The new trove includes items that one expert in Anglo-Saxon artifacts said brought tears to her eyes: gold items weighing 11 pounds, and 5.5 pounds of silver. Tentatively identified by some experts as bounty from one of the wars that racked Middle England in the seventh and eighth centuries, they included sword pommels and dagger hilts, scabbard bosses and helmet cheekpieces, Christian crosses and figures of animals, eagles and fish.
Nine-Thousand-Year-Old House Reveals Stone Age Lifestyle
The remains of a 9,000-year-old hunter-gatherers’ house, uncovered during construction at an airport, have been unearthed in Great Britain’s Isle of Man. The house was surrounded by buried mounds of burnt hazelnut shells and stocked with stone tools, according to archaeologists working on the project and a report in the latest British Archaeology.
Ancient Philippine Boat Re-created For Odyssey
Adventurers who conquered Mount Everest successfully launched a replica of an ancient Philippine boat Saturday that they will use to sail around Southeast Asia and possibly to Africa to promote Filipino pride and unity.
The replica of the balangay — a wooden-hulled boat used in the archipelago about 1,700 years ago — was built in 44 days by native Badjao boat-builders from the southernmost Philippine province of Tawi Tawi using traditional skills handed down through the generations.
Stone Age Superglue
Stone Age humans were adept chemists who whipped up a sophisticated kind of natural glue, a new study says. They knowingly tweaked the chemical and physical properties of an iron-containing pigment known as red ochre with the gum of acacia trees to create adhesives for their shafted tools.
Giant Prehistoric Kangaroos Killed Off By Humans
Humans, not climate change, were responsible for the extinction of giant kangaroos and other massive marsupials in Tasmania more than 40,000 years ago, according to new research.
Amazing Rock Art May Revise Australian History Books
Contrary to a long-held belief that Aborigines were isolated, northern communities may have interacted with visitors, such as the Makassans — indigenous people from the city of Ujungpandang (Makassar) on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Superdirt Made Lost Amazon Cities Possible
Over the past several decades, researchers have discovered tracts of productive terra preta — “dark earth.” The human-made soil’s chocolaty color contrasts sharply with the region’s natural yellowish soils.
Domesticated Horses Date Back 5,500 Years
New evidence, corralled in Kazakhstan, indicates the Botai culture used horses as beasts of burden — and as a source of meat and milk — about 1,000 years earlier than had been widely believed, according to the team led by Alan Outram of England’s University of Exeter.
The Kelp Highway
It is now known that seafaring peoples living in the Ryukyu Islands and Japan near the height of the last glacial period (about 35,000 to 15,000 years ago) adapted to cold waters comparable to those found today in the Gulf of Alaska. From Japan, they may have migrated northward through the Kurile Islands, to the southern coast of Beringia (ancient land bridge between what is now Siberia and Alaska), and into the Americas.
Vikings With Vanity
Vivid colors, flowing silk ribbons, and glittering bits of mirrors – the Vikings dressed with considerably more panache than we previously thought. The men were especially vain, and the women dressed provocatively.