A new Bar-Ilan University study, recently published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, allows for the first time the distinction between calcite-alabaster originating in Israel from that originating in Egypt. Furthermore, it confirms that calcite-alabaster objects, such as Herod the Great's alabaster bathtubs, were quarried in Israel rather than Egypt.

In world-first research, Flinders University archaeologists will lead an international consortium to discover the origin of ancient ceramics from the Maritime Silk Route. Beginning in the mid 1400s, the Maritime Silk Route witnessed the largest known expansion of global trade, but the true legacy of objects retrieved from this time has not been fully understood because most were salvaged and dispersed without the archaeological recordings of their find-spots. Thanks to funding from the Australian Research Council and contributions from its partners, archaeologists and heritage specialists from Australia, Indonesia, and across Southeast Asia will reveal the stories behind the largest known collections of trade ceramic in the world.

A study led by University of Utah researchers, with an international team of collaborators, finds that tree growth does not seem to be generally limited by photosynthesis but rather by cell growth. This suggests that we need to rethink the way we forecast forest growth in a changing climate, and that forests in the future may not be able to absorb as much carbon from the atmosphere as we thought.

Farming has been thought to originate from a single population in Southwest Asia, which covers parts of the modern-day Middle East, and made its way to areas in Turkey, Greece, and eventually across Western Europe. Scientists have long debated how these populations have emerged and flowed throughout these regions, but now an international team of researchers have excavated a trove of new genetic information that may settle the debate. Their findings, presented May 12 in the journal Cell, show that the world’s first farmers did not originate from a single group as was previously thought but from the mixing of two groups of hunter-gatherers during a tumultuous time in which human settlements almost went extinct.

The transition to dairy farming and horse husbandry may have fueled the rise of complex societies in Bronze Age Mongolia

Historic graffiti of ships carved in an African fort were drawn by soldiers on guard duty watching the sea, University of Exeter experts believe.