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Categories: Archaeology: General, Offbeat: Earth and Climate

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Good quality indoor air is crucial to our well-being, while impurities in the air can compromise our working capacity and health. Researchers have developed a new method for measuring indoor air quality, making use of fluorescent strains of nematodes.

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New research has revealed that the process of 'peopling' the entire continent of Sahul -- the combined mega continent that joined Australia with New Guinea when sea levels were much lower than today -- took 10,000 years. Sophisticated models show the scale of the challenges faced by the ancestors of Indigenous people making their mass migration across the supercontinent more than 60,000 years ago. This pattern led to a rapid expansion both southward toward the Great Australian Bight, and northward from the Kimberley region to settle all parts of New Guinea and, later, the southwest and southeast of Australia.

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An analysis of cremated bone fragments from burial mounds in Derbyshire, UK, provides the first solid evidence that Vikings crossed the North Sea with horses, dogs and other animals as early as the ninth century AD. Researchers analyzed samples of human and animal remains, finding that they most likely originated from Scandinavia and that they died soon after arrival in Britain.

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Sneaker waves are likely fueled by a specific type of wave condition generated by far-off storms and paired with just the right conditions closer to shore, a new study has found.

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By working together, dolphins and net-casting fishers in Brazil each catch more fish, a rare example of an interaction by two top predators that is beneficial to both parties, researchers have concluded following 15 years of study of the practice.

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The loss of pollinators, such as bees, is a huge challenge for global biodiversity and affects humanity by causing problems in food production. Researchers have now developed the first passively flying robot equipped with artificial muscle. Could this artificial fairy be utilized in pollination?

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What drives crocodile evolution? Is climate a major factor or changes in sea levels? Determined to find answers to these questions, researchers discovered that while changing temperatures and rainfall had little impact on the crocodiles' gene flow over the past three million years, changes to sea levels during the Ice Age had a different effect.

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The transition to agriculture from hunting and gathering in pre-colonial North America led to changes in age-independent mortality, or mortality caused by factors that are not associated with age, according to a new study. The team found that the intensification of crop use occurred in two phases, the first of which led to a decline in human age-independent mortality, while the second is associated with a rise in it. The study is the first to tie patterns of age-independent mortality to food production.

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Seeking to better understand more about the origins and movement of bubonic plague, in ancient and contemporary times, researchers have completed a painstaking granular examination of hundreds of modern and ancient genome sequences, creating the largest analysis of its kind.

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Violence and warfare were widespread in many Neolithic communities across Northwest Europe, a period associated with the adoption of farming, new research suggests. Of the skeletal remains of more than 2300 early farmers from 180 sites dating from around 8000 -- 4000 years ago to, more than one in ten displayed weapon injuries, bioarchaeologists found.

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Crocodiles were mummified in a unique way at the Egyptian site of Qubbat al-Hawa during the 5th Century BC, according to a new study.

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Antarctica is a tough place to work, for obvious reasons -- it's bitterly cold, remote, and wild. However, it's one of the best places in the world to hunt for meteorites. That's partly because Antarctica is a desert, and its dry climate limits the degree of weathering the meteorites experience. On top of the dry conditions, the landscape is ideal for meteorite hunting: the black space rocks stand out clearly against snowy fields.

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Research into how echidnas might respond to a warming climate has found clever techniques used by the animal to cope with heat, including blowing bubbles to wet its nose tip, with the moisture then evaporating and cooling its blood.

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An international team of researchers achieves completely new insights into Bronze Age marriage rules and family structures in Greece. Analyses of ancient genomes show that the choice of marriage partners was determined by one's own kinship.

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Disturbances to Earth's magnetic field can lead birds astray -- a phenomenon scientists call 'vagrancy' -- even in perfect weather, and especially during fall migration. While other factors such as weather likely play bigger roles in causing vagrancy, researchers found a strong correlation between birds that were captured far outside of their expected range and the geomagnetic disturbances that occurred during both fall and spring migrations.

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Scientists have used paleogenomics to trace 10,000 years of human immune system evolution. They analyzed the genomes of more than 2,800 individuals who lived in Europe over the past ten millennia. They were able to date the increase in frequency of most of the mutations that are advantageous in defending against pathogens to after the Bronze Age, 4,500 years ago. The scientists also observed that mutations conferring a higher risk of developing inflammatory disorders have become more frequent over the past 10,000 years.

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The movement of people across the Bering Sea from North Asia to North America is a well-known phenomenon in early human history. Nevertheless, the genetic makeup of the  people who lived in North Asia during this time has remained mysterious due to a limited number of ancient genomes analyzed from this region. Now, researchers describe genomes from ten individuals up to 7,500 years old that help to fill the gap and show geneflow from people moving in the opposite direction from North America to North Asia.

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A study examined the effects of anthropogenic noise on cognition, beak color, and growth in the zebra finch. Researchers first tested adult zebra finches on a battery of cognition assays while they were exposed to playbacks of urban noise versus birds tested without noise. Urban noises caused the birds to take longer to learn a novel foraging task and to learn an association-learning task. Urban noise exposure also resulted in treated males to develop less bright beak coloration, and females developed beaks with brighter orange coloration, respectively, than untreated birds. Findings suggest that urban noise exposure may affect morphological traits, such as beak color, which influence social interactions and mate choice.

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The analysis of ancient DNA allows scientists to trace human evolution and make important discoveries about modern populations. The data revealed by ancient DNA sampling can be valuable, but the human remains that carry this ancient DNA are often those of the ancestors of modern Indigenous groups, and some communities have expressed concerns about the ethics of sampling by outside parties. A group of scientists make the case for involvement of descendant communities in all aspects of the research process.

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Smallpox was once one of humanity's most devastating diseases, but its origin is shrouded in mystery. For years, scientific estimates of when the smallpox virus first emerged have been at odds with historical records. Now, a new study reveals that the virus dates back 2,000 years further than scientists have previously shown, verifying historical sources and confirming for the first time that the disease has plagued human societies since ancient times.