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    Ancient camp shows how humans adapted to extreme cold in Europe

    Reindeer fur would have helped ancient humans endure the climate of the last glacial maximumEsteban De Armas/Shutterstock
    An open-air site in Austria occupied by humans during the coldest part of the last glacial period may have been dedicated to hunting reindeer for pelts, showing how people adapted to extreme temperatures in Europe.
    The site, called Kammern-Grubgraben, was heavily occupied from around 24,000 to 20,000 years ago and contains the largest abundance of tools, ornaments, artefacts and stone structures in Europe during the cold and unforgiving most recent glacial maximum. At this time, the mean annual temperature… More

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    See how the Hubble Space Telescope is still revolutionizing astronomy

    After 35 years, the Hubble Space Telescope is still churning out hits. In just the last year or so, scientists have used the school bus–sized observatory to confirm the first lone black hole, reveal new space rocks created by a NASA asteroid-impact mission and pinpoint the origin of a particularly intense, mysterious burst of radio waves.

    These findings are a testament to the fact that there’s still plenty of science for the telescope to do. And there are some observations that simply can’t be done with any other telescope, including Hubble’s younger sibling, the James Webb Space Telescope. More

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    First evidence of gladiator fight with lion seen in Roman-era skeleton

    We know from ancient texts that Roman gladiators fought lions, but physical evidence has been lacking until nowDEA PICTURE LIBRARY/De Agostini via Getty Images
    Bite marks on the pelvis of a man who lived in Roman-occupied Britain were probably made by a lion in gladiatorial combat.
    The findings provide the first physical evidence that people battled animals in gladiator arenas in Europe, says Tim Thompson at Maynooth University in Ireland.

    Gladiator spectacles involving wild cats, bears, elephants, and other animals are frequently described in Roman art and texts. But despite those accounts and the hundreds of excavated Roman amphitheatres scattered across the ancient empire, none of the approximately 200 suspected gladiator skeletons uncovered so far have shown clear signs of an animal attack.
    During an urban development project in 2004 and 2005, scientists excavated the remains of about a hundred people from the Roman era just outside York, UK – a city originally founded by the Romans as Eboracum. Most of the people buried there from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD were young men, riddled with traumatic injuries and often decapitated.
    One of the skeletons bore unusual depressions and puncture marks across both hips, which researchers thought might be evidence of a carnivore attack.
    To find out, Thompson and his colleagues ran 3D scans on the ancient pelvis and compared their findings with scans of fresh bite patterns on the bones of animal carcasses – mostly horses – that had been fed to lions, leopards, cheetahs and tigers in zoos.
    The researchers found that the 10 bite marks on the bones of the suspected gladiator closely matched those made on horse bones by zoo lions. Similarities included the position of the teeth marks, as well as the depth of their marks into the bone after piercing through soft tissue.
    Part of the pelvis of a Roman-era man, with a bite mark made by a big catPLOS One
    “We’re talking about some quite big teeth going through all these layers of the body,” says Thompson.
    Even so, the bite was unlikely to be fatal: “It would sting,” he says. But when going for the kill, lions usually attack the throat.
    “What probably happened here is that the individual got knocked down by some other means, and then the lion dragged him away.”

    Historic Herculaneum – Uncovering Vesuvius, Pompeii and ancient Naples

    Embark on a captivating journey where history and archaeology come to life through Mount Vesuvius and the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

    Find out more

    Topics:archaeology More

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    An elegant account of how one ancient language went global

    The now-extinct Tocharian language on a scrap of parchmentSakkmesterke/Alamy
    ProtoLaura Spinney (HarperCollins (UK) Bloomsbury Publishing (US, 13 May))
    A new book by Laura Spinney is rather tantalisingly called Proto, begging the question: proto-what? Prototype, the earliest version of a technology? Protoplasm, the stuff of our cells? Or even protoplanet, a small hunk of space rock with a big future ahead?
    The answer, in fact, sits above and across those words: Proto-Indo-European. This is the great original language from which English, among many other tongues, both alive and dead, derives. As Spinney puts it: “Almost every second person on… More

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    A gas clump in the Milky Way’s neighborhood might be a ‘dark galaxy’

    A potential dark galaxy — one made primarily of dark matter — may have been spotted in the local universe.

    Dark galaxies are theoretical, starless systems whose discovery could help astronomers better understand galaxy formation. The new candidate was found within a large, fast-moving cloud of gas first seen in the 1960s. High-resolution observations of the cloud, reported April 18 in Science Advances, revealed a compact clump of gas that might be a dark galaxy. More

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    A claimed hint of alien life whips up spirited debate

    You may have already seen the headlines: Signs of life have reportedly been discovered on an alien world. 

    A team of astronomers led by Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge used the James Webb Space Telescope to search for interesting molecules in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system called K2 18b. The team now says they’ve found molecules that, on Earth, are associated with life, in an abundance that is hard to explain otherwise. More

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    A NASA rover finally found Mars’ missing carbon

    The carbon that once warmed Mars’ atmosphere has been locked in its rusty rocks for millennia. 

    That’s the story revealed by a hidden cache of carbon-bearing minerals unearthed by NASA’s Curiosity rover along its route up a Martian mountain. The finding is the first evidence of a carbon cycle on the Red Planet, but also suggests that Mars lost its life-friendly climate because that carbon cycle was slow, researchers report in the April 18 Science. More

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    Yes, there really is a black hole on the loose in Sagittarius

    For the first time, astronomers have confirmed the existence of a lone black hole — one with no star orbiting it.

    It’s “the only one so far,” says Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

    In 2022, Sahu and his colleagues discovered the dark object coursing through the constellation Sagittarius. A second team disputed the claim, saying the body might instead be a neutron star. New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope now confirm that the object’s mass is so large that it must be a black hole, Sahu’s team reports in the April 20 Astrophysical Journal. More