Tag Archives: ancient

Archaeologists digging in the Tzurim Valley National Park in Jerusalem, Israel, have found a small gem seal, dating from the first century CE, with a portrait of the ancient Greek deity Apollo. The 2,000-year-old gem seal found in Jerusalem, Israel. Image credit: Eliyahu Yanai, City of David. “Although Apollo is …

A team of archaeologists from the United Kingdom and Germany has carried out an archaeobotanical analysis of plant remains recovered from the 3,500-year-old royal storage complex at the site of the ancient Hittite capital city of Hattusha. During its zenith, the Hittite empire rivaled and threatened ancient Egypt. Hattusha, also …

Solar storms strip a planet’s atmosphere over time, and only a strong magnetosphere would be able to provide maximum protection. Lunar samples gathered by NASA’s Apollo missions recently revealed that the Moon had its own global magnetosphere, lasting from about 4.25 to 2.5 billion years ago. According to new research, …

If the atmosphere of Venus was at any point thin and similar to Earth’s, then ancient asteroid impacts transferred potentially detectable amounts of Venusian surface material to the Moon, according to new research from Yale University. Recovery and isotopic analyses of Venusian surface samples from the lunar surface would determine …

An international team of scientists has discovered stylistically unique ancient drawings, including the only known prehistoric depiction of a now-extinct giant sloth lemur, on the walls of a rock shelter in western Madagascar. Photograph (top) and artist’s sketch (bottom) of the inferred hunting scene: hunter (background, left) extends weapon toward …

A new species of crested penguin that lived 3.2 million years ago (Pliocene period) has been identified from multiple exceptionally well-preserved specimens found in New Zealand. Holotype specimen of Eudyptes atatu: (a) right lateral view of skull and block with (c) mandible and (d) postcranial elements; (b) right lateral view …

Extinct semi-aquatic beavers of the genus Dipoides lived 4 million years ago (Pliocene epoch) in the Canadian High Arctic and were approximately two-thirds the size of today’s North American beavers (Castor canadensis). They gnawed trees with rounded front teeth, not squared teeth like their modern relatives. A team of paleontologists …

An international team of archaeologists has excavated and examined 8,000-year-old projectile points (spear- and arrowheads) at two sites in Yemen and Oman. They’ve found that ancient Arabians independently invented a process to create distinctive projectile points — called fluting — that was first used by Native Americans about 5,000 years …

A new species of crocodilian related to modern alligators has been identified from fossils found in Mississippi and Alabama, the United States. Named Deinosuchus schwimmeri, it lived between 75 and 82 million years ago (Cretaceous period) and had teeth the ‘size of bananas,’ capable to take down even the very …

Rulers of Ancient Egypt’s Enigmatic Hyksos Dynasty Were Immigrants, Not Invaders New research led by Bournemouth University archaeologists supports the theory that the Hyksos, the rulers of the 15th Dynasty of ancient Egypt, were not from a unified place of origin, but Western Asiatics whose ancestors moved into Egypt during …