Michelle Moran's Blog, page 68

Ancient Egyptian 'Avenue of Sphinxes' gets twelve Sphinxes longer

Archaeologists have unearthed twelve ancient sphinx statues at Luxor, Egypt. The sculptures were found at a newly discovered part of the Avenue of Sphinxes, an ancient road stretching from the temple at Karnak to the temple of the goddess Mut at Luxor.

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Fertile Crescent farmers took DNA to Germany

Rebecca Jenkins
ABC

DNA evidence suggests that immigrants from the Ancient Near East brought farming to Europe, and spread the practice to the region's hunter-gatherer communities, according to Australian-led research.

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Chinese vase sells for record-breaking $68M

London, England (CNN) -- A Chinese vase found during a house clearout in London has sold at auction for what is believed to be a world record £43 million ($68 million).

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The brains of Neanderthals and modern humans developed differently

by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany have documented species differences in the pattern of brain development after birth that are likely to contribute to cognitive differences between modern humans and Neanderthals.

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Roman coin forged by ancient 'Del Boy'

A Roman coin discovered by a cleaner was struck by a 'Del Boy' forger who could not spell and did not know his emperors. The silver denarius, based on coins marking the Battle of Actium in 31BC, has the word 'Egypt' spelled incorrectly and bears the head of Emperor Caesar when it should be Augustus, British Museum experts said.

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Experts reveal brutal Viking massacre

By Liam Sloan

VIKING skeletons buried beneath an Oxford college were the victims of brutal ethnic cleansing 1,000 years ago, archaeologists have discovered. Experts were mystified when they discovered a mass grave beneath a quadrangle a St John's College, St Giles, in 2008.

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New Statistical Model Moves Human Evolution Back Three Million Years

ScienceDaily— Evolutionary divergence of humans and chimpanzees likely occurred some 8 million years ago rather than the 5 million year estimate widely accepted by scientists, a new statistical model suggests.

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Egypt: A life before the afterlife

by Richard Parkinson

Ancient Egypt rarely escapes our stereotypical view of it: an exotic place full of pyramids crammed with cursed treasure, waiting to be discovered by adventurous archaeologists. As in René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's comic Asterix and Cleopatra, it is often presented as a land of spooky tombs and people speaking in hieroglyphic pictures. These stereotypes are themselves quite ancient – even to the ancient Greeks, Egypt was a quintessentially different culture. But they trivialise a complex society.

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Pompeiians Flash-Heated to Death—"No Time to Suffocate"

Maria Cristina Valsecchi in Rome

The famous lifelike poses of many victims at Pompeii—seated with face in hands, crawling, kneeling on a mother's lap—are helping to lead scientists toward a new interpretation of how these ancient Romans died in the A.D. 79 eruptions of Italy's Mount Vesuvius. Until now it's been widely assumed that most of the victims were asphyxiated by volcanic ash and gas. But a recent study says most died instantly of extreme heat, with many casualties shocked into a sort of instant rigor mortis.

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Ozzy Osbourne genome sequenced

Furthermore, Osbourne's got a genetic sliver that once belonged to homo sapiens' extinct cousins, the Neanderthals. "For a long time we thought that Neanderthals didn't have any descendents today, but it turns out that Asians and Europeans have some evidence of Neanderthal lineage – like a drop in the bucket," Pearson said. "We found a little segment on Ozzy's chromosome 10 that very likely traces back to a Neanderthal forebear."

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