Blurs

The Yarlung Tsangpo River is one of Asia's most extraordinary rivers. It cuts through the Tibetan Plateau, plunges through a spectacular Himalayan canyon, and eventually becomes the Brahmaputra River, which flows through India and Bangladesh.  It is also at the centre of one of the world's most ambitious and controversial engineering projects. Where is the Yarlung Tsangpo River? The river begins in western Tibet, near the Angsi Glacier, and flows eastwards across the Tibetan Plateau before reaching the eastern Himalayas. Its journey takes it through some of the most remote and dramatic terrain on Earth. As it approaches Mount Namcha Barwa, the river makes a huge horseshoe-shaped turn known as the Great Bend. It then plunges through the spectacular Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon, before turning south into India. The river has different names along its journey: Tibet : Yarlung Tsangpo. Arunachal Pradesh, India : Siang, also known as the Dihang. Assam, India : Brahmaputra. Banglades...

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...

When people think of pyramids, Egypt immediately comes to mind.  Yet thousands of miles away, another collection of pyramid-like monuments rises from the landscape of China. Hidden among farmland, river valleys and remote plains are dozens of massive earthen structures that have fuelled speculation, conspiracy theories and archaeological fascination for decades. Often referred to as the "Chinese Pyramids", these enormous monuments are not temples or tombs of forgotten alien civilisations. Most are imperial mausoleums built for emperors, empresses and royal families over a period spanning more than a thousand years.  Yet despite what archaeologists have learned, many mysteries remain buried beneath their slopes. The Discovery That Sparked a Mystery Although local people had known about these structures for centuries, they remained largely unknown in the West until the twentieth century. Stories began circulating after American pilots flying over China during the Second World W...