An ancient arrowhead with human blood on it points to a Maya bloodletting ceremony in which a person’s “life force” fed the gods, two researchers say. The ceremony took place around 500 years ago in Guatemala at a temple at… Continue Reading
Archaeologists in Greece have discovered the ruins of an ancient palace with important archaic inscriptions dating back to the Mycenaean age, the culture ministry said Tuesday. The palace, likely built around the 17th-16th centuries BC, had around 10 rooms and… Continue Reading
A mass grave in Germany underscores what some archaeologists have long suspected: The first farmers were far from peaceful tillers of the soil. In a newly discovered form of Neolithic violence, attackers 7000 years ago systematically broke the shinbones of… Continue Reading
How did the world sound to our ancient human relatives two million years ago? While we obviously don’t have any sound recordings or written records from anywhere near that long ago, we do have one clue: the fossilized bones from… Continue Reading
The human cerebral cortex contains 16 billion neurons, wired together into arcane, layered circuits responsible for everything from our ability to walk and talk to our sense of nostalgia and drive to dream of the future. In the course of… Continue Reading
A stunning and unexpected discovery in Guatemala is providing researchers with important new information on the fierce rivalry between two Maya superpowers that raged during the apex of the empire some 1500 years ago. The find of a broken stone… Continue Reading
The Moche were a mysterious civilization who ruled the northern coast of Peru beginning two thousand years ago. They built huge pyramids made of millions of mud bricks and created an extensive network of aqueducts. They were also pioneers of… Continue Reading
Archaeologists have unearthed extremely rare ancient Roman frescoes, comparable to those found in the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii, in the southern city of Arles. The unexpected discovery was made during a dig on the remains of a Roman villa… Continue Reading
You may not be interested in politics, they say, but politics is interested in you. The same, if you believe famed mythologist Joseph Campbell, goes for myth: far from explaining only the origin of the world as believed by extinct… Continue Reading
In the mid 1800’s, boom-town San Francisco was a city of men, only about 15 percent women. Slavery was illegal in the West but still– white men were the ones cashing out on the boom. Mostly. Then there was Mary… Continue Reading