#traces

#traces

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.

The ostraca show us an astonishing variety of everyday situations. We find tax lists, deliveries, short notes about everyday activities, religious texts, and priestly certificates attesting the quality of sacrificial animals.

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.

Here dwells the indigenous Tzotzil community which has kept a pastoral way of life against the march of time. Apart from the odd forest ranger and passerby, Ruvalcaba's film focuses almost entirely on the Tzotzil women. Together, they tend herds of sheep which they still shear by hand, and use traditional tools for spinning yarns and natural dye for fabrics.

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.

An ancient Egyptian papyrus held by the British Museum has been cited as possible evidence supporting some of the Bible's most controversial claims about giants. The 3,300-year-old document, known as Anastasi I, has been in the museum's collection since 1839 and has recently resurfaced on the Associates for Biblical Research, renewing interest in its possible links to biblical accounts. The papyrus describes encounters with the Shosu people, said to stand 'four cubits or five cubits' tall, up to eight feet in height.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Poisoned arrows or darts have long been used by cultures all over the world for hunting or warfare. For example, there are recipes for poisoning projective weapons, and deploying them in battle, in Greek and Roman historical documents, as well as references in Greek mythology and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Chinese warriors over the ages did the same, as did the Gauls and Scythians, and some Native American populations.