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In 1844, when the Ottoman Empire still controlled the Holy Land, a census was conducted, which revealed that Jews constituted a majority of the population of Jerusalem. Where were the "Palestinians"? Where were the Canaanites? The census count reported the presence of three groups in the city: Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Canaanites were apparently not present. But suddenly, inexplicably, all Palestinians were spontaneously transformed into Canaanites in 2019, just as quickly as all Jordanian and Egyptian Arabs in Israel were spontaneously transformed into Palestinians in 1967. It took nothing more than the word of Yasser Arafat to create Palestinians out...

After examining the DNA of 93 bodies recovered from archaeological sites around the southern Levant, the land of Canaan in the Bible, researchers have concluded that modern populations of the region are descendants of the ancient Canaanites. Most modern Jewish groups and the Arabic-speaking groups from the region show at least half of their ancestry as Canaanite. In the study, published in Cell, the researchers explain that they used existing DNA analysis of 20 individuals, from sites in Israel and Lebanon, and then added 73 more, taking DNA from the bones of individuals found at Tel Megiddo, Tel Abel Beth...

The Near East is often described as the cradle of civilisation. The Bronze Age Canaanites, later known as the Phoenicians, introduced many aspects of society that we know today.. However, historical records of the Canaanites are limited. They were mentioned in ancient Greek and Egyptian texts, and the Bible which reports widespread destruction of Canaanite settlements and annihilation of the communities.... In the first study of its kind, an international team of scientists have uncovered the genetics of the Canaanite people and a firm link with people living in Lebanon today. The team discovered that more than 90 per cent...

The development of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and the Middle East led to a substantial increase in violence between inhabitants. Laws, centralized administration, trade and culture then caused the ratio of violent deaths to fall back again in the Early and Middle Bronze Age... This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers from the Universities of Tübingen, Barcelona and Warsaw. Their results were published in Nature Human Behaviour.The researchers examined 3,539 skeletons from the region that today covers Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Turkey for bone trauma which could only have occurred through violence. This...

Scientists have unveiled a sprawling burial site in India belonging to one of the world's earliest urban civilisations. The BBC's Soutik Biswas delves into the clues the graves might give us about how the early Indians lived and died.In 2019, as scientists embarked on excavating a mound of sandy soil near a remote village in the sparsely populated Kutch region, situated not far from Pakistan in India's western state of Gujarat, they had no inkling of the surprise that lay in store for them. "When we began digging, we thought it was an ancient settlement. Within a week, we realised...

-Europeans probably ate their dead loved ones instead of burying them 15,000 years ago. -According to a new study, the consumption of dead people was not essential, but a ritual. -Researchers also said people used the remaining bones as cups and chewed on them. Cannibalistic Europeans likely feasted on their deceased loved ones at funerals instead of burying them, according to a new study. Scientists now believe that cannibalism was widespread among Magdalenian Upper Palaeolithic people, who lived across Europe between 11,000 and 17,000 years ago, according to the study published in Quaternary Science Reviews. The study's researchers analyzed funerary...

The Skiles mummy was found in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of South Texas. Up to 150 mummified bodies have been found in the area, but one adult male from around 1,200 years ago attracted particular attention for study due to how well-preserved his naturally mummified remains were. As well as having a full head of hair – rarely found in the other mummified remains – he had "a very large desiccated fecal mass, which encompasses the majority of what would have been the gastrointestinal tract", according to the authors of one study.Given the size of the backup, the fecal matter...

The remains of a 24-year-old U.S. pilot who never returned from a bombing mission in World War II have been accounted for and confirmed, officials from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said Monday. Charles G. Reynolds was a U.S. Army Air Forces first lieutenant from Bridgeport, Ohio, the agency said in a news release. In late 1943, he was a pilot assigned to the 498th Bombardment Squadron in the Pacific Theater. On Nov. 27, 1943, the plane that he was a crewmember of did not return from a bombing mission near Wewak, New Guinea, the agency said, because the aircraft...

The Department of Defense has identified the remains of a World War II soldier who went missing in 1944. The remains were confirmed to be 2nd Lt. Fred L. Brewer Jr., a Tuskegee airman of the 100th Fighter Squadron, 332nd Fighter Group, in the European Theater. The DOD offered his history noting, “On Oct. 19, Brewer departed Ramitelli Air Base, Italy, as one of 57 fighters assigned to escort bombers to their targets in Regensburg, Germany.” “While enroute to their targets, the bomber group encountered heavy cloud cover over the Udine area of Italy, which forced several escort fighters to...

Ever since mummy KV55 was discovered in 1907, it has generated deep interest, debate, and controversy. The big issues have been identifying the KV55 mummy in ancient Egyptian history and combining its most probable identity with that person's proposed age of death....The mummy was found with grave goods attributed to different people and a desecrated coffin in the undecorated tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings in 1907 by an Egyptologist named Edward R. Ayrton.This tomb is just a few meters from Tutankhamun's tomb.Upon excavation, mummy KV55 disintegrated into dust and bones, so today it's only a skeleton.It was...

In an innovative endeavor to create a sensory bridge to the ancient past, a team of researchers led by Barbara Huber of the MPI of Geoanthropology has recreated one of the scents used in the mummification of an important Egyptian woman more than 3,500 years ago...The team's research centered on the mummification substances used to embalm the noble lady Senetnay in the 18th dynasty, circa 1450 BCE. The researchers utilized advanced analytical techniques—including gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, high-temperature gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, and liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry—to reconstruct the substances that helped to preserve and scent Senetnay for eternity. Their research has...

Archaeologists discovered, well-preserved brain and skin remnants of two individuals dating to the Bronze Age during excavations at Tavşanlı Höyük (Tavşanlı Mound) in western Türkiye’s Kütahya province...The excavations of the mound, which spans an area of 45 hectares, are carried out by the Archeology Department of Bilecik Şeyh Edebali University. A team of 25 local and foreign experts accompanies the research carried out under the chairmanship of Professor Erkan Fidan.According to experts, the discovery was noteworthy because it was the first time that skin remains had been found during archaeological excavations in Türkiye, whereas brain remains had only been found...

A newly described fossil suggests that the ancestor of humans and apes arose in Europe, not in Africa...In the new study, the researchers analyzed a newly identified ape fossil from the 8.7 million-year-old site of Çorakyerler in central Anatolia. They dubbed the species Anadoluvius turkae. "Anadolu" is the modern Turkish word for Anatolia, and "turk" refers to Turkey.The fossil suggests that A. turkae likely weighed about 110 to 130 pounds (50 to 60 kilograms), or about the weight of a large male chimpanzee.Based on the fossils of other animals found alongside it — such as giraffes, warthogs, rhinos, antelope, zebras,...

Human ancestors in Africa were pushed to the brink of extinction around 900,000 years ago, a study shows. The work1, published in Science, suggests a drastic reduction in the population of our ancestors well before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged. The population of breeding individuals was reduced to just 1,280 and didn’t expand again for another 117,000 years. “About 98.7% of human ancestors were lost,” says Haipeng Li, a population geneticist at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who co-led the study. He says that the fossil record in Africa and Eurasia between 950,000 and 650,000 years...

The New York Times proclaimed in a recent article that humans caused catastrophic wildfires in California, leading to a large and tragic loss of life. The author seemed to blame these fires on man-made climate change and pointed to evidence of humanity’s negative effect on the environment by citing a peer-reviewed study in a prestigious academic journal. The science is clear, the article argues: Human beings caused one of history’s great tragedies through their careless disregard for the environment.

Archaeologists in Israel have found a blood-red combat arena at Legio, a massive military base that housed Rome's "ironclad" legion in the second century.The team found the military camp and its arena — designed not for theater entertainment but for combat training...During excavations this summer, a team of archaeologists more thoroughly investigated the principia. This portion of the military compound includes an administrative center and religious structures. Outside the walls of the base, a cemetery and an amphitheater have been discovered, thanks in part to an innovative technology called ground-penetrating radar (GPR).The ensuing dig exposed the remnants of the structures...Overall,...

...Thus far, research has narrowed the identification of the four remains to 21 or 22 individuals who "likely died during the period when the (Union-operated) hospital" was caring for the Confederate dead and dying after the Battle of Williamsburg on May 5, 1862. The original list contained 59 names and their units.The temporary hospital was next door to where the burial site was discovered adjacent to the Powder Magazine off Duke of Gloucester Street. The Magazine, one of the 89 surviving 18th century structures in Colonial Williamsburg's historic area, was built in 1715 and was originally used as a storehouse...

Archaeologists in Mexico have discovered the burials of 13 individuals — including two who were beheaded as part of sacrificial rituals and five whose skulls had been elongated through intentional deformation — near a Maya pyramid at the Moral-Reforma archaeological site near Tabasco...The burials date to between A.D. 600 and 900, a time when the Maya civilization flourished in the region, the INAH said in an Aug. 23 translated statement. The burials consist of human skulls, fragments of jaws, and bones of the lower and upper extremities, the archaeologists said in the statement. Their analysis also revealed that some of...

The gapless sequence of the human genome ever produced – but it was missing one small piece: the Y chromosome. Now, the smallest member of the human chromosome family has been fully sequenced, completing a puzzle that's taken three decades to solve. The result is an all-encompassing human reference genome, one that could now contain secrets about male fertility. "Now that we have this 100 percent complete sequence of the Y chromosome, we can identify and explore numerous genetic variations that could be impacting human traits and disease in a way that we weren't able to do before," says Dylan...

What was hyped as an "unmarked indigenous mass grave" detected using ground-penetrating radar under an "abusive" Catholic residential school in Manitoba turned out to be nothing but rocks after an extensive four-week excavation. Indigenous groups in Canada used tales of "mass graves" and Catholic "abuse" of indigenous youths at residential schools to collect billions in reparations from Canadian taxpayers and have been reluctant to dig up any of the suspected "mass grave" sites detected with radar -- lest researchers' belief that the "graves" are actually just rocks and tree roots be confirmed. They claimed digging up the suspected "mass grave"...