Tag: Ancient

Viking warrior were highly feared across Europe for their brutal attacks and unorthodox for the time weapon of choice, the battle axe. Well know for their close quarter fighting style and berserkers. Most Vikings warriors were modestly armoured with only the kings guard usually having chain mail.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 2, 2011) An analysis of prehistoric "Heinrich events" that happened many thousands of years ago, creating mass discharges of icebergs into the North Atlantic Ocean, make it clear that very small amounts of subsurface warming of water can trigger a rapid collapse of ice shelves.

The findings, to be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide historical evidence that warming of water by 3-4 degrees was enough to trigger these huge, episodic discharges of ice from the Laurentide Ice Sheet in what is now Canada.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2011) Ancient stone faces carved into the walls of a well-known limestone cave in East Timor have been discovered by a team searching for fossils of extinct giant rats.


The team of archaeologists and palaeontologists were working in Lene Hara Cave on the northeast tip of East Timor.

"Looking up from the cave floor at a colleague sitting on a ledge, my head torch shone on what seemed to be a weathered carving," CSIRO's Dr Ken Aplin said.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 12, 2010) In a world first an international team of researchers, led by Dr Michael Bunce of Murdoch University, have successfully isolated ancient DNA from fossil eggshell remains of extinct birds.

"We were really surprised to discover that ancient DNA is well-preserved in fossil eggshells, particularly the heaviest bird to have existed the elephant bird called Aepyornis, which is now extinct," said Murdoch doctoral student Charlotte Oskam, who undertook the research.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2010) A rare, ancient polar bear fossil discovered in Norway in 2004 is yielding a treasure trove of essential information about the age and evolutionary origins of the species whose future is now seen as synonymous with the devastation wrought by climate change.

A paper published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers at Penn State University, the University at Buffalo, the University of Oslo, and other institutions is filling in key pieces of the evolutionary history of polar bears and brown bears, including their response to past climate changes.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 12, 2009) Recent studies show that one in three people suffer from stress and the number is on the rise. But stress isn't a new problem.

While the physiological state wasn't properly named until the 1930s, new research from The University of Western Ontario proves stress has plagued humans for hundreds, and perhaps thousands of years.

The first study of its kind, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, detected the stress hormone cortisol in the hair of ancient Peruvians, who lived between 550 and 1532 A.D.

LONDON (Reuters) - An ancient burial pit containing 45 severed skulls, that could be a mass war grave dating back to Roman times, has been found under a road being built for the 2012 British Olympics.

Archaeologists, who have only just begun excavating the site, say they do not yet know who the bones might belong to.

"We think that these dismembered bodies are likely to be native Iron Age Britons. The question is -- how did they die and who killed them," said dig head, David Score, of Oxford Archaeology.

Tomislav Domazet-Loo and Diethard Tautz from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plצn, Germany, have systematically analysed the time of emergence for a large number of genes - genes which can also initiate diseases. Their studies show for the first time that the majority of these genes were already in existence at the origin of the first cells.