cave

Workers in Marseille, France build an almost life-sized recreation of undersea Stone Age cave paintings found off the coast nearby. To reach the only place in the world where cave paintings of prehistoric marine life have been found, archaeologists have to dive to the bottom of the Mediterranean off southern France. …

These Massachusetts rockers had intended their previous full-length album, 2019’s Final Transmission, as just that – a last hurrah, completing material begun with late bassist and vocalist Caleb Scofield who was killed in a car crash in 2018. But, says singer and guitarist Stephen Brodsky, the healing process of its production led to this seventh album together.Cave In: Heavy Pendulum album artworkHeavy Pendulum is certainly the sound of a renewed band and is, like everything they’ve recorded since 2003’s Antenna (their…

An ancient tooth found in a cave has been linked to the Denisovans, a sister species of modern humans. The tooth was first found during an archaeological survey in a remote area of Laos. Now, scientists have shown that it originated from the same ancient human species that was first discovered in Denisova Cave in the mountains of Siberia. The Denisovans are believed to be cousins of the Neanderthals, which are often pictured like the man in the image above. Now that scientists have connected this tooth to the…

A close-up of the tooth from a ‘birds-eye’ viewpoint. Credit: Fabrice Demeter (University of Copenhagen/CNRS Paris)Denisovans, a sister species of modern humans, inhabited Laos from 164,000 to 131,000 years ago with important implications for populations out of Africa and Australia.What connects a finger bone and some fossil teeth discovered in a cave in the remote Altai Mountains of Siberia to a single tooth found in a cave in the limestone landscapes of tropical Laos?The answer to this question has been established by…

Deep in the forests of Laos, in a cave in the Annamite Mountains, lay a single child's tooth. That tooth – an unassuming molar - could be from a mysterious species of human we know little about, and of which few remains are known to exist.  "Analyses of the internal structure of the molar in tandem with palaeoproteomic analyses of the enamel indicate that the tooth derives from a young, likely female, Homo individual," researchers write in a new study. The tooth, from the Tam Ngu Hao 2 cave, "most likely represents a…

A team of Chinese scientists has discovered a giant new sinkhole with a forest at its bottom. The sinkhole is 630 feet (192 meters) deep, according to the Xinhua news agency, deep enough to just swallow St. Louis' Gateway Arch.  A team of speleologists and spelunkers rappelled into the sinkhole on Friday (May 6), discovering that there are three cave entrances in the chasm, as well as ancient trees 131 feet (40 meters) tall, stretching their branches toward the sunlight that filters through the sinkhole entrance."This is…

There’s a sweet moment in this mostly music documentary about rock star Nick Cave, in which he talks about having always defined himself in the past as a musician or a performer, but now he thinks of himself increasingly as a father or a husband. He even jokes that recently he took the government’s advice to retrain during the pandemic and became a ceramicist, specialising in mock-Meissen figurines showing the devil at various stages of a melancholy life, several of which enigmatically involved sailors.As the soliloquy…

There is something inherently cinematic about the work of Australian musicians and composers Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. The pair have collaborated on a string of scores for films, ranging from John Hillcoat’s 2005 antipodean western The Proposition (for which Cave also wrote the script) to the forthcoming Blonde, director Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s historical fiction novel about “the inner life of Marilyn Monroe”. Yet even away from the movie theatre, Ellis and Cave’s compositions have a…

New details of our past are coming to light, hiding in the nooks and crannies of the world, as we refine our techniques to go looking for them. Most lauded is the reconstruction of the evolution of humanity since our African origins around 300,000 years ago, by analyzing our living and fossil DNA.  Replete with the ghosts of African and Eurasian populations of the deep past, these have been resurrected only through the ability of science to reach into the world of the minuscule by studying biomolecules.Now, digital…

Credit: Antiquity (2022). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2022.24 An independent researcher and one scientists from the University of Tennessee and one from Ancient Art Archive have revealed ancient Native American artwork inscribed on cave walls and ceilings in Alabama using 3D photogrammetry. In their paper published in the journal Antiquity, Alan Cressler, Jan Simek and Stephen Alvarez describe their work in documenting the ancient…