BBC News - Dinosaur feather evolution trapped in Canadian amber
Samples of amber in western Canada containing feathers from dinosaurs and birds have yielded the most complete story of feather evolutionever seen. Eleven fragments show the progression from hair-like "filaments" to doubly-branched feathers of modern birds.
Analysis indicates they were making a dry red.
Archeologists toast world's oldest wine press • The Register
Carbon dating on one desiccated grape vine showed it had grown around 4,000 BC, meaning the press was "1,000 years older than any other wine-making facility discovered".
Surely no one will step up with copyright concerns this time ...
Google to bring Dead Sea Scrolls online
The scrolls will be available in their original languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and at first an English translation. Eventually other translations will be added and Google's translation feature may also be incorporated. They will also be searchable.
sworth Field, where Richard III met his fate at the hands of ... um ... Edmund Blackadder? has been located. The boar's head badge may have belonged to Edmund himself :).
Bosworth, fought in 1485, which saw the death of Richard III, was believed to have taken place on Ambion Hill, near Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire.
Crete has been surrounded by vast stretches of sea for some five million years. The discovery of the hand ax suggests that people besides technologically modern humans—possibly Homo heidelbergensis—island-hopped across the Mediterranean tens of thousands of millennia earlier than expected.
A stone tablet found in a cave in Abauntz in the Navarra region of northern Spain is believed to contain the earliest known representation of a landscape.
Engravings on the stone, which measures less than seven inches by five inches, and is less than an inch thick, appear to depict mountains, meandering rivers and areas of good foraging and hunting.
Gillespie said that modern DNA analysis techniques meant that any other human artefacts recovered could now be swabbed for the tiniest traces of DNA and compared to the Earhart family sample. His team will be looking for traces of mitochondrial DNA, which breaks down less easily than the chromosomal DNA of a cell's nucleus.
Altinum was eventually abandoned entirely. Most of the ancient city's stones were stolen in the Middle Ages to be reused elsewhere. Land-reclamation efforts in the 19th century turned the area from marsh into farm fields. "Altinum is unique because it was not built upon in later times," Mozzi says. Previous archaeological excavations have focused mainly on the city's necropolis, located outside the walls; this is the first-ever glimpse of the city's layout.
Newly analyzed remains suggest that a modern human killed a Neanderthal man in what is now Iraq between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago. The finding is scant but tantalizing evidence for a theory that modern humans helped to kill off the Neanderthals.
Called Chateau Jiahu, this blend of rice, honey and fruit was intoxicating Chinese villagers 9,000 years ago—long before grape wine had its start in Mesopotamia.
But not every team member agrees. "One set of cut marks does not make a complete case for cannibalism," said Francesco d'Errico, of the Institute of Prehistory in Bordeaux. It was also possible that the jawbone had been found by humans and its teeth used to make a necklace, he said.
...
"This does not prove we systematically eradicated the Neanderthals or that we regularly ate their flesh. But it does add to the evidence that competition from modern humans probably contributed to Neanderthal extinction."
These features suggest that H. floresiensis evolved from a species that was anatomically more primitive than classic H. erectus from Asia. One possibility (Fig. 2) is that H. floresiensis evolved from H. habilis, whose skeleton is poorly known but is australopith-like in many respects. Another is that H. floresiensis descended from an earlier type of H. erectus, whose body may have been much less modern than we currently credit, and which perhaps deserves a separate species designation (H. ergaster).
She has lain undisturbed for nearly 3,000 years, sealed in a decorated coffin ready for her voyage to the underworld.
Now the face of Meresamun, a priestess who sang in the temples of Ancient Egypt hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, has been revealed to the world for the first time.
Using a hospital scanner, scientists were able to peer inside her closed casket, and see through the layers of linen that protected her mummified features.
The first (and best) sauropod of Star Wars will be no surprise to anyone with reasonably sharp eyes and rudimentary knowledge of sauropod osteology: the Krayt dragon skeleton that C-3PO walks past on Tatooine is composed mainly of cast sauropod vertebrae.
Researchers said Thursday they have identified the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus by comparing DNA from a skeleton and hair retrieved from one of the 16th-century astronomer's books. The findings could put an end to centuries of speculation about the exact resting spot of Copernicus, a priest and astronomer whose theories identified the Sun, not the Earth, as the center of the universe.
Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.
Download
+ Epigonion sound recostruction example (generated on the EUMEDCONNECT infrastructure)
o Middle age piece (G. Dufay) played on 4 recostructed Epigonions, wooden resonant structure, plucked and hammered strings
+ Epigonion sound recostruction example (generated on the EUMEDCONNECT infrastructure)
o Excerpt from a XVII Century piece (C. Monteverdi) played on 4 recostructed Epigonions, wooden resonant structure, plucked and hammered strings
Researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, read the complete sequence of DNA held in tiny biological powerhouses called mitochondria, which provide energy for cells. The mitochondria are only passed down the female line, so can be used to trace the species back to an ancestral "Eve", the mother of all Neanderthals. The team analysed the DNA of 13 genes from the Neanderthal mitochondria and found they were distinctly different to modern humans, suggesting Neanderthals never, or rarely, interbred with early humans. The genetic material shows that a Neanderthal "Eve" lived around 660,000 years ago, when the species last shared a common ancestor with humans.
