Archaeology

A set of lengthy silver and gold tubes dug up from a famous grave in the the Caucuses has been found to represent the oldest surviving drinking straws, with the scientists behind the discovery believing they were used for communal beer consumption.

A new study is presenting archeological evidence of the oldest known bone tools used for making clothes. The tools, found in a cave in Morocco, suggest humans were skinning animals for fur to wear as clothes up to 120,000 years ago.

A new method of handwriting analysis is offering fresh clues as to who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. Testing the machine learning tool on one of the most famous ancient scrolls has revealed not one but two scribes were responsible for the ancient text.

A team of scientists at the University College London has used 3D tomography to shed new light on the Antikythera Mechanism – the world's first computer, which was an accurate model of the Cosmos as it was known to the ancient Greeks.

A 3,500-year-old Egyptian medical text is shedding new light on the ancient practice of mummification. Recently discovered inside a much larger work, the papyrus document being studied by University of Copenhagen is the oldest known mummification manual.

Archeologists from University College London (UCL) have found the remains of a stone circle in west Wales, which indicate that part of Stonehenge was made from recycled stones. Excavations at Waun Mawn suggest that bluestones from the Welsh circle were moved 140 miles (225 km) away, about 5,000 years ago.

A novel analytical technique has revealed undiscovered compounds in an ancient Maya drug container previously thought to only be used for tobacco. The findings offer the first clear evidence that the Maya mixed tobacco with other plant materials.

A seven-year global effort has used almost 15,000 samples from a variety of sources to draw new, more accurate calibration curves to enable more precise radiocarbon dating of objects as old as 55,000 years.

An investigation by scientists from the University of Tübingen has found that foxes may have been feeding off human scraps for over 40,000 years, based on a study of several sites in southern Germany.

A new method for determining the sex of human remains based on proteins extracted from tooth enamel has proven more reliable than those based on DNA or bone anatomy.

An archaeological conundrum may have been solved by DNA analyses carried out by a team of Stanford Medicine scientists led by Alexander Ioannidis that indicates Native Americans and Polynesians came into contact centuries before the arrival of the first Europeans.

Researchers have found the first evidence Native Americans smoked a plant other than tobacco. Smooth sumac was likely consumed for medicinal qualities, but it's the method used to make the discovery that is really getting archaeologists excited.