Shaped stone spheres were part of early humanity’s toolkit for over two million years, but what exactly they were used for has remained an enigma. Until now
2,400-year-old ‘Passover Letter’ shows evolution of Jewish ritual
A letter from a high official in Jerusalem to the Jewish garrison on Elephantine in fifth century B.C.E. Egypt is the oldest known ex-biblical account of the Pesach ritual
Paleontological surprise: Monkeys sailed from Africa to Americas not once but twice
There were two early monkey lineages in South America, not one. One lineage became the adorable platyrrhini and one went extinct
Neanderthals could make string: Oldest rope known found in France
Could Neanderthals make rafts? Three-ply cord fragment found in the Abri du Maras cave is 41,000 to 52,000 years old and indicates complexity in thinking and manufacture
Archaeologists crack secrets of deadly ancient trade in decorated ostrich eggs
Why the ancients used eggs from savage wild ostriches rather than innocuous tame ones is unclear, but ornate eggshells from the Middle East were prized by elites across the Mediterranean thousands of years before Easter was a thing
Were Hebrews ever slaves in ancient Egypt? Yes
Ancient Egypt had intimate relations with Canaan, and most of the Semitic peoples migrating there would have been Canaanite. But not all.
Oldest human genetic data gleaned from 1.8-million-year-old tooth
Sequencing from a second tooth ‘only’ 800,000 years old provided researchers with key information on the position of the enigmatic Homo antecessor in our evolutionary tree
Archaic humans still half in the trees coexisted with other species who walked
Researchers studying fossils in Sterkfontein Cave, South Africa deduce that an older Australopithecine was built for bipedalism, while a Robustus living a million years later both walked and climbed trees
Native Americans in ancient Florida developed pre-electricity fish storage
Archaeologists deduce purpose of huge walled fish ponds on an artificial island built by the powerful Calusa kingdom over 1,000 years ago
Prehistoric New Guineans discovered farming independently
New Guinean highlanders developed agriculture a millennia before their neighbors, and without the cultural developments marking the Neolithic transition elsewhere in the world
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