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The Burtele Foot with its elements in the anatomical position. (Photo by Yohannes Haile-Selassie/ASU) In A Nutshell * Scientists matched a mysterious 3.4-million-year-old fossil foot discovered in Ethiopia to Australopithecus deyiremeda, a human ancestor that lived alongside Lucy’s species but retained tree-climbing abilities. * The discovery shows human evolution wasn’t a straight path from trees to ground. While Lucy’s species evolved rigid feet for walking, A. deyiremeda kept feet that could both walk and climb, plus ate different foods from forest environments. * A juvenile jaw with distinctive teeth from the same site as the foot provided the missing link....

A third shape hidden in the infamous Vitruvian Man drawing suggests an even deeper understanding of human anatomy than previously known. Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: * A London-based dentist spotted a “hidden in plain sight” third shape within Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man drawing. * The 1490 illustration was originally created to demonstrate a principle theorized by the Roman architect Vitruvius—that the human body could proportionally fit within both a circle and a square. * The dentist noticed that a third shape in the drawing—a triangle between the figure’s legs—was reminiscent of a dental...

New research suggests that dozens of Bronze-Age era Britons were killed in an attack unlike any previous known to archaeologists studying that time period and location. The research on human remains from Charterhouse Warren in southwest England, conducted by a team of researchers from multiple institutions including Oxford University, was published in Antiquity, a journal of world archaeology. It found that at least 37 Bronze Age-era men, women and children were "killed and butchered" and then cannibalized, with their bodies then thrown down a nearly 50-foot deep natural shaft. While archaeologists have found the remains of Bronze Age and later...

Archaeologists uncover the remains of a community brutally murdered, ten thousand years ago. The bones of men, women and children have emerged from the bed of an ancient lake, providing evidence of a violent massacre in prehistoric Kenya. Marta Mirazón Lahr describes the gruesome find in this Nature Video and you can read the full paper here: Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya | 20 January 2016 | M. Mirazón Lahr et alAttack by the lake: a prehistoric massacre | 3:20nature video | 814K subscribers | 60,942 views | January 20, 2016

According to a statement released by Eötvös Loránd University, an international team of researchers led by Tamás Hajdu of Eötvös Loránd University has identified a skeleton unearthed on Budapest's Margaret Island as the remains of Duke Béla of Macsó. The thirteenth-century duke is known to have been the maternal grandson of King Béla IV of Hungary and a member of the Scandinavian Rurik dynasty, which ruled Kievan Rus, on his father's side. Austrian historical accounts attest that the duke was assassinated in November 1272, and that his body was recovered by relatives and buried in a monastery on Margaret Island....

Everyone knows Beethoven went deaf, but nobody really knew what killed him until now. Let’s get into it. For centuries, people talked about his genius and his misery like they were the same thing. And as it turns out, they kinda were. The man who gave the world symphonies was being poisoned every single day of his life. Scientists have tested the locks of hair that fans snipped from his head when he died in 1827. And what they found was pure mayhem. His body was loaded with lead, arsenic, and mercury. His wine, his medicine, even the glass he...

Archaeologists from Bournemouth University have uncovered the remains of a teenage girl buried face down in a pit in Dorset, southern England—an extraordinary discovery that may point to one of Britain’s earliest recorded cases of human sacrifice. The burial, dated to around 2,000 years ago, sheds new light on the ritual practices of the Iron Age Durotriges tribe, who inhabited the region long before the Roman conquest.The skeleton, discovered during ongoing excavations at an Iron Age settlement, was found without grave goods and in a position that deviates sharply from normal burial customs of the time. Researchers believe her hands...

The retreat from Russia by Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Grande Armée in 1812 was a cataclysmic event that marked the beginning of the end for his empire and personal dominance in Europe, with about 300,000 soldiers perishing in a force that originally numbered roughly a half million. A new study involving DNA extracted from the teeth of 13 French soldiers who were buried in a mass grave in Lithuania's capital Vilnius along the route of the retreat is offering a deeper understanding of the misery the Grande Armée experienced, detecting two pathogens not previously documented in this event. "Vilnius...

Abstract: The Scythians were a multitude of horse-warrior nomad cultures dwelling in the Eurasian steppe during the first millennium BCE. Because of the lack of first-hand written records, little is known about the origins and relations among the different cultures. To address these questions, we produced genome-wide data for 111 ancient individuals retrieved from 39 archaeological sites from the first millennia BCE and CE across the Central Asian Steppe. We uncovered major admixture events in the Late Bronze Age forming the genetic substratum for two main Iron Age gene-pools emerging around the Altai and the Urals respectively. Their demise was...

For years, archaeologists have struggled to answer a surprisingly human question: how do you tell if a skeleton from a thousand years ago was once pregnant? © Credit: Dr Hugh Willmott, University of Sheffield Pregnancy has long remained one of the most elusive aspects of human life to trace in the archaeological record, especially when it comes to skeletons. While modern tests rely on the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), this biomolecule degrades too quickly to survive underground for centuries. Now, a new study led by scientists at the University of Sheffield reveals that bones and teeth from ancient skeletons...

A pair of Ice Age “puppies” preserved in Siberian permafrost for over 14,000 years have turned out to be wolves, not early domesticated dogs. A recent study of two ancient “puppies” dating back more than 14,000 years suggests they were actually wolves, not early domestic dogs as once believed. Genetic testing revealed that the cubs were sisters, around two months old. Like modern wolves, they ate a combination of meat and plants. What surprised researchers most was the discovery of woolly rhinoceros remains in their stomachs, since such a massive animal would have been a difficult target for wolves to...

According to a statement released by Peking University, researchers led by Huang Yani and Pang Yuhong of Peking University analyzed the complete genomes of 58 individuals whose remains were recovered from central China's Baligang site. This Neolithic site is situated between the Yellow River basin to the north, where early farmers grew millet, and the Yangtze River basin to the south, where people planted rice. The DNA study suggests that in the early Neolithic period, the Baligang population comprised a mix of northern and southern East Asian ancestry. Then, some 4,200 years ago, there was an increase in people bearing...

Phys.org reports that Mohammad Reza Eghdami of the University of Guilan and his colleagues examined the poorly preserved remains of a man unearthed in northwestern Iran at the Liyarsangbon Cemetery site. The 77 Parthian burials there have been dated to between 247 B.C. and A.D. 224. The Parthians were known by the Romans for their skills in mounted warfare, archery, and metalworking, including the manufacturing of high-quality weapons. This man had been buried on his left side with his legs bent. A poorly-made pot containing the remains of a bird and traces of smoke was also discovered in the grave....

Chile mummies possibly done in by arsenic Thursday, November 24, 2005; Posted: 10:58 a.m. EST (15:58 GMT) SAN MIGUEL DE AZAPA, Chile (Reuters) -- Living in the harsh desert of northern Chile's Pacific coast more than 7,000 years ago, the Chinchorro fishing tribe mysteriously began mummifying dead babies -- removing internal organs, cleaning bones, stuffing and sewing up the skin, putting wigs and clay masks on them. The Chinchorro mummies are the oldest known artificially preserved dead, dating thousands of years before Egyptian mummies, and the life quest of the archeologists who study them is to discover why this early...

Much of a Pre-Columbian population in ancient Chile was poisoned by arsenic, say researchers. According to a recent study conducted by Jaime Swift of the Australian National University and colleagues from several other institutions in Australia and Chile, a significant part of a pre-Columbian population in northern Chile suffered from slow poisoning due to the intake of arsenic from water sources. The researchers performed plasma mass spectrometry trace element analysis of human bone and tooth samples from 21 burials excavated at the site of Caleta Vitor on the Pacific coast of northern Chile, a part of the ultra-dry Atacama Desert...

Alkalescent Fluid Keeps 2,000-year-old Corpse Intact: Expert Alkalescent fluid seems to have kept a 2,000-year-old female corpse intact, though it is widely believed that bacteria grow and reproduce faster in an alkaline environment, say experts. The well-preserved corpse, which is believed to date from the Western Han Dynasty (BC 206 - AD 24), was unearthed on July 8 at a construction site in Lianyungang, eastern Jiangsu Province. Earlier reports said the corpse still had elastic muscle tissue after being immersed in a special fluid in her coffin. The fluid had a PH scale of 7.55, said Bai Ling, a...

2,000-year-old corpse found intact in mystery fluid BEIJING - The corpse of a woman who died more than 2,000 years ago has been found well preserved in a mystery fluid in eastern China, state media reported on Saturday. The body of the woman, who was believed to have lived during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC - AD 24), still had some of her skin, muscle tissue and veins, according to the Xinhua news agency. Workers at a building site in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, discovered the corpse, which was in a coffin, on July 8. 'The female corpse, estimated to...

Because of Southeast Asia’s harsh climatic and soil conditions, human remains decay quickly and rarely survive. It was a great shock, then, when archaeologists excavating the Thung Binh 1 cave near Hoa Lu unearthed the bones of an individual who lived around 12,000 years ago, Science News Today reports. Further inspection of the surviving skeletal fragments revealed an even bigger surprise. The 35-year-old man, known as TBH1, may have been the victim of an assault that ultimately cost him his life. Researchers noticed a fractured rib near his neck, and alongside it a tiny flake of sharpened quartz lodged in...

Researchers have now studied the remains of an infant unearthed during emergency excavations in 2006 at the sacristy of the Siervas de Jesus convent in northwestern Spain, Phys.org reports. What made the initial discovery so unusual was that the infant was actually buried within a building belonging to the former Roman fort of Legio VI Victrix, making it the only child burial ever found in a military context in Iberia. During his reign from 27 b.c. to a.d. 14, the emperor Augustus passed a series of laws that strictly forbade Roman soldiers from marrying during their service time, although these...

A decade ago, archaeologists made a grisly discovery when they unearthed two Neolithic mass graves at the sites of Bergheim and Achenheim in northeastern France. The pits contained severed limbs and human skeletons, evidence of excessive violence and mutilation that did not match normal Neolithic patterns. Some deceased individuals buried in other nearby graves, however, showed no signs of brutality. A new study has recently analyzed the chilling remains to try and reconstruct the identities of the individuals and determine why some were treated so cruelly, according to a statement released by the University of Oxford. Researchers conducted multi-isotopic analysis...