Apart from the Black Death, there is not another historical disease that piques public interest quite like syphilis. The question of whether the bacterium responsible was brought to Europe from the New World following the voyage of Christopher Columbus, or…
A recent study has successfully carried out full genome sequencing of a person from ancient Egypt for the first time.
In this month’s ‘Science Notes’, we examine a recent paper that has developed a new method to identify ‘aneuploidies’ – conditions characterised by an atypical number of chromosomes – among a large array of individuals from Europe, spanning the Iron…
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…
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Svante Pääbo for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.
In this latest book by Alice Roberts, we are taken on a tour of prehistoric Britain through an in-depth exploration of seven of the most famous burials from this period found on these shores. Each main chapter of the book…