Scienceblogtwo

A barrier island off the coasts of Virginia and Maryland has had its history rewritten by an abandoned Caribbean colony unearthed centuries later and a case of identity confusion in the archaeological record. These ostensibly unrelated strands were knitted together when Nicolas Delsol, a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History, set out to investigate ancient DNA extracted from cow bones found in archaeological sites. Delsol sought to understand the origins of cattle domestication in the Americas, and he found the answer in the genetic data contained in thousands of year-old teeth. They did, however, also have a surprise. It was a happy accident, he claimed. "For my Ph.D., I sequenced mitochondrial DNA from fossil cow teeth, and when I evaluated the sequences, I noticed something was really wrong with one of the specimens." The DNA of one of the earliest horses brought to the Americas, represented by this tooth, is helping to rewrite the history of the...

Geographers frequently go to the past for the answers to what environmental challenges our planet's warming globe will bring about in the future. The pyramids of Giza, one of the most famous man-made structures in the world, were made possible by the environment of ancient Egypt, according to a new study that was published on August 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors of the study discovered that people need the waterway to move tools and other supplies like stones and limestones to the Giza Plateau for pyramid construction on a now-dry arm of the Nile River known as the Khufu branch. Sheisha Hader, a physical geographer at the University of Aix-Marseille in France and the study's principal author, adds that the Nile was an essential resource for ancient Egypt's transportation, food, land for farming, and water supplies.                                      ...

Researchers have deciphered ancient recipes for bronze, including two linguistically tricky components, using analyses of a 2,300-year-old manuscript and coins. The Kao Gong Ji, which is the oldest technical encyclopedia that is known to exist, was composed approximately 300 BC and is a section of a larger work known as The Rites of Zhou. The ancient literature covers objects like swords, bells, axes, knives, and mirrors, along with instructions on how to create them, and includes six scientific formulas for combining bronze. Two of the essential elements, "jin" and "xi," have been translated only imperfectly during the past century. According to experts, these phrases were a translation for copper and tin, two essential ingredients in the production of bronze. However, when scientists attempted to recreate the formulas, the resulting metal didn't match the makeup of ancient Chinese artifacts. Two experts now think they have correctly deciphered the full signifi...