Roman “wax tablets” were wooden frames holding a thin layer of wax used like a reusable notepad. The wax is gone in the Tongeren material, but stylus pressure sometimes bit deep enough to leave ...

New analysis of ancient Mesopotamian medical prescriptions suggests that, in a small but striking set of cases, patients were instructed to seek out the sanctuary of a deity as part of their healing ...

Confucius (circa 551–479 B.C.E.) was a teacher, philosopher, and political theorist from ancient China. His teachings have influenced much of East Asia and continue to provide us with guidance on how ...

A palm-sized fragment of elephant bone, shaped and used as a precision tool almost half a million years ago, has been identified as the oldest known elephant-bone implement in Europe. Although the ...

The newly described specimen is a partial left mandible plus a molar crown, dated to about 2.6 million years ago using multiple methods, making it one of the oldest Paranthropus fossils known. The ...

Researchers studying exquisitely preserved Scottish fossils say Prototaxites represents an entirely extinct eukaryotic lineage - a “new form of life” in the sense that it does not fit into known major ...

Tabloids have seized on the most headline-friendly takeaway - “pulleys built the pyramid” - but the underlying claim is more specific: the pyramid may have grown “inside-out,” using internal sloped ...

A faint hand stencil hidden on a cave wall in Indonesia has been dated to at least 67,800 years old—potentially making it the oldest known cave art yet studied. The discovery comes from a limestone ...

The project, described by Pompeii officials as Bruits de couloir (“corridor whispers”), used Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), a computational photography technique that photographs a surface ...

Writers in the Tang period described “golden armor,” but archaeologists had not previously had a physical example to examine. That gap is what makes this restoration notable: the conservation work ...

Crucially, the basilica at Fanum Fortunae (ancient Fano) is the only building Vitruvius explicitly references in his surviving treatise De architectura, making the identification unusually significant ...

Historically, Theodoro (also known as Gothia) is often described as one of the final “rump states” of the Eastern Roman world, with its capital at Mangup (Doros/Theodoro) and a mixed population that ...