#cave-stone

#cave-stone

The axe was the most important find in the group and would have been highly valued in the Neolithic community. Experiments with fiddle bows have found that it takes more than a day of work to manufacture an axe like this one.

Four protrusions appear to be arranged in pairs, each consisting of two connected branches surrounding a central depression. We really don't understand what any of these features represent anatomically.

Similar to four others unearthed nearby earlier this month, it is sitting upright at the bottom of a one-metre-wide pit. The skeleton's hands are resting in its lap. Like the others, its back is against the eastern wall, its face directed westward.

Five tombs of Gauls buried in a seated position have been discovered in central Dijon. Similar to four others unearthed nearby earlier this month, it is sitting upright at the bottom of a one-metre-wide pit. The skeleton's hands are resting in its lap. Like the others, its back is against the eastern wall, its gaze directed westward.

Although there are many amber stones containing a single creature, there are fewer that include two or more, as is the case with a pair of mosquitoes trapped in amber 130 million years ago which tell us that, back then, males also sucked blood. Even more extraordinary is when several organisms can be seen interacting, either eating the other, acting as a parasite, or cooperating.

Two of these molds would be used together to make a spearhead. The flat sides with the negative impressions would be matched up face-to-face and tied together with copper wire. A casting core was inserted into the opening to create a cavity for the hilt to be inserted into later. It was erected vertically and the bronze poured into the mould.

Shouldered by sandstone cliffs, these caves in Bayfield, Wisconsin, form when water-and, notably, waves-that would normally flow through the sandstone freezes instead, birthing icicles, columns, and curtains. During the winter of 2015, the caves attracted just shy of 40,000 tourists within a nine-day period, the Associated Press reported at the time.

To capture the biological impact of this extreme environment, I used a comprehensive suite of sensors and biomarker analyses. I wore a wireless electroencephalograph (EEG) system to monitor brain activity, sleep stages and neural signatures of stress and adaptation; the Oura Ring to continuously track sleep patterns, heart-rate variability and circadian-rhythm shifts; and the glucose monitor to follow metabolic responses in real time.

It was Easter week on Providenciales, the archipelago's most populous island, and spring break was in full swing. "It's been a revolution," said my driver, who went by the name Roots. It seemed like it was only yesterday that there were hardly any cars on "Provo," as the island is called. Indeed, Roots could remember when there were no roads.

The oldest known pieces of sewn clothing have been discovered in a cave in Oregon, potentially rewriting all of human history. Researchers from the US uncovered pieces of animal hide stitched together from the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 12,000 years ago. That would mean that humans in North America had advanced skills, specifically for working with plants, animals, and wood, thousands of years before the Great Pyramid of Egypt was constructed.

At first glance, it looked like Wooller and his colleagues might have found evidence that mammoths lived in central Alaska just 2,000 years ago. But ancient DNA revealed that two "mammoth" bones actually belonged to a North Pacific right whale and a minke whale-which raised a whole new set of questions. The team's hunt for Alaska's last mammoth had turned into an epic case of mistaken identity, starring two whale species and a mid-century fossil hunter.

Nine meters (30 feet) beneath the waves, they found it: a vast, man-made stone wall, averaging 20 meters (66 feet) wide and two meters (6.6 feet) tall. The structure consists of some 60 massive granite monoliths, set directly onto the bedrock in pairs at regular intervals. Smaller slabs and packing stones fill in the gaps, locking the whole into a single, deliberate construction. With an estimated total mass of around 3,300 tons, this is the largest underwater structure ever discovered in France.

Researchers have found traces of what appears to be plant-derived poison on tiny stone arrowheads from South Africa dated to 60,000 years ago. The finding pushes back the origin of this revolutionary hunting technology by tens of thousands of years. Scientists have long been fascinated by the development of poisoned hunting weapons. For one thing, they would have seriously leveled up our ancestors' foraging game.

Ötzi, the 5,000-something-year-old man found frozen in the Alps, did not have an easy go of it. He was probably murdered, shot from behind with an arrow that missed his vital organs and led to heavy bleeding and a prolonged and painful death. Days before his death, he fought another person in hand-to-hand combat and gashed his right hand. The more scientists have been able to study his body, the more ailments they have unveiled.

His investigation began after identifying recurring giant T-shapes, three-level indents, and step pyramids carved into ancient stones worldwide. 'These specific symbols that are built in different size proportions, and the symbols are found in ancient stones around the world, are not supposed to exist; no cultures are supposed to have any cross-platform,' LaCroix explained. The symbols appear in locations ranging from Turkey's Van region to South America and Cambodia.

Making poisoned arrows is about as hard as following a "complex cooking recipe", says study co-author Marlize Lombard, an archaeologist at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. "You have to add to it the danger of the poison, and planning to work with it without getting poisoned yourself, then you have to hunt and track the prey animal under difficult and dangerous conditions sometimes for a day or two."

More than 200 scans from multiple satellites, including Italy's Cosmo-SkyMed and the US-based Capella Space, showed uniform results suggesting massive pillars about 65 feet in diameter wrapped in spirals and plunging nearly 4,000 feet deep. Those pillars appear to end in 260-foot cubic chambers beneath all three pyramids and the Sphinx, which Biondi described as 'huge chambers' measuring roughly 260 feet in length and width.

We have little physical evidence of these interactions turning violent, however, because burials were rare and carnivores were more likely to finish off their prey. That's why the embellished burial site of a 15-year-old from 27,000 years ago is an important window into the past: the teenager's bones indicate he was mauled by a bear. The finding represents some of the first evidence of its kind.

New research published today in Nature dates the boneschipped out from a cave called Grotte a Hominides and nearby it over decadesto about 773,000 years ago, during the era of the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis and Denisovans (a group of humans that ranged across Asia and that does not have an agreed-upon species name). We can say that the shared ancestry between these three species is perhaps in Grotte a Hominides in Casablanca, says study co-author Abderrahim Mohib, a prehistorian at the National Institute of Archaeology and Heritage Sciences in Rabat, Morocco.

My father was a petroleum geologist. A lot of my childhood, he was gone, away on oil rigs in the Powder River Basin and remote parts of Wyoming, living in man camps long before cellphones. We had to wait days to talk to him. When he went into the nearest town to shower, he'd find a payphone and call us. I was always breathless with news.

Now, in a recent study published in Geology, retired University of New Mexico geologist Karl Karlstrom and his colleagues conclude that the asteroid's impact shook Marble Canyon hard enough to dislodge great chunks of stone and send a landslide tumbling into the river. The debris formed a natural dam that backed up the Colorado for over 50 miles to near present-day Lees Ferry.