On November 26, 2007, the Austrian National Library did something it hardly ever does: it took the Tabula Peutingeriana out of its climate-controlled display case and allowed the public to see it for a few hours. Due to its extreme fragility, the scroll was exhibited for just one day in Vienna, coinciding with its inclusion […]

The seasonal scarcity of fruits and vegetables drives bearded capuchin monkeys to significantly increase the hunting of small vertebrates, a behavior that researchers directly link to survival strategies that the ancestors of human beings may have used during periods of climatic instability. This is the main conclusion of a study published in PLOS One by […]

A multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and geologists has unearthed a 17th-century tomb in the Pień cemetery, in north-central Poland, that defies all funeral norms of the time. It is the grave of a woman between 17 and 19 years old, buried with two iron objects that, due to their placement and symbolism, reveal […]

In the interior of the Yucatán Peninsula, where jungle vegetation intertwines with the characteristic limestone of the region, a team of archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History has brought to light a settlement that completes the complex mosaic of the Maya civilization. This is K’oxol Ja’ II, an archaeological site made up […]

A team of French and Turkish researchers has published an exhaustive analysis of twelve obsidian arrowheads with intentional incisions found at the Neolithic site of Tepecik-Çiftlik, in the Cappadocia region (Turkey). These objects, dating between 7100 and 6100 BCE, represent an exceptional archaeological phenomenon: they are extremely rare and have only been found in Central […]

In 1919, when someone began to carefully examine the binding of an 8th-century codex preserved in the Chapter Archive of the Cathedral of Barcelona, they discovered that the back cover hid something more than leather and stitches. Beneath the skin, placed in folds, appeared ten fragments of papyrus. More than a century later, six of […]

In 1648, as Swedish troops looted Prague Castle at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, someone carried off among the spoils a volume that weighed 75 kilos and required two people to move. It was a book, the largest surviving illuminated manuscript of the entire Middle Ages, an object so disproportionate for its time […]

A team of archaeologists, led by the University of West Bohemia (UWB), has brought to light, near the town of Chleby, in present-day Czech Republic, a monumental structure dating back more than 6,500 years, identified as one of the oldest ritual centers in Central Europe. The first datings on organic material recovered at the site […]

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, have managed to reproduce in the laboratory the state of matter that filled the cosmos during its first millionth of a second after the Big Bang, using collisions between atomic nuclei much lighter than what was previously thought possible. This breakthrough, which the scientists […]