A French government official recently said the return of three artifacts to Ethiopia was a diplomatic handover rather than a restitution. On November 30, France‘s foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot handed over two prehistoric stone axes, bifaces, and a stone cutter to Ethiopia’s tourism minister Selamawit Kassa during a symbolic ceremony at the National Museum of Ethiopia in the...
Five years after Paris watched Notre Dame Cathedral burn, the 861-year-old structure has been restored. It is slated to reopen its doors to the public on Sunday, December 8, with two Catholic masses will commemorating the event. Following the April 2019 blaze, €846 million ($891 million) was raised in donations from 340,000 donors across 150 countries, with...
An archaeologist from the University of New Hampshire and her team have collected data which indicates the presence of a large-scale pre-Columbian fish-trapping facility. Discovered in the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary (CTWS), the largest inland wetland in Belize, the team dated the construction of these fisheries to the Late Archaic period (cal. 2000-1900 BCE), pre-dating...
Sadith Silvano’s crafts are born from ancient songs. Brush in hand, eyes on the cloth, the Peruvian woman paints as she sings. And through her voice, her ancestors speak. “When we paint, we listen to the inspiration that comes from the music and connect to nature, to our elders,” said Silvano, 36, from her home...
What appears to be evidence of the oldest alphabetic writing in human history is etched onto finger-length, clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers. The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know...
People from Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and the north-east of England are better at detecting someone imitating their accent than people from London and Essex, new research from the University of Cambridge has found. People from Belfast proved most able to detect someone faking their accent, while people from London, Essex and Bristol were least accurate....
In 79 CE, the active volcanic system in southern Italy known as Somma-Vesuvius erupted, burying the small Roman town of Pompeii and everyone in it. The “Pompeii eruption” covered everything in a layer of ash that preserved many of the bodies. Now, ancient DNA collected from the famed body casts alters the history that’s been...
Using laser-guided imaging to peer through dense jungle forests, Tulane University researchers have uncovered vast unexplored Maya settlements in Mexico and a better understanding of the ancient civilization’s extent and complexity. The new research, published in the journal Antiquity, was led by Tulane University anthropology doctoral student Luke Auld-Thomas and his advisor, Professor Marcello A. Canuto. The team used...
The first study of how Wikipedia represents Australian places has highlighted how aspects of the online encyclopedia and choices made by the volunteer editors who work on it can lead to absences, omissions and sanitised views in articles about Australia. As part of a 3-year Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project, the University of Technology...
A long, wooden boat puttered down the Indio River’s chocolate waters carrying Ana María Antonio and a colleague from the Panama Canal Authority on a mission to hear directly from villagers who could be affected by plans to dam the river. The canal forms the backbone of Panama’s economy, and the proposed dam would secure...
