News Desk

Scientific dating proves streaks on walls of Bacon Hole, near the Mumbles in south Wales, is Palaeolithic rock art… Archaeologists have used the latest scientific means to date the rock art, discovering that it was in fact created 17,100 years ago – making it the oldest example in Britain as well as north-western Europe. International academics have just published a scientific paper on their research in the journal Quaternary.

How was iron produced 2,000 years ago in Senegal? A recent study at the Didé West 1 archaeological site, in the Falémé Valley in eastern Senegal, sheds light on an ancient iron production technique.

The 4,000-year-old skull of a Bronze Age child buried in what’s now Uzbekistan bears scars from a cranial surgery known as trepanation. It is the oldest documented evidence of surgery in Central Asia and one of the oldest examples of surgery in all of Asia, the researchers report.

Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the nineties shooter game “Doom” and say they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing.

Nearly every animal on this magnificent planet has blood… but where the heck did it come from? Now, in an ambitious effort, an international team led by Kyoto University in Japan has traced the evolutionary history of blood cells back 700 million years – and discovered that they weren’t created from scratch after the rise of multicellular life. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bizarre Venus surface formations (or coronae) are likely key to understanding our twin planet’s heretofore inscrutable interior. Using NASAMagellan spacecraft data from decades past, Anna Gulcher, an earth and planetary scientist at Germany’s University of Freiburg, have created innovative new 3D models of the largest coronae to better understand Venus’ puzzling geodynamics

A brainy human relative who lived during an ice age nearly 150,000 years ago adapted to the bitter cold by developing a sophisticated stone-tool industry, according to a new study of a crystal-studded rib bone found in China. This research was published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

A new discovery in South Korea suggests that the asteroid effect may have been even more complex than we realized. The research has been published in Communications Earth & Environment.

Analysis of more than 3,000 lithic artifacts from the Cova Gran de Santa Linya site (Les Avellanes-Santa Linya, Lleida) shows that anatomically modern human communities occupying the southern Pyrenees during the Upper Paleolithic used flint (chert) exclusively for tool production. The findings, published in the journal Quaternary International, indicate that raw-material selection was closely linked to technological changes, mobility organization and the ways in which these groups interacted with the landscape.

A new revelation about the pyramid’s design could add another feather to Egyptian engineering caps. According to new research, several properties of the structure could make it surprisingly earthquake resistant – whether the builders intended it or not. The fortifying features include the empty “relieving chambers” directly above the burial chamber of Pharaoh Khufu. The findings have been published in Scientific Reports.

A new study at the University of York delves into the archaeology of the 4,000-year-old Mohenjo-daro, the Indus civilization’s largest city… By analyzing house sizes across the ancient city, researchers found that Mohenjo-daro was not only more equal than its neighbors in Mesopotamia and Greece, but it actually became more egalitarian over time. The findings were published in the journal Antiquity. 

Special Operations veterans suffering from traumatic brain injuries and posttraumatic stress disorder experienced notable improvements in their symptoms after a single dose of the psychoactive drug ibogaine. Brain scans revealed that the therapy was associated with persistent increases in cerebral blood flow and the widespread reorganization of neural networks. The research was published in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that 115,000 years ago Neanderthal groups from Los Aviones Cave (Cartagena, Region of Murcia, Spain) were already consuming mollusks following a clearly seasonal pattern, particularly during the colder months of the year, from November to April.

Our new research, published in the journal African Archaeological Review, reveals how we found 260 previously unknown enclosure burials east of the Nile River, across almost 1,000km of desert…The carbon dates and pottery from the few excavated monuments tell us these people lived roughly 4000–3000 BCE, just before Egyptians formed a territorial kingdom we know of as Pharaonic Egypt.

A recent study mapping the human brain reveals that our perception of time does not happen all at once, but rather unfolds across a series of distinct physical processing stages. As visual information travels from the back of the brain to the front, different groups of neurons handle specific parts of the timing process, ultimately creating our subjective experience of how long an event lasts. These findings were published in the journal PLOS Biology.