Face of Chinese emperor who ruled 1,500 years ago reconstructed using ancient DNA The face of a Chinese emperor who lived around 1,500 years ago has been reconstructed by a team of researchers, revealing the appearance of the ancient ruler. The facial reconstruction of the emperor is the result of a study, published in the … Read more
Are you a morning person? You may be a Neanderthal descendant. A new paper in Genome Biology and Evolution, published by Oxford University Press, finds that genetic material from Neanderthal ancestors may have contributed to the propensity of some people today to be “early risers,” the sort of people who are more comfortable getting up and … Read more
Researchers Successfully Extract Ancient DNA From 2,900-Year-Old Clay Brick For the first time, researchers have been able to extract DNA fragments from an ancient clay brick, demonstrating how these building blocks from times long past could be used to catalog flora found in the environment at the time. When this brick was made some 2,900 years ago … Read more
DNA study of remains at Delaware site find kinship among European settlers, African slaves Early colonial settlers likely survived the harsh frontier conditions of 17th-century Delaware because they banded as family units to work alongside enslaved African descendants and European indentured servants, according to a new study published this summer in Current Biology. Anthropological geneticist Raquel … Read more
Plague found in 4,000-year-old human remains in Britain The oldest evidence for the plague in Britain has been discovered in 4,000-year-old human remains unearthed at bronze age burial sites in Cumbria and Somerset. Traces of Yersinia pestis bacteria were found in the teeth of individuals at the Levens Park ring cairn monument near Kendal, and Charterhouse Warren in the … Read more
Teeth of the Red Lady: Ancient Oral Microbes Reconstructed and Their Chemical Creations Revealed About 19,000 years ago, a woman died in northern Spain. Her body was deliberately buried with pieces of the natural pigment ochre and placed behind a block of limestone in a cave known as El Mirón. When her ochre-dyed bones were … Read more
The mysterious Picts of Scotland revealed through DNA analysis Ancient DNA reveals that the Picts, the “painted people” of Scotland who fought off the Romans, weren’t an enigmatic group that migrated from faraway lands. Instead, the Picts had local roots and were related to other Iron Age people in Britain, a new study finds. An analysis of … Read more
Ancient DNA puts a face on the mysterious Denisovans, extinct cousins of Neanderthals Researchers have been able to bring the now-extinct cousins of Homo sapiens, the Denisovans, back to life (of sorts)—offering us the first glimpse at what these little-understood hominids would have looked like tens of thousands of years after they went extinct. Up … Read more
Mystery Of A 5,000-Year-Old Mass Grave In Poland Reveals A Family Tragedy When a mass grave containing 15 women, children and young men who lived 5,000 years ago was found in a southern Polish village, a mystery surrounded their demise. The discovery, made eight years ago, revealed that each person had been killed by blows … Read more