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In King Henry VIII’s pleasure palace, Hampton Court, there was no escaping class—not even in the loo. The King, of course, had a luxurious place to squat. According to the Hampton Court Palace website, he and other royals sat atop a padded chair "covered in sheepskin, black velvet, and ribbons" lofted above a pewter chamber pot. This toilet was private, located in a so-called "stool room" that was attended to by a high-ranking courtier known as the Groom of the Stool. It was a privileged, well-respected gig to handle the monarch's waste. (Apparently the groom would even take notes on...

Archaeologists now know whodunnit — the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus — after uncovering a 2,000-year-old mass burial ground in the municipality’s backyard Evidence of a mass slaying, including cruel beheadings, committed during the bloody reign of the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BCE) was recently uncovered in a courtyard next to the Jerusalem municipality during excavations of an ancient water cistern. “We removed from the pit more than 20 neck vertebrae which were cut by a sword,” said Dr. Yossi Nagar, an anthropologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). “We discovered in the pit, bodies and body parts of infants...

Today is the anniversary of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 and the death of Pliny the Elder (born A.D. 23) in that event. The eruption, which followed several years of precursor ground movements, buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and is thought to have killed as many as 15,000 people. Subsequent major eruptions occurred in 1631, 1906, and 1944, the last just after the Allies had taken the city of Naples in World War II. Pliny the Elder is remembered primarily for his "Natural History," a comprehensive compendium of ancient knowledge of the natural world....

The inscription discovered in the new excavations is nothing more than a scrawl in charcoal, likely made by a worker renovating a home. But it is dated to 16 days before the "calends" of November in the old Roman calendar style - which is 17 October in our modern dating method. "Since it was done in fragile and evanescent charcoal, which could not have been able to last long, it is highly probable that it can be dated to the October of AD 79," the archaeology team said in a statement. They believe the most likely date for the eruption...

he remains of the body were uncovered in a water-filled coffin within a tomb at Tieguai Village in China. The skeleton was buried with various other artifacts, such as a model house with miniature furniture inside and a silver pendant decorated with dragons. A sign found on the coffin said the tomb belonged to the "Grand Lady" who lived in "Ankang Commandery." While her actual name was difficult to read on the sign, the archaeologists believe it could be née Jian, LiveScience reports. One indication of the Grand Lady’s age came from the 200 bronze coins located within her coffin...

<p>POPLARVILLE, Miss. (AP) — Six foals sired by a cream-colored stallion called DeSoto scamper across a pasture in southwest Mississippi — the first new blood in a century for a line of horses brought to America by Spanish conquistadors and bred by Choctaw Indians who were later forced out of their ancestral homelands.</p>

On a lush hilltop deep in Southern Ohio, a giant snake slithers through the grass, its intentions a mystery. Despite more than a century of study, we still don't know who built the Great Serpent Mound, or why. That's part of what makes a visit here so fascinating, and also a little bit frustrating. There are still questions that can't be answered through a Google search or more than a century of research. This much is known: At 1,348 feet long, the serpent is the largest effigy mound in the world -- that is, an earthen creation in the shape...

Situated in the building known as 'House of Desks' -- near the spot where the exquisite golden ibex was found in 1999 -- the finds include a marble protocycladic female figurine, two small marble protocycladic collared jars, a marble vial and an alabaster vase, which were found inside clay chests of rectangular shape. According to a culture ministry statement, the finds were made under rubble inside a large and probably public building that is south of Xeste 3, near where the golden ibex now on display at the Museum of Prehistoric Thira was also found in a clay chest beside...

It is now possible to tell the story of mankind's presence and evolution on the planet by analyzing trends in soil and sediment accumulation of fecal sterols, chemical compounds which are crucial in human physiology. Scientists at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and the Institute for the Dynamics of Environmental Processes of the National Research Council (CNR-IDPA) have identified and dated traces of sterols within the sediments of two New Zealand lakes, thus proving the presence of the Maori people who, starting from around 1280, colonized the two oceanic islands and cleared them of forests in just a few decades...

Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch released his own DNA test on Twitter Monday evening in response to Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren doing the same to prove she has Native American ancestry. Hatch, 84, tweeted, “DNA Test Results 1/1032 T-Rex. The rest: other dinosaurs.” The Boston Globe originally claimed on Monday that the DNA test revealed Warren was somewhere between 1/32 and 1/512 Native American, however they then corrected their story saying the numbers are actually between 1/64 and 1/1,024. Warren’s claims of Native American heritage have long been a point of contention between the Massachusetts Democrat and President Trump....

I'm on my phone so I can't really paste the article. In Warren's so called DNA profile released they used admixture results to determine Native American ancestry. The problem is, almost everyone in Eastern Europe can do that with similar results to Warren. https://dna-explained.com/2014/05/21/finding-native-american-ethnic-results-in-germanic-people/

<p>The bullet probably hit the Union soldier as he was fleeing. It may have struck his cartridge box first, which sent it tumbling through the muscle of his right buttock, broke his right leg and buried itself sideways in his thigh bone just below the hip.</p>

Archaeologists using radar scans have detected a Viking ship buried beneath a cemetery in Norway. The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) said that the archaeologists discovered the anomaly using radar scans of an area in Østfold County. The ship seems to be about 66 feet (20 meters) long and buried about 1.6 feet (50 centimeters) beneath the ground, they said in a statement.

The find is the first written evidence of the name "Jerusalem" found on a column drum dating from the Herodian period. The earliest written inscription of the word Jerusalem written in Hebrew on a 2,000 year old column drum was unveiled on Tuesday at a press conference at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The limestone column drum that dates back to the Second Temple period, was discovered 10 months ago on an excavation site near the International Convention Center in Jerusalem. The words: “Hanania son of Dudolos from Jerusalem” was etched on the column which was part of a building...

Friends and family of a beloved Medieval knight re-enactor have been left “stunned” after the Virginia man accidentally impaled himself with his lance during a re-enactment event over the weekend. Peter Barclay, 53, was competing in an equestrian game in front of a crowd in Williamstown, Kentucky Saturday when he was fatally injured. Participating in events under the knight name of Master Terafan Greydragon, Peter went to spear a paper plate while on horseback when something went wrong and his lance impaled him under his sternum, WLWT confirms. Peter, a military veteran, was airlifted to a hospital but died en...

The third chapter of Donald Yates’ history of the Cherokee (Old World Roots of the Cherokee, McFarland 2012) contains the genetic story of the Cherokee Indians based on DNA Consultants’ 2009 study “Anomalous Mitochondrial DNA in the Cherokee,” but it is no easy read, being written for an academic audience. Earlier this year Yates published a condensation of his work in the series Cherokee Chapbooks, called Old Souls in a New World: The Secret History of the Cherokee Indians (Panther’s Lodge). This publication has no footnotes, bibliography or pictures; those must be sought in Old World Roots and scholarly articles...

The wizards of early Europe wore hats of gold intricately embellished with astrological symbols that helped them to predict the movement of the sun and stars... ...Wilfried Menghin, the director of the Berlin Museum... carrying out detailed research on a 3,000-year-old 30in high Bronze Age cone of beaten gold that was discovered in Switzerland in 1995... ...discovered that the 1,739 sun and half-moon symbols decorating the Berlin cone's surface make up a scientific code which corresponds almost exactly to the "Metonic cycle" discovered by the Greek astronomer Meton in 432bc - about 500 years after the cone was made --...

Everyone’s DNA sequence is unique. But for those who wish to maintain their genetic privacy, it may not be unique enough. A new study argues that more than half of Americans could be identified by name if all you had to start with was a sample of their DNA and a few basic facts, such as the region where they live and about how old they might be. It wouldn’t be simple, and it wouldn’t be cheap. But the fact that it has become doable will force all of us to rethink the meaning of privacy in the DNA age,...

Popularized in the hit movie "Jurassic World," the mosasaur has come back to life after an 85 million-year-old fossil of a newborn creature was discovered in Kansas. A "neonate-sized Tylosaurus specimen" (a type of mosasaur), has been identified and examined, with researchers looking at broken bones, including its snout, braincase and upper jaw. "Despite its small size, a suite of cranial characters diagnoses FHSM VP-14845 [the fossil's identification] as a species of Tylosaurus, including the elongate basisphenoid morphology," the study's abstract reads. The creature, which could grow up to 42 feet when it reached adulthood, had an "estimated skull length...

Zanolli and colleagues examined dental remains from the sites of Fontana Fanuccio, located 50km southeast of Rome, and Visogliano, located 18km northwest of Trieste. At around 450,000 years old, these teeth join a very short list of fossil human remains from Middle Pleistocene Europe. Using micro-CT scanning and detailed morphological analyses, the authors examined the shape and arrangement of tooth tissues and compared them with teeth of other human species. They found that the teeth of both sites share similarities with Neanderthals and are distinct from modern humans. There has been much debate over the identities and relationships of Middle...