Archeologists

The remains of at least 12 people with missing skulls and large bones were found in a 5,500-year-old Neolithic tomb in Sweden, as ongoing DNA studies try to uncover familial connections and potential diseases.A team of archaeologists in central Sweden has unearthed the thousands-of-year-old stone chamber containing several burials from the Early Neolithic period.The Smithsonian Institution has described the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, that took place from 7000 to 1700 BCE as a period characterized by the…

The Current16:20Huge ancient city discovered in Amazon"Wow" was all archaeologist Stéphen Rostain could say when LiDAR (light detection and ranging) laser technology revealed several ancient cities hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest."It's a gift for an archaeologist," he told The Current's Matt Galloway. Using the laser-scanning technology, researchers have uncovered a complex network of farmland, roads and neighbourhoods in Ecuador's Upano River Valley.The cities are believed to be between 2,000 and 3,000 years old,…

This LIDAR image provided by researchers in January 2024 shows complexes of rectangular platforms arranged around low squares and distributed along wide dug streets at the Kunguints site, Upano Valley in Ecuador. Archeologists have uncovered a cluster of lost cities in the Amazon rainforest that was home to at least 10,000 farmers around 2,000 years ago, according to a paper published Thursday, Jan. 11, 2024, in the journal Science. Credit: Antoine…

Archaeologists have mapped a hidden landscape where Australia's first people made inroads more than 60,000 years ago.This now-inland region was once a coastal mangrove swamp and, before that, a semi-arid savannah plain hundreds of kilometers from the seashore.During the late Pleistocene epoch, sea levels were so low that Australia was connected to its northern neighbors, New Guinea and Indonesia, in a supercontinent known as Sahul.But then, at the end of the last ice age, around 10,000 years ago, vast swathes of land…

Archaeologists have probed the cultures of people all over the Earth—so why not study a unique community that’s out of this world? One team is creating a first-of-its-kind archaeological record of life aboard the International Space Station.The new project, called the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment, or SQuARE, involves hundreds of photos taken by astronauts throughout the living and work spaces of the ISS. People have continuously occupied the space station for decades, and the launch of its initial…

In 15th century England, a woman by the name of Lady Isabel German tucked herself away in a room of the All Saints Church near York. For 28 years, she lived in religious solitude as an 'anchoress', praying and contemplating God from the confines of a sealed cell.Five hundred years later, remains thought to belong to the anchoress have been found in the recesses of the dilapidated church, buried in a curious fashion.While experts are not absolutely certain that this body belongs to Lady German, the dating of the remains…

Archeologists have rediscovered a pre-Hispanic fresco depicting mythological scenes in northern Peru that they had only seen in black and white photographs that were more than a century old."It's an exceptional discovery, first of all, because it is rare to unearth wall paintings of such quality in pre-Columbian archeology," said Sam Ghavami, the Swiss archeologist who led excavations that uncovered the mural in October.Ghavami spent four years looking for the rock painting, which he believes could be around 1,000 years…

The pre-Hispanic fresco "Huaca pintada", in northern Peru, had not been seen in a century. Archeologists have rediscovered a pre-Hispanic fresco depicting mythological scenes in northern Peru that they had only seen in black and white photographs that were more than a century old. "It's an exceptional discovery, first of all, because…

A unique ultra-faint dwarf galaxy has been discovered in the outer fringes of the Andromeda Galaxy thanks to the sharp eyes of an amateur astronomer examining archival data from the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and processed by the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC). Follow-up by professional astronomers using the International Gemini Observatory revealed that the dwarf galaxy — Pegasus V — contains…