Lost English legend decoded, solving Chaucerian mystery and revealing a medieval preacher’s meme
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 20-Sep-2025 20:11 ET (21-Sep-2025 00:11 GMT/UTC)
A medieval literary puzzle which has stumped scholars including M.R. James for 130 years has finally been solved. Cambridge scholars now believe the Song of Wade, a long lost treasure of English culture, was a chivalric romance not a monster-filled epic. The discovery solves the most famous mystery in Chaucer's writings and provides rare evidence of a medieval preacher referencing pop culture in a sermon.
Archaeologists from the University of Houston working at Caracol in Belize have uncovered the burial of Te K’ab Chaak, the first ruler of this ancient Maya city and the founder of its royal dynasty, marking the first identifiable ruler's tomb found in over four decades of work in Caracol, the largest Maya archaeological site in Belize and in the Maya lowlands.
Researchers from the Francis Crick Institute and Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) have extracted and sequenced the oldest Egyptian DNA to date from an individual who lived around 4,500 to 4,800 years ago, the age of the first pyramids, in research published today in Nature.
The previously unknown hymn of praise comes from the period around 1000 BCE. LMU Professor Enrique Jiménez used AI to find 30 other related manuscripts.