A team of archaeologists digging at the site of Ursoaia, in Romaniaβs IaΘi County, has uncovered a nearly 6,000-year-old pottery kiln unlike anything previously found in the region. Described in a paper published this month in the journal Antiquity by Diana MΔriuca Vornicu, Felix-Adrian Tencariu and colleagues from the Romanian Academy and Alexandru Ioan Cuza [β¦]
All roads lead to Rome. Itβs one of the oldest sayings in the Western world, and according to a new study in Nature Communications, it isnβt quite true. Led by Adam PaΕΎout, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the team found that cities like Antioch, Ancyra (modern Ankara), Byzantium (modern Istanbul), and Corinth [β¦]
Thereβs a temperature nothing in the universe has ever touched. Itβs called absolute zero, equal to -273.15Β°C (-459.67Β°F), the point at which the particles that make up matter would lose all their kinetic energy and simply stop moving. In 1848, the British physicist William Thomson β better known as Lord Kelvin β proposed making that [β¦]
Before Rome existed, before Phoenician ships ever reached the western Mediterranean, and around the same time the first fortified villages of the Argaric culture were rising in southeastern Iberia, a farming community on a rocky ridge in inland Morocco was already digging a ditch and piling up earth. What they were defending against is still [β¦]
The site is provisionally dated to a six-century stretch, from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD, offering a window into funerary rites practiced by a population that neither buried nor cremated its dead β long before that same principle produced the famous Towers of Silence. The find comes from Odirmon, a site [β¦]
Anyone planning to build in Pontecagnano Faiano, near Salerno, has learned to expect a tomb underneath. That happened again this year, and this time the find was unusual enough that archaeologists had only seen its like twice before in more than sixty years of excavation. Preventive digging ahead of a private housing development uncovered a [β¦]
Winchester Cathedral covers roughly 53,800 square feet (about 5,000 square meters) of floor space, making it one of the largest cathedrals in Northern Europe. At 558 feet (170 meters) long, itβs also the longest medieval cathedral in the world. Neither the congregation nor the more than 365,000 tourists who visit each year to admire its [β¦]
In the German state of Brandenburg, barely a hundred meters (about 330 feet) from the border with Saxony-Anhalt, the Havel River curls around a low rise of land that locals call the Pilatsch. For generations, a local legend held that a knight named Pilatus lived there, ambushing boats on the river and locking captured boatmen [β¦]
A team led by the National Museum of Denmark has worked out, for the first time, what people actually cooked in the pots of Hama, an ancient city in western Syria, roughly 4,500 years ago. By analyzing animal bones, plant remains, and fat residues absorbed into the vessel walls, the researchers found a surprisingly varied [β¦]
In 2016, paleontologist David DeMar Jr. was crawling across a rocky outcrop in northeastern Montana, hunting for fish fossils, when he spotted a dark, reddish-brown nodule about half the size of a golf ball. He picked it up and looked at it through his hand lens. On its surface was something he didnβt expect: a [β¦]
On the slope below the cemetery of SantβElpidio a Mare, in Italyβs Le Marche region, recent heavy rains loosened the hillside enough to expose something no one was looking for: a rounded ceramic vessel, decoration still visible, sitting almost intact in the displaced earth. It looked, at first, like debris. It turned out to be [β¦]
In the United States, the phrase Indian Wars conjures a specific set of images: the Battle of Little Bighorn, the massacres at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, the forced marches of the Trail of Tears, the decades-long manhunt for Geronimo. All of it is generally remembered as a 19th-century story, closed out by the early [β¦]
In a quiet corner of Hadrianβs Villa, wedged between the so-called Amphitheater and a low bench of volcanic tufa rock, sits a marble slab measuring roughly 40 by 35 centimeters (about 16 by 14 inches). It has not moved in some 1,900 years. Two lines of carved capital letters explain why archaeologists are excited: FVLGVR [β¦]
In 2022, medical CT scanners let Egyptologists peer inside sealed sarcophagi without ever lifting a lid. In 2026, the same basic technology β pointed not at a pharaohβs mummy but at two silver brooches from a German field β has just done something similar for archaeology north of the Roman frontier. The brooches came out [β¦]
Around 1590 BCE β more than 800 years before Rome was founded, and before Tutankhamun was even born β a small number of people in what is now southeastern Poland started eating a cereal that had never grown in their fields. It wasnβt a local crop, and it didnβt belong to any plant known elsewhere [β¦]
Two skeletons from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi had something strange going on in their mouths. Not cavities. Not the usual wear from a tough diet. Deep, rounded grooves cut into the teeth β a pattern no archaeologist had documented before, and one nobody could explain. The answer, published in Science Advances, pushes the known [β¦]
In 2019, workers doing routine ecological restoration at a quarry in Chinaβs Yunnan province hit something under the soil: bones and stone tools. Nobody realized at the time that this unassuming hole β known as Bianfu Cave, βbat cave,β after its former residents β would turn out to hold the largest collection of Denisovan remains [β¦]
Before 2025, paleontologists had confirmed exactly two footprints anywhere in the world made by an adult Tyrannosaurus rex β one in New Mexico, one in Montana. Isolated prints, each capturing a single instant, with no way to tell how the animal that made them actually moved. That changed with a discovery in the badlands of [β¦]
For the first time, astronomers have pointed NASAβs two flagship space telescopes at the same patch of sky beyond Neptune and let them work as a team. Hubble handled the visible light. Webb handled the infrared. Together, they picked out 27 previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs β small, icy bodies that drift in the [β¦]
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