archaeology

At one Stone-Age-era archaeological site in southern Denmark on the island Lolland all of the artifacts have been sealed in mud since the Mesolithic period 6,000 years ago. One artifact is what researchers are calling an early version of chewing gum, made from birch pitch that oozed from birch bark after being heated.

Some of us have Neanderthal genes, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's research showing that women with a certain gene variant, or allele, inherited from Neanderthals are more fertile than women without it, and that 15 to 20 percent of women in Europe have it.

The extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period is Earth's greatest murder mystery. 66 million years ago, something killed about 75 percent of all animals, including the dinosaurs.

In shallow water off the Greek island Zakynthos there is what could be the ruins of an old Greek or Roman city. When it was discovered, people thought it was a forgotten city that had been destroyed by tidal waves that hit the island long ago.

King Tutankhamen of Egypt has fascinated people ever since archeologist Howard Carter discovered his splendid tomb in 1922. He ruled ancient Egypt as Pharaoh around 1330 BC, and died when he was only eighteen years old.

Our era has a tentative name: the Anthropocene era. There’s debate over when it started, and whether we merit a new geological epoch at all, but some researchers argue that the future fossil record will clearly show both that a new epoch has begun and when it started.

While our understanding of things like epilepsy, the stars, and the shape of the Earth has changed dramatically over the centuries, ancient cultures confronted the same universe as we do. Even though their ideas about that universe are often very different from ours, there are also countless insights hidden in scientific writings from over 2,000 years ago.

Dogs and their closest wild relatives, wolves, both came to North America from Eurasia. The earliest dogs in the Americas were introduced at least ten thousand years ago.

While the first human civilizations grew in Mesopotamia, and the ancient Egyptians were building the pyraminds, there were still woolly mammoths living on a remote arctic island.

In March of 1947, Mohammed ed-dib, a member of the Ta’amireh Bedouin tribe came to Bethlehem and showed three old scrolls to various antiquities dealers. He had found the scrolls inside a cave in the desert, stuffed inside large jars.