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A British museum will remove the bones of a true-life giant in an effort to honor the deceased’s final wishes, but trustees want to retain the remains in the interest of “bona fide research.” “John Hunter and other anatomists and surgeons of the 18th and 19th centuries acquired many specimens in ways we would not consider ethical today and which are rightly subject to review and discussion,” trustees of the Hunterian Museum wrote in a statement. Irishman Charles Byrne reached a staggering height of 7-foot-7, earning the nickname of the “Irish Giant.” Upon his death in June 1783 at the...

Thomas Gingeras did not intend to upend basic ideas about how the human body works. In 2012 the geneticist, now at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, was one of a few hundred colleagues who were simply trying to put together a compendium of human DNA functions. Their ­project was called ENCODE, for the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. About a decade earlier almost all of the three billion DNA building blocks that make up the human genome had been identified. Gingeras and the other ENCODE scientists were trying to figure out what all that DNA did. The assumption...

The oldest human viruses, including herpes, have been uncovered in 50,000-year-old Neanderthal bones - and experts could soon recreate them. Researchers at Brazil's Federal University of São Paulo identified remnants of the herpesviruses, which causes cold sores, the sexually transmitted papillomavirus and adenovirus, also known as the common cold, in two male Neanderthals' DNA found in a Russian cave. Previous theories suggested that Neanderthals may have gone extinct because of viruses and the latest study may be the first to provide evidence for this idea. Now, the team hopes to synthesize the viruses and infect human cells in a lab...

After nearly 40 years, police say they have solved two cold-case murders of Virginia women using genetic genealogy. On Tuesday morning, cops arrested Elroy Harrison, 65, in connection with the 1986 slaying of Jacqueline Lard, 32, who was working at a real-estate office when she was beaten and left dead under a pile of carpet in the woods. Authorities say they also expect to charge Harrison in the death of Amy Baker, 18, who was fatally strangled and dumped in the woods after her car broke down in 1989. Forensic evidence links the two cases, police said. ...

An ancient necropolis discovered near Naples, Italy was used to bury the dead about 2,800 years ago, around the time the city of Rome was founded about 100 miles (161 kilometers) to the northwest.The discovery gives researchers a rare insight into the Iron Age cultures that existed before the Roman domination of the region. The astonishing finds near the town of Amorosi, about 30 miles (48 km) northeast of Naples, include 88 burials in "pit tombs" of both men and women.The men were typically buried with weapons, whereas the women were often buried with bronze ornaments, including bracelets, pendants, brooches...

Archaeologists have unearthed a sprawling ancient Roman cemetery in southern France containing 1,430 graves and evidence of funerary banquets held in honor of deceased family members.Excavations of the cemetery, called the Robine necropolis due to its proximity to a canal of the same name, began in 2017 ahead of construction work in the city of Narbonne. The funerary complex was "remarkably well-preserved," having been buried beneath a 10-foot (3 meters) blanket of silt during flooding of the nearby Aude River, according to a translated statement.The graves and artifacts date to between the end of the first century B.C. and the...

In 2018, a female Neanderthal was discovered in the Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. Now, archaeologists from The University of Cambridge have unveiled the reconstructed face of the 75,000-year-old woman, based on the assembly of hundreds of individual bone fragments recovered during excavations. “Neanderthals have had a bad press ever since the first ones were found over 150 years ago,” said Professor Graeme Barker from Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, who led the excavation at the cave where the woman’s remains were discovered. Neanderthals are believed to have become extinct around 40,000 years ago, and discoveries of their remains...

While we don't like to talk ill of the dead, new physiological analysis has found that the king of the dinosaurs was not so smart after all. It upends previous research that last year likened the brain and neuronal composition of the Tyrannosaurus rex to that of a primate. It's been a rough year or two for the long extinct dinosaur. First, we questioned their teeth, finding that those iconic chompers could very much have been smaller and hidden behind lips, and now an international team of paleontologists, behavioral scientists and neurologists have concluded that the T. rex wasn't smarter...

The exceptional discovery of burials about 9,000 years old - probably containing the oldest human remains ever found in Corsica (France) - will allow a better understanding of the history of early settlement of the island and of the Mediterranean. On a hill near the village of Sollacaro, Southern Corsica, nestled under a huge ball-shaped block of eroded granite which served as a shelter for prehistoric peoples, the location has been excavated by a team of archaeologists from several French universities, assisted by a Danish colleague... Having uncovered the bones of four or five adults, a teenager, and a baby...

They remain one of the most elusive groups of humans to have walked on earth. Evidence from the DNA traces left by Denisovans shows they lived on the Tibetan plateau, ­probably ­travelled to the Philippines and Laos in south Asia and might have made their way to northern China more than 100,000 years ago. They also interbred with modern humans...Their DNA, which was first found in samples from the Denisova cave in Siberia in 2010, provides most of our ­information about their existence.But recently scientists have pinpointed a strong candidate for the species to which the Denisovans might have belonged....

Nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy have long fought to maintain control over their land and water. Oral traditions and archaeological evidence indicate the Blackfoot Indigenous peoples and their ancestors have inhabited a broad swatch of North America more than 10,000 years.A study published today in Science Advances reinforces that connection. Genetic data confirm modern Blackfoot people are closely related to those who lived on the land hundreds of years ago. The findings also suggest Blackfoot people descend from a previously unknown genetic lineage extending back roughly 18,000 years ago, when people first populated the Americas—evidence that could bolster their claims...

A burial monument with human remains thought to be about 4,500 years old has been discovered in East Yorkshire.Parts of a Roman road and a burnt mound were also discovered during a £5m project to build a 5.2km (3.2 miles) sewer near Full Sutton.Ecus Archaelogy, working on the site for Yorkshire Water, said the three sites give a glimpse into the prehistoric and early historic past of the area.The analysis stage of the project is yet to start and the sewer is now being laid.The small circular burial monument was discovered in the vicinity of Full Sutton with the human...

An ancient cemetery packed with more than 100 tombs and cultural artifacts has been found by archaeologists in China’s Hubei province. Last summer, the Baizhuang Cemetery in the city of Xiangyang was discovered by the Xiangyang Municipal Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology during excavations for an infrastructure project, Newsweek reported. There, after cleaning, they found 176 tombs. Two dated to the Han dynasty period (206 BCE to 220 CE), while the rest are pit tombs from the Warring States period (5th century BCE to 221 BCE). Related Articles The cluster of petroglyphs and dinosaur tracks in the Serrote do...

Scientists have recreated the face of a 16th-century woman with a brick jammed into her mouth, an object apparently wedged there to stop her from eating the dead — as Italian locals believed she was a vampire. The spooky story begins at a mass grave discovered on the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, a location used as a bubonic plague quarantine in the late 1500s and 1600s. In 2006, archeological studies found some bodies that were buried centuries ago. “When they supposedly identified a vampire, one of those responsible for the plague according to popular myth at the time, they...

Experts have long thought that the human brain is one of the first organs to rot and decompose after we die, but new research suggests that is not the case. And in fact, it turns out that brains preserve quite well, according to a team of scientists at Oxford University - though they don't know how nearly a third of the brains lasted as long as they have. Until now, any time archaeologists found an old, well-preserved brain, it was regarded as something of an oddity - or at least the product of intentional preservation efforts by ancient people.

Scientists may have uncovered what is the largest mass burial site in Europe. The site in Nuremberg, Germany, contains the bodies of at least 1,000 people who died of the bubonic plague, which killed up to 60 per cent of Europe's population. Described as a 'nationally significant' discovery, experts think the bodies were buried at the first half of 17th century following a ruthless wave of the disease. The bubonic plague is spread by the bite of a flea that's been infected with a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. Those afflicted died quickly and horribly following a bout of high fever,...

The woolly mammoth could roam the Earth once again. That’s the goal of Colossal Biosciences as the biotech company announced a major breakthrough Wednesday in its mission to revive the 6-ton, 16-foot animal back from extinction. The Dallas-based company said it has created a set of stem cells from an Asian elephant in hopes of bringing back a creature that would be eerily similar to the woolly mammoth, according to reports. “This is probably the most significant step in the early stages of this project,” said geneticist and company co-founder George Church, a Harvard University professor, according to NPR. The...

Stone tools unearthed in a quarry in [southwest] Ukraine belonged to ancient humans...The researchers determined they were 1.4 million years old...No human fossils have been found at the open-air site...the study suggested it would have been Homo Erectus...The earliest human fossils unearthed in Europe are from...Spain and date back 1.1 million years...In Georgia [Caucasus], human fossils found near Dmanisi are thought to be 1.8 million years old.

There can be no definitive answer to the question, ‘what was England’s population in [such and such a period]?’. Even with the sophisticated data gathering and processing techniques used in compiling the modern Census, not every individual is counted, and a few assumptions have to be made. When the question is applied to earlier centuries, a degree of intelligent guesswork is called for. Although England is famously blessed with a generous source of historical records, the information is not sufficient to provide a complete picture. However, a profile or ‘shape’ to England’s population history is certainly possible, one that may...

The rise of farming in late Stone Age Europe was no smooth transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles but a bloody takeover that saw nomadic populations wiped out by farmer-settlers in a few generations, a new study has found.In fact, twice in just a thousand years, the population of southern Scandinavia was entirely replaced by newcomers to the area, whose remains bear next to no trace of their predecessors in DNA profiles, analyzed by an international team of researchers."This transition has previously been presented as peaceful," explains study author and palaeoecologist Anne Birgitte Nielsen of Lund University...Using a technique called shotgun sequencing,...