Archaeology TheFoxPosts.com

Nearly 2,000 years ago, someone used a hollowed-out piece of bone as a container for storing hundreds of poisonous seeds.  Archaeologists found the carved-out animal femur, or thigh bone, which likely came from a goat or sheep, at Houten-Castellum, a rural Roman -period settlement in what is now the Netherlands. Prior to this discovery in 2017, there had been no physical evidence of this plant being used by people in the Roman Empire, according to a statement.  The tiny seeds come from the black he NBA ne ( Hyoscyamus niger ), a highly poisonous plant from the nightshade family. He NBA ne has long been prized for its medicinal properties and hallucinogenic effects, according to a new study, published in the April issue of the journal Antiquity .   Researchers have found similar seeds scattered at archaeologist sites across Europe dating back to 5500 B.C. However, it's often challenging to determine whether the presence of black henbane at these sites indicates i...

The 3, 500-year- old pockmarked skeleton of an ancient Nubian woman could be one of the earliest known cases of rheumatoid arthritis in the world , scientists say. Archaeologists discovered the woman's skeletal remains in 2018 while conducting excavations at a cemetery located along the bank of the Nile near Aswan, in southern Egypt. Analyses revealed that she would have stood around 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall, been around 25 to 30 years old when she died and lived sometime between 1750 and 1550 B.C. The researchers published their case study in the March issue of the International Journal of Paleopathology . Because the skeleton was so well preserved and contained most of its bones, including its hands and feet, the researchers were able to conduct a thorough osteological analysis of the remains. "In many archaeological cases, you don't often get the full skeleton," lead study author Madeleine Mant , an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology ...

An underwater stone wall discovered in the Baltic Sea near Germany was built about 11,000 years ago for hunting reindeer when the location was dry land, a new study indicates. The researchers suggest the local prehistoric people built the wall; its remaining parts were crafted from 1,670 stones and stretch about two-thirds of a mile (975 meters) long, stand 3 feet (1 m) tall and are 6.5 feet (2 m) wide. The team discovered the wall via sonar and dives to the location, which is at a depth of about 70 feet (21 m) and roughly 6 miles (10 kilometers) east of Rerik, Germany, in the Bay of Mecklenburg. The wall may be the largest of its kind from the early Holocene (11,700 years ago to present) in Europe, the researchers said in the study. Based on similar prehistoric walls — including the ancient " desert kites " found in the Middle East — the authors propose that it was built on dry land by hunter-gatherers to drive wild animal herds into corrals where they could be kil...

Archaeologists may have finally identified the remains of Alexander the Great's father, half-brother and son in a trio of tombs at a necropolis in Greece.  Researchers have long debated which members of the Macedonian royal family were buried in each tomb. Now, a controversial new review suggests that researchers previously got the tombs mixed up and claim they have identified the actual occupants of each tomb. Known as the "Great Tumulus," the burial site in Aegae, the original Macedonian capital (modern-day Vergina, a town in northern Greece), contains three tombs that were built during the fourth century B.C., according to a review published in the December 2023 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science : Reports . Researchers initially discovered the tomb complex in the 1970s and proposed that the crypts, known as Tombs I, II and III, contained the remains of several royals who were closely related to Alexander the Great , the Macedonian leader who reigned ...

A gallery's worth of rock art decorating the inside of a cave in Argentina is several millennia older than once thought and contains hundreds of drawings that span 100 generations . At one time, archaeologists dated the art — located in Patagonia, a region in South America's southern tip — as being only several thousand years old. But a new analysis has revealed that some of the works actually date to as early as 8,200 years ago and were created during the late Holocene epoch (11,700 years ago to present), according to a study published Wednesday (Feb. 14) in the journal Science Advances . "It turned out to be several millennia older than we expected," study lead author Guadalupe Romero Villanueva , an archaeologist with the Argentine National Research Council (CONICET) and the National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought (INAPL), told Live Science . "We got surprised." To determine the date of the massive artwork, which depicts human...

For centuries, the "Unicorn Cave," or "Einhornhöhle," in central Germany has been famous for its many thousands of bones. In medieval times, people thought the bones came from unicorns. But a few years ago, archaeologists excavating the cave unearthed an unusual object: a toe bone from a giant deer. The material itself was noteworthy: Although giant deer were once prey for Europe's prehistoric hunters, the animals usually roamed much farther north, indicating this bone had been brought from afar. And it was clearly different from others in the cave: Several large grooves had been carved at angles into the bone's upper surface, creating a prominent chevron-like pattern. Even more extraordinary was its age: Radiocarbon dating of the bone showed that the deer lived around 51,000 years ago, when the Unicorn Cave was occupied by Neanderthals , our extinct human relatives. "The engraved bone from Einhornhöhle is at least 50,000 years old and thus range...

Two amateur divers swimming along the Spanish coast have discovered a huge hoard of 1,500-year-old gold coins, one of the largest on record dating to the Roman Empire. The divers , brothers-in-law Luis Lens Pardo and César Gimeno Alcalá, discovered the gold stash while vacationing with their families in Xàbia, a coastal Mediterranean town and tourist hotspot. The duo rented snorkeling equipment so they could go freediving with the goal of picking up trash to beautify the area, but they found something far richer when Lens Pardo noticed the glimmer of a coin at the bottom of Portitxol Bay on Aug. 23, El País reported .  When he went to investigate, he found that the coin "was in a small hole, like a bottleneck," Lens Pardo told El País in Spanish. After cleaning the coin, Lens Pardo saw that it had "an ancient image, like a Greek or Roman face." Intrigued, Lens Pardo and Gimeno Alcalá returned, freediving to the hole with a Swiss Army...