Rapid urbanization will take a heavy toll on public health if city planning and development do not incorporate measures to tackle air pollution, warns a new study. The report, compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC), was launched in Beijing in September as part of the IGAC Open…
An analysis of Greenland ice core samples indicates significant global methane emissions per capita during the Roman Empire and China’s Han Dynasty — much greater than had been known.
As the clock winds down to December 21, experts on the Mayan calendar have been racing to convince people that the Mayas didn’t predict an apocalypse for the end of this year. Some experts are now saying the Mayas may indeed have made prophecies, just not about the end of the world. Archaeologists, anthropologists and…
An ancient Buddhist statue that was recovered by a Nazi expedition in the 1930s was originally carved from a highly valuable meteorite. Researchers say the 1,000-year-old object with a swastika on its stomach is made from a rare form of iron with a high content of nickel. They believe it is part of the Chinga…
A newly discovered fragment of Coptic writing suggests some early Christians believed Jesus was married. In a paper presented at the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies, Harvard Divinity School historian Karen L. King notes that the papyrus is the “only extant ancient text which explicitly portrays Jesus as referring to a wife. It does…
Archaeologists have discovered eight extremely well-preserved spears that are an astonishing 300,000 years old, making them the oldest known weapons ever found. They probably belonged to members of the species homo heidelbergensis, although no human remains have yet been found at the site. Homo heidelbergensis lived throughout the Old World between 600,000 and 300,000 years…
The drought-induced run-up in corn prices is a reminder that we’re nowhere near solving the problem of feeding the world. The price surge, the third major international food price spike in the last five years, casts more doubt on the assumption that widespread economic development leads to corresponding gains in agriculture. The green revolution has…
Archaeologists have uncovered two 9,500-year-old cultic figurines in excavations just outside of Jerusalem, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) reported. Found at the Tel Moza archaeological site, one of the Neolithic figures is a limestone ram with precisely carved spiral horns. “The sculpting is extraordinary and precisely depicts details of the anima’s image,” the IAA excavators…
Scientists have produced a digital image of a genome tens of thousands of years old with the resolution of a typical living person’s, enabling them to describe the life and history of the ancient humans in great detail, they reported in Science magazine. Led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,…
Two Stone Age statuettes, one depicting a ram and the other a wild bovine, have emerged from the highway connecting Jerusalem with Tel Aviv. Found at Tel Moza, a couple miles north of Jerusalem, during a dig ahead of the widening of Highway 1, the 5.9-inch-long figurines are estimated to date between 9,000 and 9,500…