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Categories: Anthropology: General, Geoscience: Geology

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Some cities only last a century or two, while others last for a thousand years or more. Often, there aren't clear records left behind to explain why. Instead, archaeologists piece together clues from the cities' remains to search for patterns that help account for why certain places retained their importance longer than others.

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With the help of an underwater robot, known as Icefin, a U.S.- New Zealand research team has obtained an unprecedented look inside a crevasse at Kamb Ice Stream -- revealing more than a century of geological processes beneath the Antarctic ice.

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An international team of researchers analyzed the genomes of 180 indigenous Africans from a dozen ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and geographically diverse populations. The results shed light on the origin of modern humans, historical migrations, linguistic evolution, and local adaptation, and lay the groundwork for more people to benefit from precision medicine.

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A world-first model of paleoclimate and hydrology in Iran has highlighted favourable routes for Neanderthals and modern human expansions eastwards into Asia. The findings reveal that multiple humid periods in ancient Iran led to the expansions of human populations, opening dispersal route across the region, and the possible interactions of species such as Neanderthals and our own Homo sapiens.

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Helium -- essential for many medical and industrial processes -- is in critically short supply worldwide. Production is also associated with significant carbon emissions, contributing to climate change. This study provides a new concept in gas field formation to explain why, in rare places, helium accumulates naturally in high concentrations just beneath the Earth's surface. The findings could help locate new reservoirs of carbon-free helium -- and potentially also hydrogen.

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A new study reports on genomic data from a 23,000-year-old individual who lived in what was probably the warmest place of Europe at the peak of the last Ice Age. The oldest human genome recovered from the southern tip of Spain adds an important piece of the puzzle to the genetic history of Europe.

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In 2011, scientists recorded a previously unknown feeding strategy in whales around the world. Now, researchers in Australia think they may have found evidence of this behaviour being described in ancient accounts of sea creatures, recorded more than 2,000 years ago. They believe that misunderstandings of these descriptions contributed to myths about medieval sea monsters. Whales are known lunge at their prey when feeding, but recently whales have been spotted at the surface of the water with their jaws open at right angles, waiting for shoals of fish to swim into their mouths. A clip of this strategy was captured in 2021 and went viral on Instagram. This strategy seems to work for the whales because the fish think they have found a place to shelter from predators, not realising they are swimming into danger. It's not known why this strategy has only recently been identified, but scientists speculate that it's a result of changing environmental conditions -- or that whales are being more closely monitored than ever before by drones and other modern technologies.

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Cartilaginous fish have changed much more in the course of their evolutionary history than previously believed. Evidence for this thesis has been provided by new fossils of a ray-like shark, Protospinax annectans, which demonstrate that sharks were already highly evolved in the Late Jurassic.

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What we think of as the classic West Coast climate began just about 4,000 years ago, finds a study on climate trends of the Holocene era.

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Previous research estimated that it took hundreds of million years for the ancient Earth's magma ocean to solidify, but new research narrows these large uncertainties down to less than just a couple of million years.

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By simulating early Earth conditions in the lab, researchers have found that without specific amino acids, ancient proteins would not have known how to evolve into everything alive on the planet today -- including plants, animals, and humans.

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Scientists who study the origins and evolution of the plague have examined hundreds of ancient human teeth from Denmark, seeking to address longstanding questions about its arrival, persistence and spread within Scandinavia.

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Geologists doing fieldwork in southeastern Utah's Cedar Mountain Formation found carbon isotope evidence that the site, though on land, experienced the same early Cretaceous carbon-cycle change recorded in marine sedimentary rocks in Europe. This ancient carbon-cycle phenomenon, known as the 'Weissert Event' was driven by large, sustained volcanic eruptions in the Southern Hemisphere that greatly increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and produced significant greenhouse climate effects over a prolonged time.

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A recent excavation in Megiddo, Israel, unearthed the earliest example of a particular type of cranial surgery in the Ancient Near East -- and potentially one of the oldest examples of leprosy in the world.

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A new study suggests there may be a layer of surprisingly fluid rock ringing the Earth, at the very bottom of the upper mantle.

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Countless meteorites have struck Earth in the past and shaped the history of our planet. It is assumed, for example, that meteorites brought with them a large part of its water. The extinction of the dinosaurs might also have been triggered by the impact of a very large meteorite. It turns out that the marketing 'gag' of the 'Domaine du Météore' winery is acutally a real impact crater. Meteorite craters which are still visible today are rare because most traces of the celestial bodies have long since disappeared again.

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In their search for silver ore, the Romans established two military camps in the Bad Ems area near Koblenz in the 1st century AD.

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Data captured from seismic waves caused by earthquakes has shed new light on the deepest parts of Earth's inner core, according to seismologists.

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A new study explores 'balancing selection' by analyzing thousands of modern human genomes alongside ancient hominin groups, such as Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes. The research has 'implications for understanding human diversity, the origin of diseases, and biological trade-offs that may have shaped our evolution,' says evolutionary biologists.

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56 million years ago, the Earth experienced one of the largest and most rapid climate warming events in its history: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which has similarities to current and future warming. This episode saw global temperatures rise by 5-8°C. It was marked by an increase in the seasonality of rainfalls, which led to the movement of large quantities of clay into the ocean, making it uninhabitable for certain living species. This scenario could be repeated today.