News by Subject Archaeology

Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and other recent human relatives may have begun hunting large mammal species down to size - by way of extinction - at least 90,000 years earlier than previously thought, says a new study published in the journal Science. The magnitude and scale of the extinction wave surpassed any other recorded during the last 66 million years, according to the study.

Scientists have long wondered why the physical traits of Neanderthals, the ancestors of modern humans, differ greatly from today's man. Now, a research team led by a professor at the University of New England in Australia, with the aid of an anatomy and fluid dynamics expert at NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State University (NYITCOM at A-State), may have the answer.

University of Otago paleontologists are rewriting the history of New Zealand's ancient whales by describing a previously unknown genus of baleen whale, alive more than 27.5 million years ago and found in the Hakataramea Valley, South Canterbury.

Researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology (NIGP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their colleagues from Germany and the UK reported scale architectures from Jurassic Lepidoptera from the UK, Germany, Kazakhstan and China and Tarachoptera (a stem group of Amphiesmenoptera) from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber.

A project led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has discovered a fossilized finger bone of an early modern human in the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia, dating to approximately 90,000 years ago. The discovery, described in Nature Ecology and Evolution, is the oldest directly dated Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa and the Levant and indicates that early dispersals into Eurasia were more expansive than previously thought.

In 2016, Kumamoto University researchers reported that a Kyusyu lord ordered his people to produce wine in the 17th century. Further research has revealed that he also ordered the production of opium. It is thought that wine was used as gifts and medicine, and opium for medicine. The documents reveal that while the Japanese government was considering a ban on Christianity, the Hosokawa family seems to have actively imported goods, such as wine, from Portugal.

Griffith University has participated in the first international dating study of the fluvial terraces of the Lower Moulouya river in northeast Morocco. An unprecedented combination of dating methods has helped to construct a chronological framework to decipher environmental changes over the past 1.5 million years at a local and regional level.

Untouched Bronze-Age burial mound discovered by chance by ANU Archaeologist, Dr. Catherine Frieman. She will begin a 14-day archaeological dig on Easter Saturday to examine the site.

A project spanning countries, years and institutions has attempted to reconstruct what the southern end of the world looked like during the Triassic period, 252 to 199 million years ago.