Middle East Archaeology News

Long before the advent of agriculture, hunter-gatherers began putting down roots in the Middle East, building more permanent homes and altering the ecological balance in ways that allowed the common house mouse to flourish, new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates.

Two partial archaic human skulls, from the Lingjing site, Xuchang, central China, provide a new window into the biology and populations patterns of the immediate predecessors of modern humans in eastern Eurasia.

A project exploring the role of East Africa in the evolution of modern humans has amassed the largest and most diverse collection of prehistoric bone harpoons ever assembled from the area. The collection offers clues about the behaviour and technology of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

New research indicates that Baltic hunter-gatherers were not swamped by migrations of early agriculturalists from the Middle East, as was the case for the rest of central and western Europe. Instead, these people probably acquired knowledge of farming and ceramics by sharing cultures and ideas -- rather than genes -- with outside communities.

Researchers working on ancient DNA extracted from human remains interred almost 8,000 years ago in a cave in the Russian Far East have found that the genetic makeup of certain modern East Asian populations closely resemble that of their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Middle Eastern Bitumen, a rare, tar-like material, is present in the seventh century ship buried at Sutton Hoo, according to a study by Pauline Burger and colleagues from the British Museum, UK and the University of Aberdeen.

Our most remote ancestors, hominines, had a diet richer and more varied that what it was thought until the present moment, according to an article published in the journal PLOS ONE by a team of the Biological Anthropology Unit from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the University of Barcelona.

Middle Stone Age humans in East Africa may have employed varied techniques to process ochre for functional and symbolic uses, according to a study published November 2, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Daniela Rosso from the University of Bordeaux, France, and colleagues.

An astonishing new cultural institution for the Middle East has now opened to the public. Situated on a hilltop near Ramallah in the West Bank, the $24m Palestinian Museum was opened officially in a gala inauguration ceremony on May 18.

Across the centuries, forming cooperative networks beyond cultural boundaries has been a way to overcome natural disasters.

Part of the Middle East and North Africa may become uninhabitable due to climate change

Researchers from the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) project write in the journal Nature Geoscience that they have identified an unprecedented, long-lasting cooling in the northern hemisphere 1500 years ago.

Sometimes old friends give you a surprise. Russian archaeologists were conducting a routine examination of an old sabre unearthed seven years ago in Yaroslavl - when it turned out to be oldest crucible steel weapon in East Europe.

A new analysis of a medieval cesspit in the Christian quarter of the old city of Jerusalem has revealed the presence of a number of ancient parasite eggs, providing a window into the nature and spread of infectious diseases in the Middle East during the 15th century.

It is possible people may have been making the trip from Easter Island to the Americas a long time before the Dutch commander Jakob Roggeveen arrived with his ships in 1722, according to new genomic evidence demonstrating that the Rapanui people living on that most isolated of islands had significant contact with Native American populations hundreds of years earlier. The findings reported that the Cell Press journal Current Biology yesterday provide the first genetic evidence for such an early trans-Pacific route between Polynesia and the Americas, an impressive trek of over 4,000 kilometers (nearly 2,500 miles).