burials

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain After analyzing DNA from almost 10,000 people from ancient and pre-modern societies, our international team of researchers have discovered six cases of Down syndrome in past human populations. Our results, published today in Nature Communications, show people with Down syndrome lived in ancient populations. Although…

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This weekly newsletter is part of a CBC News initiative entitled "Our Changing Planet" to show and explain the effects of climate change. Keep up with the latest news on our Climate and Environment page.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Thursday.This week: From fashion to burials: How fungi can help fight climate change 2024 has barely started and is already threatening to set temperature records World's globetrotting animals at risk due to habitat…

When NASA attempted to return to the Moon for the first time in 50 years on January 8, more was at risk than just US$108 million worth of development and equipment.The agency earned the ire of the Native American Navajo people, who made a bid to stop the launch because of an unusual inclusion in the payload.The Peregrine lander (which completed its controlled re-entry into the atmosphere late last week) was carrying human ashes, including those of famed science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. A commercial partnership…

How the east end of the Abbey church and its furnishes may have looked – crafted by illustrator Stephen Conlin, based on evidence from the study. Credit: Stephen Conlin New evidence, helping to form a 15th-century reconstruction of part of Westminster Abbey, demonstrates how a section of the building was once the focus for the royal family's devotion to the cult of a disemboweled saint and likely contained gruesome images of his…

Katrina Spade, the CEO of Recompose, poses with mulch made from a dead cow in 2019.Photo: Elaine Thompson (AP)In a few years, people in California will have a new choice for what to do with their loved ones’ bodies after death: put them in their garden.This weekend, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that makes human composting legal in the state beginning in 2027. The bill, AB-351, makes California the fifth state to allow human composting since it was first legalized in Washington in 2019 (Oregon, Colorado, and…

Three skeletons uncovered in a rock shelter adorned with red pigment rock art reveal burial rituals of early humans who followed well-trodden paths through Indonesia's Lesser Sunda Islands, albeit thousands of years apart.Aside from deepening our understanding of the evolution and diversification of burial practices, the finds – from Alor Island in southeast Indonesia – enrich past discoveries that previously provided some clues about patterns of migration of early humans making their way southward."Burials are a unique…

Labelled bones from Alor Island, Indonesia. Credit: Tracey Nearmy/ANU If three ancient bodies buried in Indonesia could talk, researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) say they would tell stories of the earliest humans in island Southeast Asia. …

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain The National Funeral Directors Association has predicted that by 2035, nearly 80% of Americans will opt for cremation. When the first U.S. indoor…

Four children in Mexico were buried in the years after the Spanish Conquest with rituals and grave offerings that suggest that pre-Hispanic customs lived on for some time after the Aztec empire fell. The National Institute of Anthropology and History said Monday the…

Site location and skeletal remains included in the analysis. a Map of the Levant indicating the location of Tell Qarassa in South Syria. b Skeletal remains of syr005 during the excavations at Tell Qarassa (Photo by Jonathan Santana). Credit: Communications Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-022-03508-4 A new study combining archaeological, historical and bioarchaeological data provides new insights into the early Islamic…