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Every ancient object has a story to tell.
When researchers dust an object during excavation, a new window opens to the past. Each piece recovered is a small clue that often leads to a larger puzzle to be solved.
For example, construction workers recently uncovered a nearly 2,000-year-old statue while building a car park in the United Kingdom. First, a crew member found a marble head of a Roman woman, and two weeks later her bust surfaced nearby and he reassembled the pieces.
So how did the statue, probably purchased by the ninth Earl of Exeter for his country estate Burghley House in the 1700s, end up buried outside? According to the Treasury, this situation is “a complete mystery” until additional evidence emerges.
These historical ties allow us to find common ground with people who lived thousands of years ago. And sometimes, an entire place can be found frozen in time, disrupting our understanding of daily life centuries ago.
we are a family
Must Farm was a thriving Bronze Age village situated on a river in the east of England; When it burned down 2,850 years ago, just nine months after its inhabitants built it.
Regarded by experts as “Britain’s Pompeii”, the site preserved rare information that revealed a new, less hierarchical portrait of Bronze Age society. The Must Farm excavation (above) took place in 2016.
Extensive research near Peterborough has uncovered exceptionally well-preserved slices of life, including a spoon left in a half-eaten bowl of porridge, alongside other artifacts such as wooden buckets and ceramics.
“One of these buckets… had a lot of cutting marks on the bottom, so we know that people living in a Bronze Age kitchen turned that bucket upside down when they needed an improvised cutting board,” Chris Wakefield said. An archaeologist from the University of Cambridge.
dig this
Paleontologists made a bit of a rainbow connection to Kermit the Frog when they decided to take a closer look at a small, 270-million-year-old amphibian skull preserved in a fossil collection.
With its wide eyes and cartoonish smile, the fossil bore such a striking resemblance to Jim Henson’s beloved Muppets character that the newly identified species now bears the name Kermitops gratus.
The slightly crushed skull remained unexamined at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History for 40 years before researchers examined it. And the sample could help researchers solve the evolutionary puzzle about early amphibians that lived before dinosaurs.
All Over the Universe
Astronomers have observed two streams of ancient stars that likely helped form the Milky Way galaxy billions of years ago.
Scientists have discovered stellar wonders using the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope; This allowed them to do a bit of “galactic archaeology” in the heart of our galaxy.
These streams, named Shakti and Shiva for the Hindu gods, were probably fragments of other galaxies that initially merged with the Milky Way 12 to 13 billion years ago.
Speaking of stars, NASA expects a violent explosion called a nova to cause a “new star” to appear in the night sky between now and September.
power of nature
When a supervolcano erupted 74,000 years ago, it likely triggered climate change that could have been felt by the first humans in Africa.
Initially, researchers thought the eruption might have been violent enough to trigger a volcanic winter that could have wiped out most of our ancient ancestors.
Microscopic pieces of volcanic glass found alongside stone tools and animal remains near Ethiopia’s Shinfa River have shown how humans survived and adapted after the eruption.
Now a new analysis has revealed that the arid conditions caused by the catastrophic event may have inspired a pivotal time when humanity migrated from Africa to around the world.
fantasy creatures
Giant pandas have distinctive patterns, but it turns out they’re not all black and white.
A rare handful of bears with brown-white fur live in a single mountain range in China.
With only 11 reports of the creatures in Shaanxi province’s Qinling Mountains since a ranger first spotted them in 1985, researchers thought the unusual coloration was the result of inbreeding.
By studying pandas in the wild and in captivity, including a male brown panda named Qizai, researchers discovered that behind the brown fur is a recessive genetic trait similar to blue eyes or red hair in humans.
curious things
You can re-evaluate after reading these stories:
— About 25 million years ago, an evolutionary change occurred involving a “jumping gene” that caused great apes and eventually humans to lose their tails.
— A 4,000-year-old stone bottle found in southeastern Iran is probably the oldest known tube of red lipstick.
— A treasure hunter found the largest gold nugget believed to have been found in England despite a faulty metal detector.
— An unusually horned “devil comet” will be visible in the sky during a total solar eclipse, but experts recommend keeping an eye out for it until the end of March instead.
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