Blurs

In 1950, two brothers cutting peat in a bog near Silkeborg, Denmark, made an extraordinary discovery. At first, they believed they had found the body of someone recently murdered. The man's face was remarkably well preserved. His eyes were closed, his expression peaceful, and around his neck was a leather cord. But this was no modern crime scene. The body was more than 2,000 years old. Known today as the Tollund Man, he is one of the best-preserved human remains ever discovered from prehistoric Europe.  His body survived because of an unusual combination of acidic water, low oxygen and the chemical conditions found inside peat bogs. Yet preservation is only part of the mystery. The question that has fascinated archaeologists for decades is much darker: Why was he killed and placed in the bog? A man frozen in time Tollund Man probably lived during the 4th century BCE, during Europe's Iron Age. When discovered, much of his body was still astonishingly intact. His face retained re...

For more than two decades, a small stone-lined grave on the Isles of Scilly posed an unusual archaeological puzzle. Inside were the possessions of someone who appeared to occupy two very different worlds. There was a sword and shield, objects strongly associated with warfare and traditionally linked to male burials. But there was also a beautifully made bronze mirror, an object much more commonly found in Iron Age graves associated with women. Only one person had been buried there. So who was this mysterious individual? When the grave was discovered on the island of Bryher in 1999, archaeologists could not answer the question. It would take more than 20 years — and a sophisticated scientific technique — to finally reveal the identity of the person buried there. A Discovery in a Cornish Field The discovery happened almost by accident. In 1999, archaeological investigations began after a farmer uncovered an Iron Age sword while working at Hillside Farm on Bryher. The excavation revealed ...

For years, the Denisovans were almost ghost-like. We knew they existed. We knew they had lived somewhere in Asia. We knew they had contributed DNA to some living human populations. And we knew remarkably little about what they actually did. The Denisovans became one of the strangest stories in human evolution precisely because their genetic legacy was much larger than their archaeological footprint. A few fragments of bone. A handful of teeth. Genetic traces surviving inside modern humans. And enormous gaps on the map. Now a cave in southwestern China is beginning to fill some of those gaps. Researchers working at Bianfu Cave in Yunnan have identified multiple Denisovan remains using ancient proteins and have reconstructed a remarkably long archaeological sequence stretching from approximately 190,000 to 70,000 years ago. The evidence suggests these people were repeatedly exploiting the landscape, hunting medium- and large-sized animals and using both stone and bone in ways that may no...

Ancient Egyptian artwork is revealing an unexpected ingredient list — and modern chemistry is beginning to expose recipes that survived for thousands of years. Walk into an Egyptian tomb and the first thing that catches your eye is colour. Brilliant reds, deep blacks, ochres, blue and green pigments. The images appear deceptively simple. Gods, kings, animals, plants and scenes from daily life are rendered in a relatively limited palette that has remained recognisable for thousands of years. But the colours themselves have a hidden history. They were not simply "paint". They were mixtures. Minerals were ground, plants were processed, organic substances were added, binders were prepared. And some of the ingredients have left behind chemical fingerprints that can still be detected today. Now researchers are using a technique called palaeoproteomics — the analysis of ancient proteins and peptides — to investigate those fingerprints. The results are revealing something surprising....