Middle East Archaeology News

Humans in the Middle East were using complex fishing tools and techniques by 12,000 years ago, according to a study published by Antonella Pedergnana of the Archaeological Research Centre and Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution in Mainz, Germany.

Archaeologists excavating a Slavic hillfort in the village of Chodlik, located in the Lublin Voivodeship of Poland, has discovered hundreds of artefacts from the Middle Ages.

After a long journey, a group of settlers sets foot on an otherwise empty land. A vast expanse separates them from other human beings, cutting off any possibility of outside contact. Their choices will make the difference between survival and death.

The transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age was apparently accompanied by severe droughts between 1302 and 1307 in Europe; this preceded the wet and cold phase of the 1310s and the resulting great famine of 1315-21.

Although coastlines have widely been proposed as potential corridors of past migration, the occupation of Africa's tropical coasts during the Stone Age is poorly known, particularly in contrast to the temperate coasts of northern and southern Africa.

An examination of two documented periods of climate change in the greater Middle East, between approximately 4,500 and 3,000 years ago, reveals local evidence of resilience and even of a flourishing ancient society despite the changes in climate seen in the larger region.

Around 100,000 years ago, the climate worsened abruptly and the environment of Central-Eastern Europe shifted from forested to open steppe/taiga habitat, promoting the dispersal of wooly mammoth, wooly rhino and other cold adapted species from the Arctic.

A joint research team led by Dr. MAO Fangyuan from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. MENG Jin from the American Museum of Natural History has reported a new multituberculate mammal, Sinobaatar pani, with well-preserved middle ear bones.

MSA toolkits first appear some 300 thousand years ago, at the same time as the earliest fossils of Homo sapiens, and are still in use 30 thousand years ago.

Physical evidence found in caves in Laos helps tell a story about a connection between the end of the Green Sahara, when once heavily vegetated Northern Africa became a hyper-arid landscape, and a previously unknown megadrought that crippled Southeast Asia 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.

The gender of the human remains found inside a cremation pyre pit in Beisamoun, Israel remains unknown. What is known is that the individual was a young adult injured by a flint projectile several months prior to their death in spring some 9,000 years ago.

Global warming will modify the distribution and abundance of fish worldwide, with effects on the structure and dynamics of food networks.

In the 1600s, two private chapels were erected as family burial sites for two noble families. One in the town Svendborg in Denmark, the other in Montella, Italy.

The Taxaceae are a distinct conifer family widely used in ornamental horticulture and are an important source of chemotherapeutic drugs (e.g., Paclitaxel).

Ancient humans deliberately collected perforated shells in order to string them together as beads, according to a study published by Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer (Tel Aviv University, Israel), Iris Groman-Yaroslavski (University of Haifa, Israel), and colleagues.