archaeology

Perhaps, as Davis and other archeologists suggest, those people came from northeast Asia by boat, moving south along the Pacific coastline and setting up camps along the way. “The Pacific coast is the most likely candidate—it seems like it would have had areas of exposed and habitable land between about 17,000 and 16,000 years ago,” says Geoffrey M. Smith, executive director of the Great Basin Paleoindian Research Unit at the University of Nevada Reno, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “It may have been more short…

Archaeologists on a famous site in Idaho have found stemmed point tools that date to about 15,785 years ago, making them thousands of years older than the site’s previously known tools.The research pushes back the known ages of some of the oldest tools on the continent, and could shed light on how technology (and perhaps genetic connections) were shared between the Ice Age inhabitants of Asia and North America. The work was published last week in Science Advances.“From a scientific point of view, these discoveries add…

The stern of the shipwreck Endurance.Photo: Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust/National GeographicCompiling a list of the top archaeological finds in a given year is always a weird exercise in time dilation. I’m tasked with revisiting past lives through the art, shipwrecks, and bones left behind. Some items on this list were lost for merely a century; others for millennia. No matter how old they are, though, they’re all relegated to a relativistic ‘then’—a world that’s well and truly gone, except for these tantalizing…

Even if you aren't familiar with Daniel Arsham, chances are you might have already come across his crystallized Pokémon sculptures. Fans can now get a similar makeover on a smartphone, by way of a collaboration between Xiaomi and the New York-based artist. The Xiaomi 12T Pro Daniel Arsham Edition features a faithful reproduction of the artist's iconic "fictional archaeology" vibe, which mainly consists of bronze crystals set in an eroded green patina.  You won't find any protruding crystals on the phone, but the coating's…

Tla’amin Nation Guardian Watchmen, Bryce McKenzie, leading Lasqueti islanders in saying ‘Xwe’etay.’ Credit: Ken Lertzman, Author provided We are standing in a circle on an expansive beach in front of an ancient rock-walled fish-trap—one of many archaeological sites on the small island of Xwe'etay (Lasqueti) in the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the British Columbian mainland. …

Credit: Springer International Publishing As a human future among the stars becomes ever closer, one University of Oregon professor looks to the distant past for clues about how we can get there. Ever since the first human-controlled spacecraft escaped Earth's gravity, people have been pushing toward permanent human life inhabiting…

Climate change is putting pressure on one of science’s earliest fields of discovery: archaeology. Drought in the Colorado River basin is re-exposing centuries-old artifacts as lakes and rivers become mudflats. And where droughts aren’t happening, floods are—sometimes in quick succession with drought. Consider the Mississippi River basin. Two and a half years ago, the basin experienced record-high flooding that devastated riverbanks and adjacent land loaded with artifacts dating to Mississippian civilization. Today, the…

Is it possible to find a precise date for what was perhaps the most important battle in our early history, the Kurukshetra war? I believe this is entirely possible using clues from a specific episode of the war.The fourteenth day of the Mahabharata war was a crucial one for both sides. On the evening of the thirteenth day, Arjuna, devastated by the death of his young son, Abhimanyu, had vowed that he would kill Jayadratha – the man he held responsible – by the sunset of the next day. If he could not, he would give up his…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain New excavations in Uppåkra are at the forefront of cutting edge archaeological techniques. By combining big data, data modeling and DNA sequencing, researchers are currently solving significant parts of a historical puzzle. Perhaps we will learn whether the Justinianic Plague, the forerunner of the Black Death, reached Uppåkra. Until now, this has been uncertain.…

Nobel Laureate Svante Pääbo was thrown into a pool of water today for his accomplishment.Photo: Jens Schlueter/Getty Images (Getty Images)The Nobel Assembly today awarded Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research into human origins.Pääbo has been studying ancient DNA since graduate school, when he managed to isolate DNA samples from Egyptian mummies in a German museum. Since then, Pääbo has made his name researching the genetic origins and differentiation of hominin…