it's not clear they're going to get. Local tribal nations are at war with the federal government over drilling projects that could disrupt both the environment and the history of northwestern Mexico.

One thing is for certain: The 1980s interpretation of those roads as merely utilitarian was wrong. And it wasn't just the Chaco Culture that placed a deeper meaning in the construction of elaborate, elegant roads in the American Southwest. What's the deal with Route 66, anyway?

Archaeologists exploring a neglected corner of the Valley of Kings in Egypt have identified the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh of the New Kingdom. This marks the first such tomb found since 1922 when the discovery of 19-year-old pharaoh Tutankhamun's burial chambers enraptured the world.

The inhabitant of this tomb has a lower profile. Pharaoh Thutmose II ruled for only five years until his death at age 30, when he fell victim to a disease that left him scarred and shriveled. His half-sister and widow, Hatshepsut, assumed the throne as his regent. As Egypt's second-known female pharaoh and an influential stateswoman, her legacy far outshone his.

Now Thutmose II is back in the spotlight.

A hidden tomb

In 2022, a joint Egyptian-British expedition found traces of a staircase leading into the stony depths below a monumental cliff. After months of excavation, they cleared the passageway of rocky debris and emerged into a stark, empty tomb.

There was no sarcophagus or any of the offerings traditional to Egyptian burial sites. Instead, huge limestone chunks clogged the hallways, just like the staircase. But above it all, the ceiling shone with painted stars, and the walls showed scenes from the book of Amduat, reserved for the burials of kings. This had been the tomb of a pharaoh.

So where was he?

Fragments of the old tomb

Scattered among the limestone debris, a few broken fragments of alabaster memorialized the name of the tomb's inhabitant: Thutmose II. Others bore the name of his widow, Hatshepsut.

The debris everywhere didn't align with grave robbers, the common reason for empty tombs. This looked like an orderly evacuation following some sort of disaster. The team concluded waterfalls had pummeled the base of the cliff and flooded the tomb, probably only five or six years after the burial.

But whoever had moved Thutmose II's remains hadn't done so immaculately.

"And thank goodness they did actually break one or two things," commented Dr. Piers Litherland, the lead archaeologist on the team, "because that’s how we found out whose tomb it was.”

Where was Thutmose II moved?

Egyptologists have known where Thutmose II's body was since 1881. Entombed alongside other royals in the Royal Cache at Deir el-Bahri, Thutmose II had been moved to this communal crypt about 500 years after his death, along with those whose own tombs had also disintegrated.

The French Egyptologist who unwrapped Thutmose II's mummy wrote, "He resembles [Thutmose I, his father], but his features are not so marked and are characterized by greater gentleness. He had scarcely reached the age of thirty when he fell victim to a disease of which the process of embalming could not remove the traces."

But if a flood destroyed his tomb a handful of years after his death, a second tomb would have had to house his remains and burial gifts for the intervening 500 years before his body wound up in that communal site. If archaeologists can find it, the artifacts within might cast more light on Thutmose II's brief and poorly documented reign.

Hatshepsut, his more famous widow, also stands to benefit should Thutmose II's second tomb be located. Her successor, Thutmose III -- son of Thutmose II by a minor consort -- set to erasing every record of her reign following her death. His motivation was likely revenge over her long reign, which prevented him from taking the throne.

Thutmose II's burial artifacts may contain information on both his reign and the early life of one of Egypt's most iconic but mysterious pharaohs.

Archaeologists have discovered a macabre part of the River Thames's history. For over 6,000 years, humans have been dumping bodies into the London river.

The new study examined 61 skeletons -- 30 newly retrieved ones and 31 previously studied specimens. Radiocarbon dating showed that the remains span a period from about 4000 BC to 1800 AD. A significant chunk of them dates all the way back to the Bronze Age (2300 to 800 BC) and the Iron Age (800 BC to 43 AD). This suggests that the practice was particularly common during these eras.

"These don't appear to just be bones that have steadily accumulated in the river through time,” Nicola Arthur, the study’s lead author, told Live Science. "There really was something significant going on in the Bronze and Iron Ages."

Studying skeletons from the Thames is not new. Since the 19th century, scholars have debated why Britain's early people often threw bodies into the water. One theory is that it was a ritual of some sort. In many ancient cultures, rivers were revered as sacred, and offering human remains might serve to honor deities or to seek their favor. This pattern occurs across northwestern Europe, explained Arthur, but it's still too early to conclude this was the main motivation.

A second theory: The remains may be the result of violence. Not just individual mayhem: Ancient communities would have fought over this vital resource and strategic route. Some of the skeletons pulled from the river show signs of trauma.

Although human remains are not uncommon in European waterways, the sheer number of skeletons discovered in the Thames is unparalleled.

Nurtured by the alluvial planes of the Indus river, the Indus Valley hosted one of the world's oldest urban cultures. From 3300 to 1700 BC, the Indus people built impressive cities like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, which had the irst urban sanitation systems, developed complex agricultural techniques and massive trade networks, and produced sophisticated art.

They also left more than their share of mysteries. Who were these people, and why did they abandon their vast cities? What sort of government did they have, which allowed for rigorous urban planning but resulted in no palaces, temples, or monuments?

Perhaps the most significant hurdle for those hoping to understand the Indus people is the matter of written language. They probably had one, but that’s another matter of debate. These questions aren’t only important to archaeologists and historians. The Indus Valley civilization is the point of convergence for a number of thorny political and cultural issues.

A language mystery

Several political and ethnic groups on the Indian subcontinent are eager to claim descendancy from the Indus Valley people.

Hindu nationalists argue that the Indus script is related to Sanskrit, the ancient language of Hindu scriptures. This was the language of the Aryans, who brought both Hinduism and the Vedic scripts to India. If the Indus writing is related to Sanskrit, they argue, this proves that Aryans are the indigenous people of India the popular philosophy of Hindu supremacy claims.

Another school of thought proposes the script is related to Tamil. Tamil is the classical Indian language of the Dravidian people. If the Indus language is Dravidian, this arguably proves that they are the indigenous Indians.

A recent study brought more attention to the debate. It was a massive joint venture between Pondicherry University archaeologist K. Rajan and R. Sivananthan, deputy director of the state’s archaeological department. Together, they digitized 15,000 pieces of graffiti from over a hundred sites across Tamil Nadu and compared them with the Indus script. According to their findings, over half of the signs were a match, and another ninety percent were “parallels.”

Tamil Nadu is more than 2500 kilometers away from the Indus River valley. If their archaic scripts are indeed related, it would vastly change our understanding of the ancient civilizations of the Indian subcontinent.

The possible significance was not lost on Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin.

“The efforts of the state government is to ensure the right place for Tamil Nadu in the country’s history,” he said.

He issued a statement encouraging anyone to try decoding the Indus script. The successful translator will earn one million dollars.

The trouble with decoding

That’s a lot of money, but it’s a tough job. There exist over 5,000 artifacts in the script, but deciphering them won't be easy. For one thing, it might not actually be a written language. The inscriptions are very short -- most only five symbols, with the longest only 26. They might represent "proto-writing," like early Mesopotamian clay tablets that recorded mercantile transactions. They might even be more like medieval European heraldry, representing a particular group, individual, or family.

Assuming that it is a written representation of spoken language, the language it represents is completely unknown. Other famously decoded ancient languages-- like Linear B or Mayan glyphs-- benefited from known linguistic descendants in modern Greek and Mayan.

Though the Indus people traded with other literate civilizations, like the ancient Mesopotamians, no bilingual inscriptions have been found. Famously, the Rosetta Stone, written in both Egyptian and Greek, made it possible to decode ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

There are as many as 676 unique symbols in Indus script, but a recent computer analysis by Nicha Yadev found that just 67 of them account for 80 percent of the language. Scholars like Yadav are increasingly using computer analysis and machine learning to translate Indus script.

While Yadav has demonstrated an underlying linguistic logic to the signs, he knows that the mystery is unsolved. “We still don't know whether the signs are complete words, part of words, or part of sentences,” he admitted.

So what do the symbols mean? If you can figure it out, you will earn $1 million from the Tamil government.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD destroyed the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum and is one of the most culturally important volcanic events in history. The rediscovery of the incredibly well-preserved remains in the late 18th century sparked renewed interest in classical antiquity. It has shaped fashion, art, architecture, and popular culture and has inspired paintings, poems, blockbuster films, and songs.

The eerily preserved bodies are part of what made the catastrophe so famous. But that was not Vesuvius' first major eruption. A new find of fleeing footprints preserved in stone shows another unsettling -- and far older -- record of devastation.

Pipeline work

The discovery only occurred because a gas pipeline near Naples needed updates. In an area so rich in history, any digging requires archaeologists. So researchers and the various companies worked together to preserve what the construction might uncover.

It uncovered a great deal, it turns out. Two years of work on the pipeline have generated an impressive list of discoveries. These include burials from Late Antiquity, votive ceramics from the second and third centuries BC, and a network of ancient roads. It is clear that the area was continuously used over a long period. A Roman villa had at one point been converted into a cemetery, with what researchers believe was an underground martyrium, a buried shrine for Christian martyrs.

The most dramatic find, however, has to be the footprints. Beside a small stream, dozens of tracks from humans and animals are pressed into the stone.

Ancient disaster

Before the Christian cemetery, the Roman villa, and the Hellenic sanctuary, there was a settlement of Bronze Age people. They lived along the banks of a stream called the Casarzano, in the shadow of Vesuvius.

Archaeologists know the footprints were made by people fleeing an eruption because they were preserved in pyroclastic deposits. This is the material ejected from a volcano, like cinders, ash, and chunks of rock and crystal, that blanket the earth during an eruption. Panicked people and their animals fled along the stream, attempting to reach a safe distance, leaving their prints in these deposits.

We don’t know whether the people who made those prints survived, but we do know that people returned to the area. Pipeline excavations have also unearthed the remains of a Bronze Age settlement that continued to be inhabited into the early Iron Age.

I am prepared to risk it all by admitting that I enjoyed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. There it is. The 2008 film didn’t get the best reception because of its overdone CGI and unlikeable characters. But the storyline -- centered on a mysterious, elongated skull from Peru -- grabbed me.

Crystal skulls are some of the most fascinating, strange mysteries out there. They arrived on the archaeological scene in the 19th century, most without stories or context attached. For many years, no one knew who made them or why. But in the early 2000s, they were proven to be fakes, so why do museums still bother to display them? 

Where it all began

Our story begins in January 1924. The sound of cutting, cracking and enthusiastic voices interrupted the stillness of the jungle in British Honduras (now Belize). A group of local Mayan descendants, a teenage girl and her dear Papa were searching for something. The father, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, was on a mission to fulfill his dream of becoming a world-renowned archaeologist after leaving his Wall Street job. And Anna, his protege and adopted daughter, wanted to make a name for herself in the field as well.

Somewhere in the bush was a lost city called Lubaantun, or “the place of fallen stones” in ancient Yucatek Maya. The site was occupied from 730 to 890 AD. At first, it did not look like much, with stones scattered everywhere and the ruins of pyramids. But it would become the epicenter of a phenomenon that took the world by storm. 

On finding the ruins, young Anna took this chance to explore for herself without the supervision of her father. While peering through a crack in a sunken temple, she saw a small shiny object glistening in the sliver of sunlight. Risking the unstable ruins, she ventured into the dark and uncovered a skull. Not just any skull. Rather, it was a life-size skull of pure, clear quartz (13cm high, 18cm long, and 13cm wide.) This was her ticket to fame, and the skull soon became known as the Mitchell-Hedges skull.

A supernatural object?

The discovery overjoyed their Mayan guides. Supposedly, it had been missing for centuries and was a big part of their heritage. According to local legends, the skull was a crystallized likeness of a beloved and powerful high priest. To preserve his powers, they crafted the skull after him, believing that his essence could be transferred into the skull. Those in possession of the skull could will death on his enemies.

The most important rule was, don’t look into its eyes. It will drive you mad or even kill you. Curiously, the locals gifted Frederick and Anna the skull as a thank-you. Since then, the skull has been credited by New Agers, shamans, and UFO enthusiasts as the key to hidden knowledge and unlocked psychic abilities. They nicknamed it the Skull of Doom.

Skulls were not uncommon in Mesoamerican cultures. They played a big role in the religious, social, and artistic lives of the Maya and Aztecs. It symbolized both life and death and was mostly associated with human sacrifice, rebirth, and appeasing the gods. Skulls continue to be a major symbol of Mexican cultural practices.

An art restorer named Frank Dorland studied the skull to estimate its value. He determined it was thousands of years old, even older than the site itself. He believed it was carved out of a chunk of quartz, rubbed together, shaped, sanded down, and polished with diamonds for 150-300 years, the time it would take to make it so clear.

Where it gets weird

You would think that such a discovery would have made Anna and Frederick famous as soon as they got back to civilization. Wrong. It wasn't until the 1940s that the skull went public. So why wait? Unless the pair was hiding something.

After her father died in 1959, Anna went into full-on marketing mode. She began to promote events in which patrons could -- for $5 admission -- view the skull, feel its power, and hear about that life-changing find in the jungles of Belize. First red flag! The 1960s and 1970s were the perfect time to start such a venture, as spirituality and New Age exploration were at their peak.

If you check out Frederick's autobiography titled Danger My Ally, you'll see that it does not mention Anna's discovery at all. You’d think that Frederick would have raved about the skull or at least made its discovery public. Rather, there is only mention of acquiring a skull, saying:

It is at least 3,600 years old and according to legend was used by the High Priest of the Maya when performing esoteric rights. When the High Priest willed death, with the help of the skull, death inevitably followed. It has been described as the embodiment of evil. I do not wish to try and explain this phenomenon....

No mention

Why is there no mention of Anna and her find?

Let's look at Frederick Mitchell-Hedges. He was a restless man working in the finance sector, trying to build wealth for himself in London and Wall Street in New York City. Deep down, however, he yearned to be an archaeologist, particularly one who was well respected in the academic community.

Mitchell-Hedges left his well-paying job after saving up £4000 and became a full-time explorer. He had somewhat of a reputation, getting into relationships with wealthy women so he had access to funding for his expeditions. He even claimed that he found artifacts from Atlantis. Surely, such a person would have spoken about this crystal skull.

However, records from the Sotheby's, published in the British journal Man, show a skull -- reputedly an artifact from Mexico -- went up for auction in 1936. The buyer was none other than Mitchell-Hodges. It seemed that he bought the skull, and the whole story of its serendipitous discovery was apocryphal.

The truth comes out

When Anna was confronted with this information, she stated that her father ran into financial trouble and received a loan from an art dealer named Sydney Burney after Mitchell-Hedges gave him the skull as collateral. However, Burney double-crossed him and put it up for auction.

Yet in a letter to his brother in 1943, Mitchell-Hedges suggests that the crystal skull was, in fact, a purchase:

The "Collection" grows and grows and grows. You possibly saw in the papers that I acquired that amazing Crystal Skull that was formerly in the "Sydney Burney Collection." It is fashioned from a single block of transparent rock crystal, exactly life-size; scientists put the date at pre-1800 BC, and they estimate it took five generations passing from father to son, to complete. It is anthropologically perfect in every detail, a superb piece of craftsmanship. There is only one other in the world known like it, which is in the British Museum and it is acknowledged to be not so fine as this.

The matter was eventually put to rest in the 1970s when curious researchers from Hewlett-Packard's laboratories took up Dorland's suggestion to analyze it. Though the lab's technology could not determine its age, it did find signs of metal drills used on its teeth. Anna did not hesitate to take the skull back and refuse any more scrutiny.

Anna's later years

Anna married a man named Bill Homman and they toured with the skull until she died in 2007. Homman became its owner and he took the skull to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. for analysis. However, it did not have the answers he was looking for.

Jane Walsh, the main researcher behind the tests, found some interesting details. X-ray and electron microscope scans revealed polishing and tool marks consistent with 19th and 20th-century techniques, particularly those associated with rotary tools and abrasives, most likely with a diamond head. Therefore, this was most likely made in the 1930s.

Ancient civilizations, including the Maya and Aztecs, lacked the technology to carve such precise and smooth shapes from hard quartz. The fact that some skulls displayed features like perfectly symmetrical teeth suggested they were produced much more recently than claimed. Yet...this skull is on display for its expert craftsmanship rather than its historical accuracy.

It's now apparent that the elaborate tale of Anne finding the skull deep in a cave in a jungle in Belize was made up from start to finish. The inconsistencies in her story, conveniently bending the details of her father’s purchase of the skull from an art dealer in London in the 1940s and the lack of records of having been in Belize in 1924 in the first place all point to an elaborate con job. 

Other skulls turn up

The Mitchell-Hedges Skull is not the first such quasi-treasure. They've been around since the 1800s. The British Museum’s crystal skull, often referred to as the Mittler Skull, was acquired in 1897 from a collector named Eugene Boban.

A French antiquities dealer, Boban claimed that it had been discovered in Mexico. Most likely, he lied about its age to get more sales. He said it was found in an ancient Aztec or Mayan tomb. Others linked it to the broader lore surrounding pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures. However, the lack of solid provenance and the skull's highly polished surface has led many researchers to question its authenticity as a genuine artifact.

When Dr Jane Walsh received another skull in an anonymous package, she couldn't help but analyze it. This one was not life-size but very large, around 31 pounds. It was not an accurate human skull but had more decorative embellishments. She enlisted the help of British Museum scientist Margaret Sax to help her compare the two skulls.

After rigorous tests, she said:

British Museum scientist Margaret Sax and I examined the British Museum and Smithsonian skulls under light and scanning electron microscope and conclusively determined that they were carved with relatively modern lapidary equipment which were unavailable to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican carvers...

The British Museum skull was worked with hard abrasives such as corundum or diamond, whereas X-ray diffraction revealed traces of carborundum (SiC), a hard modern synthetic abrasive, on the Smithsonian skull. Investigation of fluid and solid inclusions in the quartz of the British Museum skull, using microscopy and Raman spectroscopy, shows that the material formed in a mesothermal metamorphic environment equivalent to greenschist facies. This suggests that the quartz was obtained from Brazil or Madagascar, areas far outside pre-Columbian trade networks.

Conclusion

So, where does this leave us? They're fake, yes. But you can't help but admire the craftsmanship and beauty of the pieces. In a way, its creators got what they wanted: fame of a sort.

Archaeologists have unearthed a 4,000-year-old tomb in Saqqara, Egypt that belonged to Teti Neb Fu, a royal witch doctor. Sitting 40km south of Cairo near Giza, Saqqara is an ancient burial ground for high-ranking officials.

The team has been excavating the southern side of the site, where the tomb is located, since 2022. Saqqara is the location of the very first Egyptian pyramid and is renowned for its association with Egypt's earliest dynasties.

The burial chambers, known as mastabas, held particularly important people. Teti Neb Fu's tomb is remarkably well-preserved in some ways, although almost everything within it had been looted before it was uncovered. There were also no bones within the grave.

Instead, researchers identified who the tomb belonged to by the inscriptions and carvings on its intricately decorated walls. These not only name the man who once lay within but also give some clues about the magician's life.

Snake doctor

Teti Neb Fu lived in Ancient Egypt’s Sixth Dynasty during the rule of King Pepi II. The inscriptions show that he held several prestigious titles. These include the Chief Palace Physician, Chief Dentist, Priest and Magician of the Goddess Serket, and the Director of Medicinal Plants. These all suggest he served as both a healer and a magician, blending medical knowledge with spiritual practices to treat ailments within the pharaoh’s court.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Teti Neb Fu’s career was his knowledge of how to treat venomous bites and stings. Researchers believe this might have been his specialty because of his association with Serket, the goddess of protection, healing, and magic. Often depicted with a scorpion on her crown, she was known for healing their venomous bites.

Muhammad Ismail Khaled, the Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, thinks the list of intriguing titles reveals a lot about the beliefs within ancient Egypt's Old Kingdom. The references to medicine, magic, and religion show that these practices, while odd bedfellows in our era, complemented each other in ancient Egypt.

Elaborate tomb

The elaborate tomb reflects Teti Neb Fu's prestigious position. Its walls are covered with carvings of healing scenes and rituals and hieroglyphs describing his work.

“The tomb is adorned with stunning carvings and vibrant artwork, including a beautifully painted false door and scenes of funerary offerings,” the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement.

The discovery of Teti Neb Fu’s life as healer and magician of the pharaoh’s court provides a deeper understanding of early Egypt. Archaeologists have previously found tombs belonging to the wives and senior officials of King Pepi I, but this is the most intriguing find so far.

Archaeologists have uncovered the long-lost site where Alexander the Great achieved his first major victory in battle. It took place against the Persians in 334 BC, and marked the start of the 21-year-old general's campaign to conquer Asia Minor.

New evidence suggests that the battlefield lies near the modern-day Biga River in northwestern Turkey.

Turkish archaeologist Reyhan Korpe has been searching for the site of the so-called Battle of the Granicus for two decades.

“The Battle of the Granicus is considered one of the most pivotal moments in world history," he told Turkiye Today. "Following his victory here, Alexander conquered...much of Asia, extending his empire into India."

The battle of 90,000 men saw Alexander's Macedonian army face the formidable Persian force for the first time. The Persian ruler Darius was warned not to meet the Macedonian army head-on, but he ignored his advisers.

This marked the first of three battles between the Persians and Alexander's army across Asia Minor. The Battle of the Granicus began the fall of the Persian Empire.

Two decades of research

The exact location of this historic battlefield had eluded searchers for centuries. Korpe and his team analyzed ancient texts, did extensive fieldwork, and even did geomorphological analysis to map Alexander's route through the region. After two decades of meticulous research, they finally pinpointed the location of the battle.

In the 19th century, German geographer Heinrich Kiepert suggested this site as the location but offered little evidence to support his claim. For Korpe, the key was finding the remains of the ancient city of Hermaion, cited as Alexander’s final stop before the battle.

Ancient sources also state that some of Alexander's men positioned themselves on a hill during the battle. Farmers have found ancient remains and weapons on a hill next to the proposed battleground.

“The most important discovery was identifying the routes Alexander took to reach the battlefield and where he camped along the way," explained Korpe. "We mapped out the exact route Alexander traveled."

Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism plans to develop the site into a tourist attraction.

Archaeologists think they have identified the ship that took Vasco da Gama on his final journey into the Indian Ocean. Initially discovered in 2013, researchers believe the wreck off the coast of Kenya is da Gama’s 16th-century Sao Jorge. 

The Portuguese explorer took a pioneering route from Europe into the Indian Ocean. He was the first person to link Europe and Africa via the ocean and the first to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost tip of Africa. This was the starting point for Portuguese trade in the Indian Ocean.

Da Gama made four journeys to the Indian Ocean throughout his life. The last, in 1524, featured an armada of 20 ships, including the Sao Jorge. 

Just six meters deep

The Sao Jorge sank later that year, shortly before da Gama died. If the researchers are correct, then this is one of the earliest European shipwrecks in the Indian Ocean. When originally discovered in 2013 just six meters below the surface, divers found copper ingots and elephant tusks around the submerged ship, as well as timbers from its hull.

“The provisional dates of the artifacts point to a shipwreck on the outward journey to India and a shipwreck date in the first quarter of the sixteenth century,” the researchers said in a statement.

To confirm that it is da Gama’s ship, the team will now carry out archaeological surveys of the nearby coral reefs. These stretch 25 kilometers from the beach resort town of Malindi, where the wreckage lies, to a cape called Ras Ngomeni.

Filipe Castro, a nautical archaeologist leading the study, admits that they still aren't sure if the wreckage belongs to the Sao Jorge, but if so, "it is a treasure."

There are several Portuguese shipwrecks from the same time period around Malindi. In the early 1500s Portugal started creating galleons -- ships that could be used both in war and for exploration of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Each had three or four masts and could be fitted with artillery in several places. The design was copied across Europe and “changed the history of European expansion," said Castro.

Archaeologists have uncovered the oldest alphabet in human history. Small clay cylinders from an ancient Syrian tomb show clear markings of letters etched into them. 

Using carbon dating, researchers have established that the pieces of clay and the tomb they were in date back to 2400 BC. This means the writing predates other early alphabets by 500 years. This completely changes our belief about the origins of alphabets in early civilizations. Most experts had credited the ancient Egyptians with the invention of the alphabet around 1900 BC.

“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the social elite," said Glenn Schwartz, who led the recent study. "Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated. This new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined.”

Schwartz has led a 16-year excavation at Tell Umm-el Marra in western Syria. Tombs dating back to the Early Bronze Age contain skeletons, jewellery, and pottery. One also held the finger-sized pieces of engraved clay.

It is possible the little clay pieces were labels. They all have small perforations, indicating they were once tied to other objects.

“Maybe they detail the contents of a vessel, or maybe where the vessel came from, or who it belonged to,” said Schwartz. "Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate."

Schwartz presented the findings at the annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research earlier this week. He and the research team are investigating how smaller cities and urban areas developed across Syria. The Tell Umm-el Marra site was one of the first medium-sized centers in the region.

For over 30 years, starting in the 1940s, hundreds of tons of surplus ammunition was dumped into Lake Mjøsa, Norway's largest lake. In 2022, a military vessel used an autonomous underwater vehicle to map the dumped bombs. What they found, instead, was a strikingly well-preserved shipwreck.

The sonar image it captured excited marine archaeologist Oyvind Odegard, who was working on the project. But without more information, it was impossible to determine when the ship had been built or what secrets it held.

Exciting find

"This shipwreck is the most exciting find we've encountered so far,” said Mjøsa Museum director Arne Julsrud Berg. He has completed nearly two dozen dives in Lake Mjøsa, investigating the remains of 18th and 19th-century ships. But those lay at depths of less than 20m. This one is more than 400m down -- too deep for divers.

Instead, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), led by Oyvind Odegard, sent down a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV). It was equipped with a grabbing arm and attached to a boat by a long line.

The icy depths presented significant technical challenges on the first expedition in 2023. The robot could only capture a few seconds of video before losing power.

In late 2024, after spending the intervening year ironing out the kinks in their intrepid little robot, they tried again.

While the cold, placid lake bottom preserves sunken ships (and bombs), the surface can be treacherous. Bad weather forced researchers to pull the robot back up before it could collect a sample that would allow them to carbon date the ship.

But they did get incredible photos and video footage of the wreck, which provided researchers with tantalizing clues to its history.

Meet Storfjorden I

Researchers call the ship Storfjorden I, and thanks to new footage, they now believe it is a type of flat-bottomed vessel called a "føringsbåt." These were used to carry passengers and cargo across the lakes of Norway for hundreds of years.

Viking or Victorian?

Although its name means Big Fiord in Norwegian, Storfjorden -- just 10m long -- isn’t large enough to be considered a ship. Initial estimates placed Storfjorden anywhere between the 3rd to 4th centuries and 1850. The same conditions which kept the boat intact also make it difficult to date. With a wreck this well-preserved, researchers can’t use the rate of decay to judge its age. So without rot and without a sample, they must use the clues of its construction to narrow down a timespan.

The boat is “clinker” built, meaning the planks are overlaid in the traditional Scandinavian style. Later vessels would be “carvel” built, a style of laying planks down flush that originated in the Mediterranean.

Starting in the late 1700s, the sawed planks for ships came from a shipyard. But these planks were cut thickly with an ax, confirming suspicions that this was an older find. But how much older? Could it date back to the Viking age?

Again, visual clues in the footage provide a tentative answer.

The boat had an upright stern, which in Norway only began around the end of the 14th century. Another hint is how it was steered. Unlike earlier Viking ships, which used a special steering oar over one side of the vessel, this føringsbåt appears to have a central rudder.

But beyond these new ranges, the precise age of the boat still remains to be seen.

Future discoveries

Work has only just begun on the bottom of Lake Mjøsa. Odegard and his team plan to go out to the føringsbåt wreck site again next year, and it is likely only the first of many discoveries in the lake.

Another group of NTNU researchers is making a digital map of the lakebed, which integrates satellite, historical, and research data as well as other measurements.

Lake Mjøsa has been used as a waterway since at least the early medieval era and much of it remains unexplored. In his early years, the great Norwegian polar explorer Otto Sverdrup applied for a job as a ferry captain on Lake Mjøsa.

Sverdrup, who later became the greatest ice navigator of the Golden Age of Polar Exploration, did not get the job because "the company was not willing to take on a man who was unfamiliar with the difficult ice conditions on this lake," says Sverdrup's biographer, Per Egil Hegge.

Scientists have brought a vampire back from the dead with 3D printing and modeling clay. Found in an unmarked cemetery in Pien, Poland in 2022, her grave shows all the signs of a burial of someone considered a vampire. 

Called Zosia by locals, the girl was buried with an iron sickle across her neck, padlocks around her feet, and a few different types of wood around her. Her remains date back 400 years.

At that time, all three items were believed to protect humans from vampires. Slavic folklore tells that sharp objects such as sickles would decapitate the dead and stop them from returning to the living world. Other such vampire burials in Poland include sickles or padlocks. This is the first time that archaeologists found both in a single grave. 

Resurrected as a human, not a monster

To reconstruct her face, archaeologist Oscar Nilsson first 3D-printed a replica of Zosia’s skull. Then he added layers of modeling clay to build up her face bit by bit. Analysis of her bone structure, gender, age, ethnicity, and weight helped replicate her exact features.

"It's emotional to watch a face coming back from the dead," Nilsson told Reuters. "Especially when you know the story of this young girl."

He said the team wanted to bring Zosia back to life "as a human, and not as this monster that she is buried as."

During the 17th century, superstitions were rife. Anyone who behaved differently, had a disability, was born out of wedlock, or was foreign could be accused of witchcraft or supernatural connections. Unusually, Zosia’s grave shows signs of relative wealth within her community, including fragments of silk and precious metals. This intrigued the researchers even more.

The mystery of Zosia

Dariusz Polinski, who led the excavations, told The Past, “She was neither ritually murdered nor was she one of the convicted in the witchcraft trial. Those individuals were treated in a different way, and they were usually thrown into provisional graves. It is possible that in her lifetime, the woman experienced a tragedy and was harmed. On the other hand, her appearance or behavior might have provoked contemporary residents to be afraid of her.”

Anthropologists, archaeologists, and forensic experts have been working to uncover who Zosia was and what she looked like. She died between the ages of 17 and 21, had Swedish origins, and suffered from a hemangioma on her chest. These are growths of blood vessels on the skin that may have been visible to others. They can cause dizziness, fainting, and extreme headaches. This would likely have been viewed negatively by those around her and added to the belief she was a vampire. 

Known as the Treasure of Villena, this horde of brilliant golden treasure from prehistoric Spain reveals ancient metalworking secrets.

Amid a dazzling collection of 66 mostly golden artifacts, the two most important ones are not the most eye-catching. But this open iron bracelet and gold-decorated iron hemisphere are more than they seem.

In a recent paper, researchers at Spain's National Archeological Museum discovered that the objects were forged from meteoric iron.

Bronze Age or Iron Age?

The Treasure of Villena, discovered in the Valencia region of Spain in 1963 by Jose Maria Soler, is considered one of the most important collections of prehistoric treasure in Europe. Yet for 60 years, researchers have struggled to accurately date the collection. Estimates spanned nearly a thousand years, from 1500 to 800 BC.

The sticking point was two worked pieces of iron, the hemisphere and the bracelet. While the gold objects that made up the bulk of the collection were dated to between 1500 and 1200 BC, smelted terrestrial iron objects weren’t produced on the Iberian peninsula until around 850 BC.

Metal from the sky

But what if these objects weren’t made of terrestrial iron? It wasn’t as unbelievable as it might seem. In fact, the oldest known iron artifacts, a set of 5,000-year-old beads from northern Egypt, also came from meteoric iron.

Iron is almost always found in the form of iron ore, which needs to be treated to extract the iron. Without the invention of this process, called smelting, Bronze Age peoples couldn’t use the iron they found. But they could harvest iron from meteorites to make weapons, tools, and decorative objects. Meteoric iron is easily distinguished from terrestrial iron: It has more nickel and less carbon.

Researchers tested the Villena iron objects by carefully taking small samples so they would not damage the precious artifacts. What they found seemed to confirm their suspicions. These ancient treasures came from a fallen meteorite.

Due to the corroded condition of the artifacts, the results aren’t completely certain, but further tests should confirm their initial analysis. If so, these objects are the first examples of meteoritic iron working on the Iberian peninsula. It would also affirm that the Treasure of Villena belongs to the Bronze Age, suggesting a date of around 1400 to 1200 BC.

Researchers think they have found a depiction of Noah’s Ark on the 3,000-year-old Babylonian Map of the World. Also known as the Imago Mundi, the clay tablet has baffled archaeologists for over a century. 

Archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam discovered the tablet in 1882 in Sippar, an ancient Babylonian city in present-day Iraq. It now lies in the British Museum, and researchers finally think they have decoded it. Curator Irving Finkel says that the cuneiform writing on the tablet tells of the ancient Babylonians' beliefs and culture. 

The tiny tablet has cuneiform on both sides and a map of sorts etched into it. The writing above the map tells of the creation of the Earth, and the map itself seems to give an aerial view of Mesopotamia. 

On the tablet, Mesopotamia is surrounded by a double circle that is labeled the "Bitter River." At the time of creation, this was considered the boundary of the known world. Within Mesopotamia, clear markings depict the Euphrates River, Babylon, and other features.

“In this circular diagram, you have captured the entirety of the known world, where people lived, thrived, and perished,” said Finkel.

Triangles outside the double ring represent distant mountains and realms beyond that of the known world. 

Mysterious triangles

The back of the tablet is covered in cuneiform, which speaks of what lies within the eight triangles that sit outside the double circle. Here, the information slips between reality and imagination. Those creating it did not know exactly what lay beyond Mesopotamia. The stories tell of giant birds and trees with jewels hanging from them instead of fruit. 

Researchers think the back acts as a guide to unknown lands for any explorer who is considering a journey beyond the Bitter River. A story about one of the mysterious realms shows a striking resemblance to the biblical tale of Noah’s Ark. It says that the explorer must pass through "seven leagues...[to] see something thick as a parsiktu-vessel."

The word parsiktu was of immediate interest to Finkel. He says this word would make any Assyriologist's ears prick up. It is only seen on one other cuneiform tablet, which describes an ark built by the ancient Babylonian version of Noah. The Ark eventually crashes on the other side of a mountain beyond the Bitter River. 

Finkel believes the Imago Mundi tells adventurers the journey they must take to find Noah's Ark and gives us an incredible insight into the crossover of ancient stories and cultures.

“It shows that...from the Babylonian point of view, this was a matter of fact…That if you did go on this journey, you would see the remnants of this historic boat,” he says. 

Researchers have sequenced the oldest known genome in Italy. It belongs to a blue-eyed, dark-skinned, curly-haired little boy who lived during the last Ice Age. 

Archaeologists discovered his skeleton in 1998 in the Grotta delle Mura cave in Puglia, the region at the heel of Italy's "boot." Carefully placed between slabs of rock, it was the only burial in the cave. The well-preserved remains of the little boy offered researchers a rare glimpse into infancy during the Upper Palaeolithic era. 

The infant was 76cm (two-and-a-half feet) tall when he died. Dental analysis suggested he was around 16 months old. His remains indicate he was poorly developed, and his teeth show nine lines that are markers of stress. Clearly,  the boy's short life was a difficult one.

Isotopes within the tooth enamel gave most of the information. The strontium suggested that the mother was malnourished and stayed in one place during pregnancy. A fracture in the child's collarbone indicates his birth was very difficult. 

Born with ill health

DNA analysis proves that the child had ill health throughout its short life. Mutations were present in two genes, TNNT2 and MYBP3, signaling that he suffered from the genetic condition of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy which eventually leads to congestive heart failure -- his likely cause of death. 

Radiocarbon dating shows the child lived between 16,910 and 17,320 years ago, not long after the Last Glacial Maximum. At this time, ice covered a quarter of the land on Earth.

The boy existed in a time of significant change, and this find offers information on ancient human migration into southern Italy. The region's climate was slightly warmer than other parts of Europe, which made it a slight refuge from the harsh conditions in other parts of continental Europe. 

Genetic analysis shows the boy was an ancestor of the Villabruna cluster, a group of post Ice-Age people that lived until about 14,000 years ago. His connection to them proves that their lineage began in southern Italy before the end of the Ice Age. It is the first time that researchers have been able to say without question that the group was in the region before the Ice Age ended. 

For centuries, a lost Mayan city was buried under dense jungle in southeastern Mexico. The massive site, named Valeriana after a nearby lagoon, covers over 16 square kilometers. With an estimated 6,764 man-made structures, only the Calakmul site, 100km away, rivals its size.

Despite the fact that it only lay a short hike from the town of Xpujil, the archaeological community was unaware of this ancient metropolis hiding in the neighborhood.

Tulane University PhD researcher Luke Auld-Thomas discovered it by chance. Digging around the internet, he found a laser survey completed by a Mexican environmental monitoring organization, “on something like page 16 of a Google search.”

No other archaeologist seen this. Auld-Thomas processed the data again, this time using the parameters of his trade developed by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping.

The result was a detailed map of a sprawling lost city.

Founded before 150 AD

Even without fieldwork, the layout gives archaeologists a glimpse of what life would have been like in Valeriana. At its peak, between 750 and 850 AD, 30,000 to 50,000 people lived there. The city center included several temple pyramids, a ball court, enclosed plazas connected by a causeway, a reservoir and amphitheater-style residential patios. Architectural details reveal that the city was founded before 150 AD, and that the entire site was part of a continuous urban sprawl.

To the southwest of the city center lies a more modest residential area. Here, ring-shaped structures revealed that the people who lived there had been producing lime plaster.

The epicenter of the site is on the edge of the area covered by available data, making it extremely likely that there are more buildings just outside the scanned section.

This discovery is a reminder that in the pre-colonial era, complex civilizations lived in the tropics.

“No, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered,” Auld-Thomas said.

On every level, this discovery runs counter to the old colonial idea of the Americas as a lightly inhabited wilderness.

The future of discovery?

Valeriana also shows us the changing methods of archaeological discovery. Light detection and ranging technology (LiDAR) penetrates dense vegetation. It can search huge, inaccessible areas for possible sites. Until now, its prohibitive cost has limited its use. However, as Luke Auld-Thomas has proved, archaeologists can repurpose so-called ‘found’ datasets from unrelated remote sensing work.

Who knows what ancient, undiscovered wonders are still out there, hidden in old civil engineering reports and ecological surveys?

The Sverris Saga tells the old Norse story of King Sverre Sigurdsson, his rise to power, and his rule over Norway from 1184 to 1202 AD. One anecdote in the book speaks of a dead man who was cast into a well before it was filled with stones. Hundreds of years later, researchers think they have discovered the remains of this nameless Well Man. 

He is only mentioned in one line of the saga but is now one of its most famous characters. This is the first time that actual remains have been linked to a Norse saga. Researchers discovered the bones decades ago, in 1938, in a well at Sverresborg Castle -- the well described in the saga. 

At the time, the technology to fully analyze the bones and identify the individual did not exist. Now, a joint team from Scandinavia, Iceland, and Ireland has carried out genomic analysis, radiocarbon dating, isotope analysis, and gene sequencing of the skeleton. 

The team extracted DNA from the leg bone and cranium. “We were very frustrated to find that it was almost entirely bacterial DNA,” said co-author of the new study, Michael Martin. Most of the human DNA was severely degraded. Everything changed when they got some teeth from the lower mandible. The root of one tooth held enough DNA that they could sequence the man's genome. 

Timeline fits

The team has been piecing together information about the mysterious Well Man for six years. When he died, Well Man was between 30 and 40 years old and had blue eyes and blonde hair. His genetics trace back to Vest-Agder, a southern county of Norway. Isotopes of carbon and nitrogen suggest a seafood-rich diet.

Crucially, he died approximately 900 years ago. This timeline fits perfectly with the story of the invasion of Sverresborg Castle in the Sverris Saga. 

The tale recounts that in 1197 AD, the archbishop’s fighters invaded the castle when the king was not there. They did not kill anyone but burned down all the houses and destroyed the castle and all of the king's longships. Then the archbishop’s men took a dead man and threw him into the well before filling it with stones. Co-author Anna Petersen said most scholars think the man was either important to the king in some way or they were trying to poison the castle’s water supply.

No one will ever truly know what happened. They do know that the man was dead before he was thrown into the well. How he died is a mystery. Though the saga says no one was killed during the invasion, that might not be the case.

"The text is not absolutely correct," said Petersen. "What we have seen is that the reality is much more complex than the text."

Martin agreed. “The sagas," he pointed out, "are a mix of historical fact, storytelling, political propaganda, and Old Norse religion.”

Archaeologists have mapped two lost cities of the Silk Road in Uzbekistan using drones and LiDAR. The fabled cities had lain buried under mountain pastures for centuries.

Light detection and ranging technology (LiDAR) uses laser pulses to detect structures hidden beneath vegetation. The two settlements lie five kilometers apart at around 2,000m above sea level. Called Tugunbulak and Tashbulak, they were two of the largest mountain settlements on the famous trade route between Europe and China.

Tugunbulak, the largest of the two, contains watchtowers, plazas, fortresses, and large complexes. Tens of thousands of people once lived here.

Speaking about Tugunbulak, Farhod Maksudiv -- co-author of a new paper on the find, said, “The people inhabiting Tugunbulak for more than a thousand years ago were nomadic pastoralists who maintained their own distinct, independent culture and political economy.”

Backyard find

The research team has been uncovering the Tashbulak site for almost a decade. In 2015, a forestry official commented that he had seen ceramics in his backyard that were similar to what they were unearthing at Tashbulak. This tiny tip is how Frachetti discovered the larger Tugunbulak site.

“We got down there, and right in his backyard is a medieval citadel," Frachetti told CNN. "He just didn’t know it. We go up to the mound, and we look out, and we can see mounds and pyramidal [shapes] all over the place, and we’re like, oh my gosh, this place is huge."

At first, they used foot surveys and computer modeling to figure out the layout of both sites. It took a long time, but this proved to be a silver lining. Over the years, the technology has improved tenfold, and now they can use LiDAR and drones.

Drone use is strictly regulated in Uzbekistan, and the team needed special permission to use them. This year, they finally mapped out both cities, thereby discovering the largest urban layout of any medieval Central Asian city at high altitude.

“The final high-res maps were a composite of more than 17 drone flights over three weeks,” Frachetti said. “It would have taken us a decade to map such large sites manually.”

High-altitude hubs

The research proves that the Silk Road did pass through high-altitude areas. Some have speculated that it only wandered through the lowlands. The Silk Road was such a commercial success that setting up settlements along its branching paths was incredibly lucrative, and cities began popping up along it.

Despite this, the archaeologists believe these settlements existed for a different reason. Life at this altitude would have been incredibly difficult, making it an odd choice for a simple stopover along the route. They are also much larger than other rest stops.

Instead, the team thinks they were built to harvest the nearby iron ore. They hope that future excavations will reveal who built the cities and why they were abandoned.

Underwater caves off the coast of Sicily offer new clues about the island's first human inhabitants. They may have arrived by sea, not by land, as previously assumed. 

Sicily is one of the earliest islands in the Mediterranean that modern humans inhabited. How they reached it is a mystery. Though it sits just over three kilometers off the coast of Italy, crossing that stretch of water was not easy.

Most of the work on Sicily’s ancient history has focused on land. But archaeologist Ilaria Patania and her team studied submerged caves in southern Sicily instead. Tens of thousands of years ago, these were on dry land, but rising sea levels have since covered them.

Patania and her team worked closely with local divers, fishermen, and even retired tugboat captains who had spent years in the waters around Sicily. Their insights helped researchers locate previously overlooked sites. Archaeologists also collaborated with the Italian navy’s specialized dive teams to explore deeper underwater areas.

Initially discovered in 1870 and lightly investigated in the 1990s, the caves have been almost forgotten since then.

Land bridge

The team searched the underwater caves for signs of early human presence. One site of particular interest is the Corruggi cave near the southern tip of Sicily. A land bridge once connected this to the island of Malta, so early humans could have walked between the islands.

"Analyzing the remains from this site might give us insight on the very last leg of the human journey [from] the southernmost coast of Sicily and off toward Malta,” said Patania.

Inside the Corruggi cave, researchers found animal fossils, pottery, and ancient stone blades, suggest that early humans were active in this region. They may have traveled either by land, water, or both -- island-hopping across the Mediterranean.

Researchers tend to agree that ancient humans arrived in the area 16,000 years after the last glacial maximum. But we know humans had made it to Siberia 30,000 years earlier. The huge discrepancy in time scales is baffling. Many now wonder if our ancestors arrived in Sicily much earlier than we thought. 

In 1934, an archaeologist was digging in the Timna Valley in the sweltering heat of southern Israel. He was trying to prove that King Solomon's Mines was no mere 19th-century fantasy adventure. He believed it was real.

Background

The fascination with biblical archaeology traces back to the Victorian era. With the Industrial Revolution came excavations and the discovery of long-buried sites like Troy, Mycenae, and Nineveh. Some of these discoveries even confirmed tales of Greek mythology and the Bible. The excitement permeated Victorian culture and led to the emergence of adventure fiction. 

Enter H. Rider Haggard

The story of King Solomon’s Mines originated in H. Rider Haggard's novel of the same name. This son of a barrister could not figure out what he wanted to do in life. After failed attempts to get into both the army and the British Foreign Office, his father shipped him off to South Africa to work as a personal assistant to a celebrated diplomat. Thus, his love affair with adventure began. Africa and its ancient legends fascinated him. He published King Solomon’s Mines in 1885, and it was an instant hit. 

In the novel, he introduced Allan Quatermain, an Indiana Jones-like character who also featured in subsequent novels. Here, a man named Sir Henry Curtis enlists Quatermain for his hunting skills and knowledge of a dangerous region to help find his lost brother.

Curtis’s brother disappeared while trying to find the fabled diamond mines of King Solomon. After narrowly escaping death from hostile tribes, they discover the mines, take some diamonds home, and recover Curtis’s brother. It is worth noting that Haggard placed these mines in South Africa. 

Though this is a work of fiction, there might be some truth to the story. The Bible does not explicitly say that Solomon owned mines but does speak about his wealth and his access to raw materials, which he used to create riches for the First Temple. Was Haggard onto something? 

Biblical analysis

King Solomon is perhaps the most iconic king in all the Abrahamic religions. He reigned sometime between 975-926 BC. The son of King David and Bathsheba, he was famous for the wisdom given to him by God, for his military prowess and diplomatic skills, for his hundreds of wives, and for his wealth. Supposedly, it “surpassed all the kings of the earth in riches.”

He built this fortune by receiving regular tributes from local and foreign figures as well as through heavy taxation. He used this money to build the First Temple.

The Bible speaks of his wealth extensively in 2 Chronicles 9:13-29:

The weight of the gold that Solomon received each year amounted to six hundred and sixty-six talents of gold, in addition to the tolls levied on merchants and what was collected from foreign trade. All the kings of Arabia and the governors of the provinces also brought gold and silver to Solomon…

King Solomon also made a large ivory throne, which he overlaid with pure gold. The throne had six steps, and a footstool of gold was fastened to it. There were armrests on each side of the seat, with two lions standing beside the arms, while twelve lions stood on either side of the six steps. Nothing like it had ever been made in any other kingdom.

Silver not good enough

He also had around 4,000 stalls for 12,000 horses and chariots and drank only from gold cups -- rejecting silver as not good enough. Much of the wealth went into Solomon’s Temple, also known as the First Temple.

But when Solomon’s reign ended, what happened to his treasure?

Because of Solomon’s excesses and sins, God punished him. New enemies appeared, and the tribes of Israel rejected Solomon and his successors. His kingdom split into two entities: the Kingdom of Israel to the north and the Kingdom of Judah to the south. Israel was ruled by Jeroboam, one of Solomon's former servants, while Solomon’s notoriously ineffectual son Rehoboam presided over Judah.

Both kingdoms suffered a devastating blow when an Egyptian pharaoh named Shoshenq removed all of Solomon’s wealth from his palace and the First Temple. 

1 Kings 14:25–26 says:

In the fifth year of Rehoboam, Shishak, king of Egypt, attacked Jerusalem. He carried off the treasures of the Temple of the Lord and the treasures of the royal palace. He took everything, including all the gold shields Solomon had made.

Egyptians took it all

A temple pillar at Tell Basta, just north of Cairo, confirms the conquest. It states that Solomon's treasures were used as offerings to the Egyptian gods. 

Throughout all these passages, there is no mention of Solomon's mines. But 1 Kings 7 explores the construction of the Temple and the materials he sourced. He cast two bronze pillars, 10 bronze carts, and four bronze wheels and axles. Solomon supposedly cast these objects "...in the plain of the Jordan, in the clay ground that lie between Succoth and Zarethan.”

This led historians and archaeologists to believe that Solomon might have used mining to sustain his wealth and maintain the Temple. So, perhaps the idea is not that far-fetched.

Archaeological evidence

James D. Muhly, a professor of Ancient Near East History at the University of Pennsylvania, states that there is “biblical silence” on the mines. However, numerous books on biblical archaeology do mention them, particularly Solomon’s focus on copper smelting. Solomon even bore the nickname, the Copper King. 

The archaeological search for the mines began with the theories of Rabbi Nelson Glueck in 1934. He found large copper smelting slags in the Timna Valley, in the southern part of the Negev in modern-day Israel. Glueck also cited evidence of miners’ quarters.

A few years later, he excavated a mysterious mound in Tell-el Kheleifeh, between Israel’s southernmost city of Eilat and Aqaba in Jordan. This mound hid a large building complex which had a series of peculiar holes throughout the walls. Glueck believed that the building was a refinery and smelter, and the holes allowed wind to keep flames going.

He concluded that Tell-el Kheleifeh was the ancient port city of Ezion-Geber from the Bible. Here, Solomon sent ships to fetch treasures and metals.

The theory falls short

It did not take Glueck’s opponents long to poke holes in the theory. His main critic was a photographer and archaeologist named Beno Rothenberg. Rothenberg claimed that the holes in the walls were simply remnants of where beams were. Plus, mud plaster ringed the holes -- not the type of material that would survive smelting. 

Rothenberg did his own investigations in the Timna Valley over the years. Though he found copper mines in the area, they dated before Solomon’s reign by a century and a half. They were also under Egyptian control, as confirmed by hieroglyphs in a temple at Hathor. 

In 2013, archaeologists from Tel Aviv University excavated an area in the valley called Slave’s Hill. They found smelting camps containing pieces of clothing, food, broken pottery, and furnaces dating to Solomon’s time. However, they believe the camps belonged to the Edomites -- enemies of Solomon and Israel who lived in the Timna Valley at the same time. 

Conclusion

Though the pieces seemed to go together well, the evidence suggests that King Solomon did not have copper mines, from which he cast his treasures, but likely sourced the materials elsewhere. If he did have mines, the Bible would have said so since it details all his other activities and sources of wealth. The legend of King Solomon’s Mines will likely remain a great work of adventure fiction. But this does not mean that other biblical treasures do not exist out there.

Talk to any archaeologist, and one of the first things they'll tell you is that the discipline has very little to do with bullwhips, leather jackets, or punching Nazis. But a team of scientists digging in Jordan has discovered one notable exception to the "real archaeology is not like an Indiana Jones movie" rule. They have unearthed an exceptional find buried beneath one of the film locations for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The scientists uncovered 12 human bodies entombed beneath a building known as The Treasury in the ancient city of Petra, Jordan. The 2,000-year-old remains date to sometime between the first century BC and the first century AD. The site also contained numerous artifacts.

If you've never heard of Petra, you'll probably still recognize it — the UNESCO World Heritage Site is half-built, half-carved out of the rose-colored sandstone cliffs located halfway between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea.

The Treasury, in particular, is iconic. It has graced the cover of National Geographic and was featured as the location of the Holy Grail in the third Indiana Jones movie. Today, it is a popular tourist attraction.

Suspicions confirmed

A few years ago, archaeologists discovered two tombs in The Treasury and suspected there might be more.

However, the funding and permits needed for investigations have been difficult to come by lately. So when a rare opportunity presented itself, a team led by Pearce Paul Creasman of the American Center of Research conducted ground-penetrating radar scans.

"That's when we discovered the signals which I interpreted as voids in the subsurface," Richard Bates, a professor of geophysics at the University of St. Andrews, told NPR.

The government of Jordan gave the go-ahead to begin digging. This past August, the team uncovered the 12 sets of remains in a chamber 5.5m long, 5.5m wide, and 3m deep. A film crew from the Discovery Channel was on hand when the bodies were discovered. An episode of Expedition Unknown aired on Wednesday, October 9, and chronicled the find. That's serendipitous because, astonishingly, the remains were unmolested by human hands — the bodies resting just as they were when originally entombed.

Petra was built by the Nabataeans. These desert nomads ruled a thriving kingdom in the area for 500 years until the Romans annexed it in 106 AD.

An improbable discovery

Creasman told CNN that it's extremely rare to find untouched human remains in Petra due to its location as a trading crossroads and travelers' millennia-old habit of ducking into the sandstone buildings to escape Jordan's oppressive heat.

“We were hopeful of finding anything that might tell us more about the ancient people and place — human remains can be a really valuable tool in that regard,” Creasman said. “The burials in this tomb are articulated, so the bones haven’t been rummaged around and moved. That’s exceedingly rare.”

Intriguing artifact

The artifacts found with the remains are in even better condition. One of them, a ceramic cup, looks startlingly like the Holy Grail prop used in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. While the human remains are blessedly free of interference by human hands, several sets show signs of mold, likely owing to the porous sandstone Petra is carved from.

That means the team must proceed cautiously with the rest of the dig. As usual with archaeology, funding is an issue.

"The next step...is to get the money to properly exhume at least one of the bodies and do a full study on it," Bates said. "There are indications from the geophysics that there are other tombs there...A lot of where we go from here is going to be quite expensive, basically. So who knows when that's going to happen?"

Frozen in time, abandoned for 4,500 years, and under threat from an eroding coastline, Scotland’s "Pompeii" is the best-preserved Neolithic settlement in Western Europe. But despite Skara Brae's immaculate preservation, researchers still don't know why it was abandoned.

Storm reveals a forgotten village

Before its discovery, Skara Brae was nothing more than a sandy, grassy mound in the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland. In 1850, a powerful storm stripped the sand away, revealing bits of a small village.

One of the locals who stumbled upon the ruins was an amateur archaeologist named William Watt. Watt and his colleague, George Petrie, excavated the site and uncovered four houses. After Watt died in 1866, Petrie did not continue their work but did present his findings to the academic community.

The site was largely left alone until 1913 when, over a single weekend, someone plundered the site for artifacts. Soon after, another storm revealed more of the village.

In 1925, officials constructed a seawall to protect the ruins from the ocean. Then in 1927, researchers finally decided to investigate the site properly when the government granted access to archaeologist V. Gordon Childe from the University of Edinburgh. 

Because of waterlogging and protection from the sand, the site was impressively well-preserved. The researchers found ten flagstone houses built deep into the ground. Each house has Stone Age furniture, including beds, a fireplace, and a Neolithic drainage system. Artifacts included animal bones, tools, jewelry, and pots, as well as a series of carved stone balls with rune-like symbols. Linguists have yet to crack what the runes mean. 

Radiocarbon dating suggests most of the discoveries are from around 3180 BC. Around 2500 BC, village life died out. The village shows no sign of advancing further into the Bronze Age, and personal belongings were left behind.

What happened that caused the residents to abandon their homes? 

Who lived there?

Archaeologists determined that less than 50 people lived in Skara Brae. The residents were most likely farmers and hunters. Researchers call them the "Grooved Ware People," after some of the distinctive objects they used. They left traces of their existence at other Neolithic sites in Orkney, including the Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness. 

So why did the small community leave? Some historians believe Skara Brae suffered a catastrophe akin to Pompeii. The area is prone to bad weather, and a particularly dreadful storm could have forced the residents to flee. The site was surrounded by dunes, so powerful winds could have blown sand into the village and buried the site.

Another theory is that natural erosion of the coastline threatened the village crops.

However, the site was most likely abandoned for several reasons. The transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age saw drastic social changes. The Bronze Age brought more sophisticated weaponry, more complex architecture, and the emergence of chiefdoms and hierarchies. Villages grew in size, and migration and trade increased. Perhaps the older residents of Skara Brae died off while the youngest moved on, looking for easier lives.

Skara Brae's abandonment was probably gradual. Straddling two time periods, it succumbed to the tides of change.

Still springing surprises

Recently, Dan Hicks of the University of Oxford tweeted several black-and-white photos from the 1929 Skara Brae excavation, setting off a group of "internet sleuths." The photos contained four women who people had long believed to be tourists. They were actually archaeologists. The internet sleuths embarked on a mission to uncover their identities.

Eventually, they found their names: Margaret Simpson, Margaret Mitchell, Dame Margaret Cole, and Mary Kennedy. All were students of Professor Childe’s. All but one became professional archaeologists. (Cole pursued a writing career.) The women were trailblazers, with female archaeologists exceedingly rare at the time.

The Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague will rule over who owns the world’s most valuable sunken ship.

In 1708, the British sank the San José off the coast of Colombia. The Spanish galleon still sits on the seabed over 700m down, beyond the reach of divers. Its billions of dollars worth of gold, silver, and emeralds make it the most valuable shipwreck on the planet. For obvious reasons, its precise location is not public.

The U.S. salvage company Glocca Mora found the San José in the 1980s. Since then, there has been a fierce debate over who owns the ship and whether it should be raised from its watery grave. Colombia, Spain, indigenous communities in South America, and Glocca Mora -- now known as Sea Search Armada -- all claim it belongs to them. 

After several inconclusive cases, the court in the Hague will decide once and for all who owns it. Colombia claims that as the boat sank off its coast, it should be theirs. They want to raise it and put it on display. 

When Glocca Mora found the ship, they wanted to share the fortune -- and the task of raising it -- with Colombia. But the two sides could not agree on who got what percentage, and the battle has raged since then.

In 2015, the Colombian government claimed that they had discovered the ship in a different location than the salvage company claimed. Since then, Colombia has insisted that the salvagers have no rights to the boat or its treasure. 

What about Spain?

Meanwhile, Spain argues that since it is their ship, it is Spanish property. Indigenous communities in South America believe they should profit from the treasure, as it was pillaged from them during colonial times.

“That wealth came from the mines of Potosí in the Bolivian highlands," said a spokesperson for the groups. "This cargo belongs to our people...They owe us that debt.”

Historians, archaeologists, and preservation groups argue that the vessel should be left alone. Over 600 people died when it sank, meaning that the wreckage is also a graveyard. Out of respect, many feel that it should be left as is. 

The British never intended to sink the ship. At the time, a war raged between Spain and Britain. As a British ship tried to seize the San José and its treasure off the coast of Colombia, it fired a cannonball, which happened to land on the San José's gunpowder store. Within minutes, the ship and all its treasures sank. 

The treasure's value also remains in dispute. As part of its case, Sea Search Armada estimated it is worth $7-$18 billion, but historians say such an estimate is impossible.

"If you’re talking about gold and silver coins, do we make an estimate based on the weight of the gold now? Or do we look at what collectors might pay for these gold coins?"

International law does very little to clear up the ownership argument, so for now, the decision rests with the Hague. But there are no details on when this legal wrangle will end.