The plain of jars in Laos Alvov/Shutterstock The remains of at least 37 people have been found interred in a giant stone jar in Laos, reshaping our understanding of one of South-East Asia’s most puzzling ancient landscapes. Around the remote Xieng Khouang plateau in central Laos sit thousands of giant stone jars, some 3 metres…
Boudica led an uprising against the Romans in around AD 60, as depicted in this Victorian-era chromolithograph Popperfoto via Getty Images Despite the Romans’ huge cultural and social impact on Britain, the genetic trace they left behind was surprisingly small, according to a study of more than a thousand ancient genomes. “The Roman conquest was…
Wedges made of limb bones may have been used for splitting soft, copper-bearing rock O. Zagorodnia Even with the technology to make metal tools, people in Bronze Age Britain still used animal bone tools alongside metal ones to obtain copper, a practice spanning at least nine centuries between 3700 and 2800 years ago. A study…
A strange “golden orb” pulled from more than 2 miles beneath the Gulf of Alaska, once rumored to be everything from an alien egg to an unknown species, has finally been identified after a yearslong scientific investigation. Researchers with NOAA and the Smithsonian announced the unusual object, first discovered in 2023 during a deep-sea expedition,…
The Shroud of Turin bears an image of a man said to resemble Jesus Christ public domain/Art Collection 2/Alamy DNA analysis has identified a vast array of animal, plant and human material contaminating the Shroud of Turin, complicating the story of the mysterious relic purported to be the cloth that Jesus Christ was wrapped in…
The Turin Shroud bears an image of a man said to resemble Jesus Christ public domain/Art Collection 2/Alamy DNA analysis has identified a vast array of animal, plant and human material contaminating the Turin Shroud, complicating the story of the mysterious relic purported to be the cloth that Jesus Christ was wrapped in after his…
An artist’s impression of how Visigoth warriors may have looked in the 5th century The Creative Assembly (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) The Goths were a multi-ethnic society, according to a study of DNA from Gothic graves. The people buried there had ancestry from places as far afield as Scandinavia, modern-day Turkey and North Africa. The findings…
