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History

Remains of a Warrior Woman Found in Siberia

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Siberian Warrior Woman - Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Archaeologists in Siberia have unearthed a 2,500-year-old grave holding the remains of four people from the ancient Tagar culture — including two warriors, a male and female — and a stash of their metal weaponry.  The early Iron Age burial contained the skeletal remains of a Tagarian man, woman, infant and older woman, as well as a slew of weapons and artifacts, including bronze daggers, knives, axes, bronze mirrors and a miniature comb made from an animal horn, according to the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  The Tagar culture, a part of the Scythian civilization (nomadic warriors who … Read more

AI “resurrects” Roman Emperors

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roman emperors - Courtesy of Daniel Voshart/The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ancient Roman emperors’ faces have been brought to life in digital reconstructions; the unnervingly realistic image project includes the Emperors Caligula, Nero and Hadrian, among others.  The features of these long-dead rulers have been preserved in hundreds of sculptures, but even the most detailed carvings can’t convey what these men truly looked like when they were alive. To explore that, Canadian cinematographer and virtual reality designer Daniel Voshart used machine learning — computer algorithms that learn through experience — in a neural network, a computing system processes information through hierarchies of nodes that communicate in a manner similar to neurons in a brain. In … Read more

What Did People Use Before Toilet Paper?

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toilet paper - pixabay

Because inquiring minds want to know: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, toilet paper was nearly as hard to come by as personal protective equipment. Though toilet paper has existed in the Western world since at least the 16th century A.D. and in China since the second century B.C., billions of people don’t use toilet paper even today. In earlier times, toilet paper was even more scarce. So what did ancient humans use to wipe after going to the bathroom? It can be difficult to tell using the archaeological record, said Susan Morrison, a medieval literature professor at … Read more

Are You in the Market for a Vampire Slaying Kit?

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Vampire Slaying Kit

You’re in luck. Live Science has the details: Inside the box are eight compartments holding: a copy of the New Testament published in 1842; a knife with a silver blade; a percussion cap pocket pistol; pliers, crucifixes and rosary beads; a vial with a metal lid — “contents unknown;” and a small bottle containing sharks’ teeth, according to the listing. Vampire folklore and the belief in vampires can be traced to the ancient world. Indeed, burials dating to more than 1,000 years ago in Europe took safeguards to protect the living against the restless undead, with suspected vampires buried with … Read more

Time Travel: AI Restores 1890’s Videos to HD-Like Clarity

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1890s footage

Shot more than a century ago, a scene showing “Buffalo Bill” as he conducts an interview with an Oglala Lakota leader looks as if it were filmed yesterday. This old film clip was recently remastered using artificial intelligence (AI), and the result lookslike high-definition video. The artist behind this transformation is giving Live Science readers a first look at the astonishing result. Though still black and white, the remastered footage no longer appears jittery and sped-up, as silent films usually do. Motion in very old movies looks unnaturally fast because the hand-cranked film cameras of the day captured fewer frames … Read more

“Alien” Skulls Offer Clues to Life During the Collapse of the Roman Empire

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Alien Skulls

Over decades, dozens of artificially deformed “alien-like” skulls that are more than 1,000 years old have been unearthed in a cemetery in Hungary. Now, these skulls are revealing how the collapse of the Roman Empire unleashed social changes in the region. During the fifth century A.D., people in central Europe practiced skull binding, a practice that dramatically elongates head shapes. These altered skulls were so drastically deformed that some have compared them to the heads of sci-fi aliens. The fifth century was also a time of political unrest, as the Roman Empire collapsed and people in Asia and eastern Europe … Read more

Mystery of the Stone Balls Solved

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stone balls

For nearly 2 million years, ancient humans crafted stones into hand-size balls, but archaeologists were unsure why. Now they know: Ancient people used them as tools to get at the tasty marrow within animal bones, a new study finds. In other words, if a bone were a can of soup, these ancient stone balls were like ancient can openers. The finding is a remarkable one; archaeologists have wondered for decades exactly how ancient humans used these stone balls. “Our study provided evidence, for the first time, regarding the function of these enigmatic-shaped stone balls that were produced by humans for … Read more

Italy’s Excalibur? Student Discovers 5,000-Year-Old Sword in Venice

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A keen-eyed archaeology student made the find of a lifetime when she spotted one of the oldest swords on record, mistakenly grouped with medieval artifacts in a secluded Italian museum. The ancient sword was thought to be medieval in origin and maybe a few hundred years old at most — but studies have shown that it dates back about 5,000 years, to what is now eastern Turkey, where swords are thought to have been invented, in the early Bronze Age. The weapon was spotted in November 2017 by Vittoria Dall’Armellina, who was then a doctoral student in archaeology at Ca’ … Read more

SCIENCE: The Global Ocean

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open ocean - pixabay

What did Earth look like 3.2 billion years ago? New evidence suggests the planet was covered by a vast ocean and had no continents at all. Continents appeared later, as plate tectonics thrust enormous, rocky land masses upward to breach the sea surfaces, scientists recently reported. They found clues about this ancient waterworld preserved in a chunk of ancient seafloor, now located in the outback of northwestern Australia. Around 4.5 billion years ago, high-speed collisions between dust and space rocks formed the beginnings of our planet: a bubbling, molten sphere of magma that was thousands of miles deep. Earth cooled … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Decade

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Cool cats, we’ve entered a new decade and I’m on the edge of my seat about it. The 2010’s were a circus for me, personally and publicly and politically, a roller coaster of wildness I’m hoping won’t be repeated. It wasn’t all bad. I started my writing career and had a son, got married and got divorced, made friends and lost friends and rekindled my zest for life. The last decade was something to behold, a time to look back and shake my head in wonder that I manage to knuckle under, survive it mostly on nothing by spite. The … Read more