Since the early days of archaeology, people have been analysing the architecture of burial monuments, seeking connections between them to understand better how ancient populations were related. The advent of modern ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis added a new way of…
Dogs are man’s best (and oldest – see CA 352 and 401) friends, but how they came to be that way is still a bit of a mystery. Based on morphological changes and genetic estimations, they are believed to have…
In the complex story of human migration out of Africa, Homo sapiens are believed to have travelled steadily eastwards to Asia – eventually reaching Australia by around 50,000 years ago – but seem not to have moved into Europe for a period of 20,000 years.
DNA analysis of the Avar empire people, who lived on the Great Hungarian Plain some 1,500 years ago, is revealing details of their social structure, kinship practices, and marriage traditions. The Avar empire was founded by groups of mounted warriors…
Ballynahatty, in County Down, Northern Ireland, is an astonishing site that deserves to be far better known for what it tells us about Neolithic timber monuments. At the core of the site is a series of deep post pits that once held 471 tree-sized wooden posts. The newly published excavation report seeks to reconstruct the original appearance of the monument and tell the story of its creation, use, and deliberate destruction, as Chris Catling reports.
A long-lost Roman emperor. Who could resist such a headline? The media lapped it up. But how could anyone lose an emperor in the first place? It turns out that this emperor was self-declared, so he wasn’t really an emperor at all
In the decades since the cracking of the human genome, the study of ancient DNA – known as archaeogenetics – has had a dramatic effect on our understanding of the distant past. The analysis of genetic material preserved in archaeological…
Ancient human DNA is revolutionising our ability to detect human migration that occurred hundreds of years ago. Joscha Gretzinger and Stephan Schiffels explain how these advances have transformed our understanding of the past.
Ancient DNA analysis has identified individuals of Indigenous Maya, European, and West African origin in the city's cemetery.
Over the last decade, revolutions in the scientific analysis of archaeological material have allowed us to delve deeper into the origins and migrations of modern humans. Through the lens of Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary…
Recent DNA analysis of whalebone artefacts found at The Cairns, Orkney, has shed light on the relationship between these marine mammals and the site’s Iron Age community, as well as hinting why the large local broch may have been demolished…
A public-interest piece in Nature – published in response to their research paper about the Bell Beaker culture – discusses the ‘sometimes straining’ relationship between archaeologists and geneticists.