When little Dorothy Louise Eady fell down the stairs at home, remaining inert, her parents believed in horror that she had died and placed her body gently on a bed. But, to her surprise and joy, the girl was alive and she regained consciousness shortly after. The really curious thing came later, b
A team from Tel Aviv University led by Professor Oded Rechavi in collaboration with Professor Mattias Jakobsson, from Uppsala University in Sweden, has succeeded in deciphering the ancient DNA extracted from the scrolls (made from animal skins) on which the Dead Sea Scrolls were written. By charac
From the ground, it is impossible to tell that the plateau underfoot is anything extraordinary. But from the sky, with laser eyes, and below the surface, with radiocarbon dating, it is clear that it is the largest and oldest Mayan monument ever discovered. Located in Tabasco, Mexico, near the north
On the border between the Russian Federation and Mongolia, in the mountains to the south of Tuva, there is a large complex of clay buildings called Por-Bajin. Its located on an island in a lake, and until now archaeologists werent sure who built it and what its purpose was. What they did know is tha
Here we have seen those of Tutankhamun, Tamerlane and Jacques de Molay, which together with Moctezumas (although this is of a different nature), are the most famous legendary curses in History. But it is that in other times it became quite common to resort to those imprecations and evil desires; in
The pyramids of Giza and Sakkara, the Great Sphinx, the temples of Karnak and Luxor, those of Abu Simbel, the citadel of Cairo, the Egyptian Museum, the tombs of the Valley of the Kings... We could be like this until tomorrow. The archaeological heritage of Egypt is so immense that the visitor is fo
Carved from burned bone, this miniature bird statuette is the oldest known Chinese work of art, according to an international team of researchers from the universities of Bordeaux, Shandong, Bergen, the CNRS (Comité National of the Scientific Research ) and the Weizmann Institute of Science. It was
Previously we talked here about Abu Hureyra, a site now submerged under the waters of a dam in Syria, where evidence of the transformation of humans from hunter-gatherers to farmers has been found. We said then that the oldest settlement dated from the Epipaleolithic (about 13,500 years ago) and abo
Viracocha was the most important divinity of the pre-Hispanic Andean religion and, although he constituted a superior hierarchy along with Inti, Illapa and Punchao, the Spanish missionaries focused their references on him when evangelizing the indigenous people in the idea of a single god. . The
Between 1928 and 1937 René Neuville was vice-consul of France in Jerusalem (between 1946 and 1952 he held the position of consul general). As well as a diplomat he was a prehistorian and archaeologist, he carried out various investigations in the area, such as the excavation of the Jebel Qafzeh cave
New analysis shows that bones from one of the sites, called Kostenki 11 , are more than 20,000 years old, making it the oldest circular structure of its kind built by humans and discovered in the region. The bones probably came from animal burial grounds. The circle was hidden by sediment and now, o
New evidence of massive lightning strikes at the center of a stone circle in the Outer Hebrides may help clarify why these monuments were created thousands of years ago. The Calanais Virtual Reconstruction Project, a joint venture led by the University of St. Andrews with the Urras nan Tursachan an
Goblins, gnomes and dwarfs are characters that are part of the mythology of many places, both in Spain (the trasgu Asturian, the trastolillo Cantabrian, the iratxo Basque, the follet Catalan…) as in Europe (the lutin french, the leprechaun Irish, the domovoi Slavic, the mazapgul Italian…). The fact
An international team including researchers from the University of Arizona and the University of Johannesburg has found the oldest known skull of Homo erectus , the first of our ancestors to be almost human in its anatomy and aspects of its behavior. Years of meticulous excavation at the fossil-ric
The New York University Archaeological Mission to the Temple of Ramses II at Abydos, under the direction of Dr. Sameh Iskander, discovered the foundational deposit in the foundations of the temple in its southwest corner, with numerous objects that were buried in 1279 BC. at the time of its founding
A recent study suggests that brown hares and chickens were first treated as gods, not food, when they arrived in Britain during the Iron Age. Archaeological evidence shows that the first brown hares and chickens to reach Britain were carefully buried and intact. There are no signs of butchery on th
Ancient artifacts dating back 3,300 years have been unearthed by archaeologists from Australias Macquarie University in a long-lost city believed to be linked to King David. A rare figurine of the Canaanite god Baal in an attitude of beating his enemies, another of a bronze calf, two seals and deco
One of the things that most attracts the attention of a curious person when visiting the interior of a pyramid (and that extends to Egyptian architecture in general) is that its walls are usually almost completely covered with hieroglyphics. It is not a question of decoration per se, but rather a
Hunter-gatherer groups who lived on the shores of the Baltic between 7,500 and 6,000 years ago had culturally distinct culinary tastes, analysis of ancient pottery shards has revealed. An international team of researchers analyzed more than 500 hunter-gatherer pots from 61 archaeological sites acro
Emperor Claudius has gone down in history, above all, for his physical defects (portrayed by Robert Graves in two successful novels, I, Claudius and Claudius, the god, and his wife Messalina , both adapted to a prestigious television series), for having managed to survive -and succeed- Caligula,
Serapis was a Greek-Egyptian syncretic god, made up of the Egyptian divinities Osiris and Apis (identified with Zeus and Hades) who emerged in Memphis among the descendants of the Greek mercenaries of Psammetichus and Amasis in the 7th-6th centuries BC. C., and whom Ptolemy I appointed as the main g
In recent years, millions of people around the world have suffered from loss of smell due to COVID-19. Even those who have avoided infection with the new coronavirus now experience the world of smells differently due to the very masks that provide protection against the virus. This loss of smell has
Political, religious, security... The reasons that presided over the evolution of the pyramids, then their abandonment in favor of the hypogeums, remain hypothetical for Egyptologists. Step Pyramid at Saqqara (Egypt). This article is from the Special Issue of Sciences et Avenir n°197 dated April-
Three inscriptions would have made it possible to identify to whom the impressive Kasta tumulus, discovered last year in Greece, was dedicated. One of the two caryatids - the best preserved - discovered on September 6, 2014 at the Amphipolis site. MYSTERY. Neither a queen nor a king... but a gener