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Great tits use advanced syntax, including speaking in phrases, to warn their fellow birds of incoming danger, a new research reveals. This linguistic trait was previously believed to be unique to human beings.

A rare 3,000-year-old seal, from the time of King David in the 10th century BCE, was recently discovered by a 10-year-old Russian volunteer at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount Sifting Project. Dr. Gabriel Barkay, co-founder and director of the project – which sifts through thousands of tons of illegally removed earth from the contested holy site in 1999 by the Wakf religious trust to build a mosque – said that the finding is unprecedented. “The seal is the first of its kind to be found in Jerusalem,” said Barkay, a world-renowned archaeologist and Israel Prize laureate, who has led the project for...

Archaeologists discover First Temple-era seals, one with a woman's name. Rare find that sheds significant light on owner's life. Archaeologists have found two ancient seals with Hebrew names, dating back to the time of the First Temple, in Jerusalem's City of David. The objects belonged to a woman and a man, Elihana bat Gael and Sa'aryahu ben Shabenyahu. "Finding seals that bear names from the time of the First Temple is hardly a commonplace occurrence, and finding a seal that belonged to a woman is an even rarer phenomenon," said a researcher with the project. The artifacts were discovered in...

A campaign has been launched to bring the Bayeux Tapestry, one of the world’s great works of art, back to Britain for the first time centuries, and put it on display in Canterbury Cathedral. The famous embroidery of the 1066 Norman Conquest is the subject of a major conference of world experts being held at the British Museum next month......

Halley's comet portrayed on ancient coin Heather Catchpole ABC Science Online Wednesday, 19 May 2004 Could the star shape on the king's crown be Halley's comet? A rare ancient coin may feature an early record of Halley's comet, researchers say. The coin features the head of the Armenian king Tigranes II the Great, who reigned from 95 to 55 BC. A symbol on his crown that features a star with a curved tail may represent the passage of Halley's comet in 87 BC, say the Armenian and Italian researchers. Their research will be published in Astronomy & Geophysics, a journal...

Explanation: Today, February 29th, is a leap day - a relatively rare occurrence. In 46 BC, Julius Caesar, featured here in a self-decreed minted coin, created a calendar system that added one leap day every four years. Acting on advice by Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, Caesar did this to make up for the fact that the Earth's year is slightly more than 365 days. In modern terms, the time it takes for the Earth to circle the Sun is slightly more than the time it takes for the Earth to rotate 365 times (with respect to the Sun -- actually we...

Teacher has published dictionary for once thriving Ontario tribe whose `Huron Carol' is Yule tradition The world's last Huron-language speaker is a white man teaching at Humber College. Anthropologist John Steckley has made the Huron tongue and Huron history his focus for more than 30 years, "and every year I think of how little I knew the year before," he says. Sometimes he feels alone in his interests, he says. At other times, he feels in demand – especially around Christmas and particularly this one. Earlier this month Steckley published an authoritative Huron-English dictionary, the first such volume in more...

Rich pickings The library of the Mouseion in Alexandria may have ceased to exist but evidence of what it once contained can be gleaned from fragments of papyri found elsewhere in Egypt, writes Jill Kamil. Thanks to Egypt's dry climate and warm desert sand, papyrus texts in fragile and fragmentary form have survived from many sites -- among them Fayoum and Middle and Upper Egypt -- with the most expansive horde coming from Oxyrhynchus (modern Al-Bahnasa), a vast Graeco-Roman city once second in importance only to Alexandria. Oxyrhynchus was little more than a mass of ruins when, back in...

A question arises time and again from prilgrims visiting the Holy Land: What was the language that Jesus spoke? They ask: What was the language of Palestine in the times of Jesus? What languages did Jesus speak? Were there any indications found in the Gospels? Palestine, given that it was always a crossroads for entire peoples in their spontaneous, and often times forced, migrations, was by necessity a multi-lingual land. It was a place where they spoke several languages at the same time. That is, in the times of Jesus, there were no less than two local languages spoken and...

A portion of the Spanish treasure Fort Pierce salvor Daniel Porter recovered in 2012 from a galleon sunk in 1631 in a hurricane off Panama is back in his hands. Porter, 53, the managing partner of Fort Pierce-based Maritime Research and Recovery LLC, attempted in September to bring home about 100 silver coins and other artifacts with an estimated value of $500,000 when they were seized by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol at the behest of Panama’s government. The items were part of Porter’ share of more than 10,000 such items minted in Peru that were recovered during a...

A horde of 700 year-old coins has been found by a group of metal detectors in a Jutland field being excavated by archaeologists, the Viborg Museum announced on Wednesday. Coins dating back to a tumultuous period of civil war in Denmark were found in a field south of Foulum and are being put on display at the Viborg Museum. The museum said that three members of the Central Jutland Detector Society (Midtjysk Detektorforening) discovered the mediaeval coins, which are thought to have been hidden during the first half of the 1300s, a period of internal unrest in Denmark which culminated...

The world’s first scientific renaissance took place not in Italy, but in the Arab world. The period between the 9th and 11th centuries AD, when Islam took hold of a band of territory strategy from Spain in the West through to what is now Pakistan, saw an extraordinary intellectual flowering. Scientists in the Arab world during this period made important advances in fields as varied as astronomy, mathematics, medicine and optics – advances that fed into and stimulated the later European Renaissance. Which makes it all the stranger that modern Islamic nations have such a lamentable record in science. Where...

By Adam Taylor March 18, 2015 Follow @mradamtaylor (Statens historiska museum / Christer Ahlin) In the modern-era, Scandinavian countries have become known for their sometimes awkward embrace of migrants from the Arab and Muslim world. But the history behind that relationship goes back far further than you might expect.Consider the case of a ring discovered in a Viking grave in Birka, a historic trading center in what is now Sweden. The woman in the grave died in the 9th century and was discovered around a thousand years later by the famous Swedish archaeologist Hjalmar Stolpe, who spent years excavating...

Few Americans have heard of Rabbi Haim Isaac Carigal, but every Yale University graduate has seen the evidence of his influence over the history of that institution. Because of Carigal's relationship with Yale's fifth president, Reverend Ezra Stiles, in 1777 Hebrew became a required course in the freshman curriculum. Many colonial-era American Christians had a respect for — even a fascination with —the Hebrew language and Jewish religion. In part, their interest stemmed from a belief that the Hebrew Bible, which they dubbed the "Old Testament," laid the ground for the Christian "New Testament." Educated American Christians, especially New England...

About 60 drawings and hieroglyphic inscriptions, dating back around 5,000 years, have been discovered at a site called Wadi Ameyra in Egypt’s Sinai Desert. Carved in stone they were created by mining expeditions sent out by early Egyptian pharaohs archaeologists say. They reveal new information on the early pharaohs. For instance, one inscription the researchers found tells of a queen named Neith-Hotep who ruled Egypt 5,000 years ago as regent to a young pharaoh named Djer. Archaeologists estimate that the earliest carvings at Wadi Ameyra date back around 5,200 years, while the most recent date to the reign of a...

American special forces stormed the basement of the notorious Mukhabarat, the headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s secret police, shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And while they didn’t find the alleged weapons of mass destruction, nor the Iraqi dictator himself, what they did find was a rare collection of artifacts from the Iraqi Jewish community dating back hundreds of years, including a Hebrew Bible and Babylonian Talmud. The collection was waterlogged and damaged, and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq placed an urgent call to the United States National Archives and Records Administration in Maryland. With permission from local...

In a dry canyon strewn with the ruins of a long-dead city, archaeologists have made a discovery they hope will help unravel one of the most tenacious mysteries of ancient Peru: how to read the knotted string records, known as khipus, kept by the Incas. At the site called Incahuasi, about 100 miles south of Lima, excavators have found, for the first time, several khipus in the place where they were used -- in this case, a storage house for agricultural products where they appear to have been used as accounting books to record the amount of peanuts, chili peppers,...

A four-sided red jasper sealstone is among the finds unearthed during this season's excavation of the Minoan peak sanctuary at Vrysinas, located south of the city of Rethymnon. The whole area was officially announced and included in the archaeological sites list by the Central Archaeological Council of Greece. The sealstone, which is carved on all four surfaces with characters of the Minoan Hieroglyphic script, constitutes the sole evidence to date for the presence of this earliest Minoan style of writing in Western Crete. The excavation, which began in 2004, is conducted by the Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities under...

First use of Code Talkers in combat, 1918 The use of pre American languages to protect U.S. voice com began in, 1918. Early on, in World War I, "Captain Lawrence noted conscripts speaking Choctaw bla bla, and recognized a potential to secure line active, field communications. Choctaw com contributed directly to constriction and later withdrawal of two companies during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive and were later used in the implementing a successful surprise attack on the Germans at Forest Farm. A belated program expanded in to World War II. http://www.comanchemuseum.com/code_talkers Comanche Code Talkers of World War II. In late 1940, 17...

Continuing on the theme of what Muslims did - or more likely did not do - for the world, there is a widespread misconception that they "invented algebra". Maybe this fallacy is due to the fact that "algebra" is a word of Arabic origin, but historical questions are not solved by etymological answers. Yes, the English word "algebra" derives from the Arabic. So does "sugar" (from the Arabic "sukkar") but that doesn't mean that Muslims invented sugar. The word "algebra" stems from the Arabic word "al-jabr", from the name of the treatise Book on Addition and Subtraction after the Method...