All posts tagged: Prehistoric

The End of Oak Street review: Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor go prehistoric

The End of Oak Street review: Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor go prehistoric

Published by Daniella Wilson

A star rating of 4 out of 5. High concept doesn’t always equal high quality – we like sharks! We like tornadoes! Job done! But in this instance “dinosaurs in the suburbs” works a dream. It’s a loving homage to Steven Spielberg and The End of Oak Street less rips off Jurassic Park, ET and Jaws and more relies on audiences’ love for those films and the nostalgia they are imbued with to bring a fresh take to the ‘Spielburbia’ sub-genre. In the hands of director David Robert Mitchell, who made breakout horror hit It Follows, this is a moving, funny and thrilling family-friendly 12A romp, which still has a murky dark heart at the centre. Set (initially) in 1982, Oak Street lies in a friendly neighbourhood of kids on bikes, perfect lawns sullied by naughty dogs, school bullies and hot new high-schoolers. The Platt family – mum Denise (Anne Hathaway), dad Greg (Ewan McGregor) and kids Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), with rescue dog Starbuck, are ostensibly the perfect unit, but beneath …

DNA Study Could Reveal Who Made Prehistoric Cave Paintings

DNA Study Could Reveal Who Made Prehistoric Cave Paintings

Published by Jenni Sidey

Provenance is everything in the art world. Auction houses spend years tracing the ownership history of a painting from one collector to the next. But for some of humanity’s oldest works of art, the provenance goes cold tens of thousands of years ago. Who painted the bison on the walls of Altamira? Who pressed a hand against damp limestone before blowing red pigment around their fingers? Archaeologists have spent generations trying to answer questions like those. A new study suggests genetics could finally provide part of the answer. Related Articles Researchers working in caves across Spain and Portugal have recovered ancient human DNA directly from cave walls, opening a new way of studying the people who created—or at least occupied—the sites where some of humanity’s oldest surviving works of art remain. Before anyone imagines archaeologists identifying the prehistoric equivalent of Michelangelo, there are limits. The researchers are not claiming they can identify the individual artist behind a painted bison or hand stencil. Instead, they believe the technique could reveal who used these caves, when they were …

Prehistoric plague could have caused population collapse in stone age Europe

Prehistoric plague could have caused population collapse in stone age Europe

Published by skeptic

Did a major epidemic of plague trigger a prolonged collapse in Europe’s population in late neolithic times – from around 5,600 to 4,000 years ago? In Europe, the neolithic is part of the stone age, spanning the time from the introduction of agriculture by migrant groups from Anatolia, up until the bronze age. Scientists now know that prehistoric plague infected neolithic farmers in Europe. What hasn’t been clear until now is whether these early strains of the plague bacterium were even deadly. New evidence shows that they were, but other factors still don’t line up to support the evidence for a late neolithic epidemic. Plague DNA found in human remains from over 4,000 years ago is genetically quite different to the plague strains which caused the Black Death in Europe. Prehistoric plague strains lack a gene that allows the bacteria to effectively hijack fleas, turning them into bubonic plague delivery systems. They also have ancestral forms of other genes that are known to be important in promoting virulence. Detections of prehistoric plague cases were also …

Early prototype of Stonehenge unearthed 3 miles from prehistoric landmark

Early prototype of Stonehenge unearthed 3 miles from prehistoric landmark

Published by Sam Flores

LONDON — It’s just a stone’s throw away, but archaeologists have discovered an earlier and simpler version of Britain’s iconic Stonehenge that predates the ancient landmark by around 500 years. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content. Researchers uncovered two large pits that they believe once held towering wooden posts in the village of Bulford 3 miles to the east of Stonehenge in southern England, according to a news release from Wessex Archaeology, whose team made the discovery. “Up till now, our knowledge of this ancient feat of astronomy was based on Stonehenge and other monuments of a similar period,” Phil Harding, who led the excavation, said in the news release Thursday. “But what we’ve discovered at Bulford is 500 years earlier than the famous stones we know so well.” While the timber has long since rotted away, the posts lined up to point directly at the rising sun during the summer solstice and the setting sun at the winter solstice — in the same way as …

Oldest traces of plague discovered in prehistoric teens buried in Russia

Oldest traces of plague discovered in prehistoric teens buried in Russia

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. The word  “plague” typically conjures horrible visions of the  bubonic plague , that  killed over one third of Europe’s population during the 1300s. The bacterium that causes the plague, however, is much older than the medieval era. In fact, the disease has been torturing humans for at least 5,500 years, according to a study published today in the journal Nature .  In the paper, researchers detail how they recovered and sequenced ancient DNA from the teeth of 42 prehistoric hunter-gatherers—including several children and teenagers—from four sites near Lake Baikal in Siberia, Russia. The total genetic material included DNA from the individuals themselves, and the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which they found in 18 of the hunter-gatherers.  Their work represents the oldest detection of …

Oldest evidence of the plague found in prehistoric graves, rewriting its history

Oldest evidence of the plague found in prehistoric graves, rewriting its history

Published by Sam Flores

In prehistoric graves of children in Siberia, scientists have found the world’s oldest evidence of a plague outbreak. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content. The discovery, described in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, rewrites the history of one of the most consequential diseases in human history. The graves, on the banks of the Angara River, contained remains from multiple generations of hunter-gatherers, along with archaeological remnants like arrowheads that date back about 5,500 years. When researchers did genetic testing on the skeletons’ teeth, they found DNA of the bacterium that causes plague in about 40%. A shared grave with three children, two of whom were identified as half-sisters 9 to 10 years old and 5 to 6 years old. The third occupant is a boy 11 to 12 years old who wasn’t closely related but was buried at the same time and found to have plague DNA.Courtesy Vladimiri Bazaliiskii The study’s lead author, Ruairidh Macleod, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, …

First-ever amber discovery in Antarctica reveals lost prehistoric rainforest

First-ever amber discovery in Antarctica reveals lost prehistoric rainforest

Published by Jenni Sidey

Amber usually brings to mind tropical forests, trapped insects, and warm landscapes. That is what makes the new Antarctic find so striking. Buried beneath the Amundsen Sea, tiny resin fragments now suggest that about 90 million years ago, near the South Pole, swampy conifer forests were growing in a much warmer world. The material is the first fossil resin ever reported from Antarctica. Researchers found it in a thin lignite layer at the top of a roughly 3-meter-long carbonaceous mudstone sequence of mid-Cretaceous age, recovered from the Pine Island trough in West Antarctica. The core came from Site PS104_20, at 73.57° south and 107.09° west, in 946 meters of water. It was drilled from the seafloor in early 2017 during RV Polarstern Expedition PS104 using the MARUM-MeBo70 seafloor drill rig. Until now, amber had been described from every continent except Antarctica. Southern Hemisphere continental configuration ~90 million years ago, including sites of southernmost amber finds: the ‘Otway amber’ (green cross; Quinney et al.2015), the Tupuangi amber (yellow cross; Mays et al.2017) and the ‘Pine Island …

Prehistoric child’s finger bone, bear tooth pendant, and more discovered in Spanish cave

Prehistoric child’s finger bone, bear tooth pendant, and more discovered in Spanish cave

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Life at high altitudes is unforgiving. The thin air and atmosphere make breathing and other bodily functions difficult—especially for humans. However, a cave over 7,000 feet above sea level in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain is forcing archaeologists to rethink how often our prehistoric ancestors made use of these heights.  A team found a cave in Spain full of hearths, jewelry, and human remains, indicating that people may have been living at this incredibly high altitude as long as 5,500 years ago. A child’s finger bone and a baby tooth discovered among the rock also means this cave may have been a burial site. The cave and its findings are detailed in a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. For decades, archeologists believed that high-mountain environments like these were places that prehistoric communities only passed through occasionally. Cave 338 is 7,332 feet above sea level in Spain’s Núria Valley. The team dug through …

Prehistoric Altar with Human Remains Discovered in Central Mexico

Prehistoric Altar with Human Remains Discovered in Central Mexico

Published by José Betancourt

Researchers working on an archaeological salvage project related to construction of a passenger train between Querétaro and Mexico City discovered a 1,000-year-old stone altar. The discovery was first reported in March, and was uncovered within the Tula Archaeological Monument Zone, a Toltec site in the central state of Hidalgo, according to Mexico’s INAH (the National Institute of Anthropology and History). When the three-level altar was excavated from the test pit, the project archaeologists discovered four human skulls abutting the monument, along with several long bones, which are believed to be femurs. There is also a black ceramic bowl, fragments of obsidian, and several blades with the altar. It is about three feet long on each side and is made up of andesite, river stones, and basalt rock. Related Articles “Each discovery like this expands our knowledge of one of the great civilizations of Mesoamerica,” said Claudia Curiel de Icaza, Mexico’s secretary of culture. She went on to explain that the project “reinforces a central conviction of our cultural policy: Mexico’s archaeological heritage is the memory …

Why don’t giant prehistoric insects still exist?

Why don’t giant prehistoric insects still exist?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Three hundred million years ago, dragonfly-like creatures with wingspans stretching 70 centimeters patrolled the skies of a world nothing like our own. These griffinflies, as paleontologists call them, were the largest flying insects ever to exist, roughly five times the size of any dragonfly alive today. For three decades, scientists thought they knew why such animals could never return: modern air simply doesn’t contain enough oxygen to power them. New research published in Nature dismantles that explanation entirely. A team working across five years and more than a thousand microscope images has found that the respiratory structures of insect flight muscles occupy so little anatomical space that insects could, in principle, easily compensate for lower oxygen levels by growing more of them. The oxygen content of Earth’s ancient atmosphere, the theory goes, was not the reason griffinflies grew enormous. And it almost certainly is not the reason giant flying insects don’t exist today. That second question, what actually does limit insect size, now has no clean answer. The long-extinct griffinfly (left) dwarfs even today’s heavyweight …