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Thousands of bones from boys and men likely killed in a ferocious battle 2,000 years ago have been unearthed from a bog in Denmark, researchers said Monday. Without local written records to explain, or a battlefield to scour for evidence, experts are nevertheless piecing together a story... Four pelvic bones strung on a stick were among the remains of at least 82 people found during archaeological excavations at Alken Enge in Jutland... The more than 2,300 human bones were contained in peat and lake sediments over 185 acres (75 hectares) of wetland meadows. Radiocarbon-dating put them between 2 BC and...

Archaeologists are still trying to work out what exactly happened to the long-dead couple, who were found in the former royal palace of Helfta in Eisleben, in the German state of Saxony.It is not currently known if they died together or separately, or why the wife's facial bones are missing.The pair are believed to have been extremely wealthy when they were alive.Archaeologists told German newspaper Bild that it was likely the husband was a dignitary of some kind.'Among other things, they found a knife, a belt set and the fittings for a so-called official staff, such as those carried by...

A gene from Denisovans makes people predisposed to mental health issues The gene was passed down to humans about 60,000 years ago in Asia Humans having sex with a now-extinct subspecies they met in Asia some 60,000 years ago could be the reason you have depression, a new study has claimed. Researchers discovered a gene variant linked to the crossbreeding of humans and Denisovans which they believe affects our mood. Those with the variant have lower levels of zinc in the body - a nutrient which studies increasingly show is associated with mood and happiness. Scientists said SLC30A9 is the...

Archaeologists unearthed the remains of a 17th-century child padlocked to his grave in southeastern Poland, Reuters reported Monday. VIDEO AT LINK............. The child, aged six or seven, was found in a cemetery in Pien, about 170 miles south of Warsaw, according to the Reuters report. The child reportedly was found buried face down and padlocked by his feet to the grave with a triangular padlock in what appears to be an effort to prevent it from resurrecting from the dead to feast on the living. The discovery suggested that the people of that era firmly believed in vampires, ghosts, zombies,...

Modern Europeans have a smaller proportion of Neanderthal genes in their genomes than East Asians do. New research suggests the reason lies at the feet of migrating early farmers.A wave of migrating farmers from the ancient Middle East may be the reason why modern Europeans don't carry as much Neanderthal DNA as today's East Asians do, a new study finds.All humans with ancestry from outside of Africa have a little bit of Neanderthal in them — about 2% of the genome, on average. But people with East Asian ancestry have between 8% and 24% more Neanderthal genes than people of...

The mummy, known as "Juanita" or the "Inca Ice Maiden", was an Inca girl who is thought to have been sacrificed in a ritual more than 500 years ago. Scientists worked with a specialist in facial reconstruction to build a silicon bust of the mummy. Johan Reinhard, the US archaeologist who first found the mummy in 1995, said the bust "makes her even more alive". A team of Peruvian and Polish scientists worked with Oscar Nilsson, a specialist in facial reconstruction from Sweden, to build the silicon bust of the teenage girl. The scientists said body scans, skull measurements, DNA...

DS 09/02/04 ‘I’m not Arab, I’m Phoenician’ ­ a common phrase, but flawed concept It isn’t always easy to live in the postmodern era. No absolute truths or morals to hang on to. The world is what you make of it and anything goes seem to be life’s only principles. Consequently, your identity is not something that befalls upon you by birth, but something you are free to choose and construct, which can lead to rather bizarre results. Let’s take as an example a young man I know. Born and bred in his beloved London, he has a British passport,...

The Phoenicians, enigmatic people from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, stamped their mark on maritime history, and now research has revealed that they also left a lasting genetic imprint. Scientists reported Thursday that as many as 1 in 17 men living today on the coasts of North Africa and southern Europe may have a Phoenician direct male-line ancestor. These men were found to retain identifiable genetic signatures from the nearly 1,000 years the Phoenicians were a dominant seafaring commercial power in the Mediterranean basin, until their conquest by Rome in the 2nd century B.C... The scientists who conducted the...

A team of biologists at Lebanese American University estimates that 1 in 17 persons around the Mediterranean carries genetic markers distinctive to the ancient Phoenician people who resided in what is now Lebanon. The Phoenicians spread out in a trade diaspora two millennia ago, establishing colonies from Spain to Cyprus. The team also found that one third of Lebanese have the markers for Phoenician descent, and that these are spread evenly through the population, among both Christians and Muslims. In fact, all Lebanese have broadly similar sets of genetic markers. The lead researcher commented, "Whether you take a Christian village...

Drainage work in the construction of the second runway has been moved as a resultThe oldest Phoenician remains yet to be found in Málaga have been unearthed at the airport as land was moved as part of the construction of the second runway.

This is the first ancient DNA to be obtained from Phoenician remains. Known as “Ariche,” the young man came from Byrsa, a walled citadel above the harbor of ancient Carthage. Byrsa was attacked by the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus “Africanus” in the Third Punic War. It was destroyed by Rome in 146 B.C. Analysis of the skeleton revealed the man died between the age of 19 and 24, had a rather robust physique and was 1.7 meters (5’6″) tall. He may have belonged to the Carthaginian elite, as he was buried with gems, scarabs, amulets and other artifacts. Now genetic...

In general, historiography concerning ancient Sicily is overwhelmingly Greco-centric, i.e. focused on its Greek immigrants. Because the indigenous population’s architectonic remains are relatively invisible, whilst those of the Greek immigrants are monumental, the accepted historiography has been that the indigenous population had neither territory, power nor economic resources.It was instead accepted that as soon as the Greeks had established themselves on the island (on the western side in 628 BCE) they colonised and controlled the majority of the Sicilian lowlands, the economy and thus also the indigenous population.This outlook has contributed to an imbalance and a distorted picture of the...

E. Matisoo-Smith from the University of Otago, New Zealand and Pierre Zalloua from the Lebanese American University, Beirut, and colleagues... looked at mitochondrial genomes... to investigate how Phoenicians integrated with the Sardinian communities they settled. The researchers found 14 new ancient mitogenome sequences from pre-Phoenician (~1800 BCE) and Phoenician (~700-400 BCE) samples from Lebanon and Sardinia and then compared these with 87 new complete mitogenomes from modern Lebanese and 21 recently published pre-Phoenician ancient mitogenomes from Sardinia. The researchers found evidence of continuity of some lineages of indigenous Sardinians after Phoenician settlement, which suggests that there was integration between Sardinians...

Mon, Sep 16 2002 12:39 AM AEST Ancient warrior grave unearthed in Lebanese port Archaeologists have unearthed several Bronze Age graves, including that of an ancient warrior interred with his axe, in the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon. Excavation team director Claude Doumet Serhal said the excavations are "among the most important archaeological projects in Lebanon as they are taking place in the centre of the city of modern Sidon." He also said the warrior's grave dated back to the Middle Bronze Age, around the second millennium BC, and included an unusually well preserved bronze duck-bill axe with a...

SIDON: The British Museum's excavation team in Sidon have recently unearthed a new grave containing human skeletal remains belonging to a Canaanite warrior, archeology expert and field supervisor Claude Doumet Serhal told The Daily Star on Monday. According to Serhal, the delegation made the discovery at the "Freres" excavation site near Sidon's crusader castle. "This is the 77th grave that we have discovered at this site since our digging activities has started ten years ago with Lebanese-British financing," she said. According to Serhal, the remains go back to 2000 B.C., with a British archeologist saying the warrior had been buried...

There was a spate of headlines last week claiming that new scientific discoveries disproved the historical narrative of the Bible. Headlines included, "DNA vs the Bible: Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites" and "Study disproves the Bible's suggestion that the ancient Canaanites were wiped out." The problem is that the reverse is actually true: The discoveries confirm what the Scriptures explicitly state.Not surprisingly, these headlines didn't come from obscure, Bible-bashing websites. Instead, they came from Cosmos Magazine, Yahoo.com, New Scientist (claiming that the discovery helped unravel the "true fate" of the Canaanites), and others. As stated in the New York...

The new samples come from Sidon, a coastal city in Lebanon. Marc Haber, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K., extracted enough DNA from the ancient skeletons to sequence the whole genomes of five Canaanite individuals, all around 3700 years old. Haber’s first mission was to figure out who the Canaanites were, genetically speaking. Ancient Greek sources suggested they had migrated to the Levant from the East. To test that, Haber and colleagues compared the Canaanite genomes to those of other ancient populations in Eurasia. It turned out the Greeks were half right: About 50% of...

DNA research is shining new light on the Biblical Canaanite civilization, which existed thousands of years ago in the Middle East. The ancient civilization, which created the first alphabet and is mentioned frequently in the Bible, has long fascinated historians. LiveScience reports that, because the Canaanites kept their records on papyrus, rather than clay, relatively little is known about them. Now, however, scientists have found a genetic ‘trail’ back to the Canaanites’ ancient world. By sequencing the genomes of five Canaanites that lived 4,000 years ago with genomes from 99 people living in modern day Lebanon, researchers identified a strong...

Last week, the American Journal of Human Genetics published a study connecting the DNA of ancient Canaanites to modern-day people in Lebanon. Various news outlets immediately reported that this study proved the Bible wrong, when nothing could be further from the truth. Evolution News' David Klinghoffer compiled a helpful series of headlines: “Study disproves the Bible’s suggestion that the ancient Canaanites were wiped out” (The Telegraph) “Bible says Canaanites were wiped out by Israelites but scientists just found their descendants living in Lebanon” (The Independent) “Bronze Age DNA disproves the Bible’s claim that the Canaanites were wiped out: Study says...

Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas told the United Nations Security Council that PA residents are the direct descendants of the Canaanites, claiming that ‘Palestine’ made significant contributions to humanity prior to the 1917 Balfour Declaration. During his address at the UN Security Council in which he called on the international community to hold a Middle East peace conference, with the goal of launching multilateral negotiations, Abbas claimed that the Arab residents of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza were in fact descended from the ancient Canaanites. "We are the descendants of the Canaanites who lived in the land of Palestine 5,000 years...