ancestral history, chivalric and heroic tales, literature, medieval manuscripts, research

Most Medieval Manuscripts of Chivalric and Heroic Tales Have Been Lost

New research finds that, while the Knights of the Round Table has won global fame, most medieval English chivalric and heroic tales have been lost. Meanwhile, more than three-quarters of medieval stories in Icelandic and Irish survive to the present, in an unusual pattern suggesting that island ‘ecosystems’ helped preserve culture. 90 percent of medieval manuscripts of ...

Troy Oakes

Armor gloves and a suit of armor.

Discarded Ostrich Eggshells Provide Timeline for African Ancestors

Archaeologists have learned a lot about our ancestors by rummaging through their garbage piles, which contain evidence of their diet and population levels as the local flora and fauna changed over time. One common kitchen scrap in Africa — ostrich eggshells — is now helping unscramble the mystery of when these changes took place, providing ...

Troy Oakes

An ostrich just hatched from an egg.

Modern Africans and Europeans Have More Neanderthal Ancestry Than Previously Thought

When the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, using DNA collected from ancient bones, it was accompanied by the discovery that modern humans in Asia, Europe, and America inherited approximately 2 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals — proving humans and Neanderthals had interbred after humans left Africa. Since that study, new methods have continued to catalog ...

Troy Oakes

Neanderthals interbred.

Origin Story: Rewriting Human History Through Our DNA

For most of our evolutionary human history — for most of the time anatomically modern humans have been on Earth — we’ve shared the planet with other species of humans. It’s only been in the last 30,000 years, the mere blink of an evolutionary eye, that modern humans have occupied the planet as the sole ...

Troy Oakes

A cave painting.

Mysterious Ancient Burial Mound Used for 2,000 Years

Researchers have found evidence that an unremarkable prehistoric burial mound near Bordeaux, in southwest France, was re-used by locals for around 2,000 years. The researchers say what drew people to the burial mound for 2 millennia remains a mystery. The Le Tumulus des Sables site was discovered by chance in 2006 when school children stumbled ...

Troy Oakes

The burial mound near Bordeaux.

It’s Unlikely South African Fossil Species Is Ancestral to Humans

Statistical analysis of fossil data shows that it is unlikely that Australopithecus sediba, a nearly 2-million-year-old apelike fossil from South Africa, is the direct ancestor of Homo, the genus to which modern-day humans belong. The research by paleontologists from the University of Chicago, published in Science Advances, concludes by suggesting that Australopithecus afarensis, of the famous “Lucy” skeleton, is still ...

Troy Oakes

Fossil skulls.

Study Shows Natural Dyes Used to Color Clothing Thousands of Years Ago

Even thousands of years ago people wore clothing with colorful patterns made from plant- and animal-based dyes. Chemists from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) have created new analytical methods to examine textiles from China and Peru that are several thousand years old. In the scientific journal Scientific Reports, they describe their new method, which can ...

Troy Oakes

Natural material with natural dyes.

250,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Teeth Found to Have Lead Exposure

Using evidence found in two Neanderthal teeth from southeastern France, researchers from the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai report the earliest evidence of lead exposure in an extinct human-like species from 250,000 years ago. This study is the first to report lead exposure in ...

John Andress

Study Confirms the Massive Scale of the Lowland Maya Civilization

Tulane University researchers, documenting the discovery of dozens of ancient lowland maya civilization cities in northern Guatemala through the use of jungle-penetrating Lidar (light detection and ranging) technology, have published their results in the prestigious journal Science. The article includes the work of Marcello Canuto, director of the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane, and Francisco ...

Troy Oakes

Ancient Farmers Spared Us From Glaciers, But Profoundly Changed Earth’s Climate

Millennia ago, ancient farmers cleared land to plant wheat and maize, potatoes and squash. They flooded fields to grow rice. They began to raise livestock. And unknowingly, they may have been fundamentally altering the climate of the Earth. A study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides new evidence that ancient farming practices led to a rise ...

Troy Oakes