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Ancient Scandinavians wrote encrypted messages in runes 1500 years ago

5 July 2023

Objects from Norway and Sweden, some dating from AD 500 to 700, show clear evidence of encryption using runic symbols, the alphabet later used by the Vikings

Humans were kissing at least 4500 years ago, reveal ancient texts

18 May 2023

Many sources claim sexual kissing spread worldwide from South Asia 3500 years ago, but there is evidence it was practised in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt much earlier than that

Midas Mound Gordion and landscape and cereal crop

A three-year drought may have brought down the ancient Hittite empire

8 February 2023

Wood from a burial chamber in modern Turkey reveals there was a sudden severe drought around the time Hittite cities were abandoned 3000 years ago

The mummy of a boy digitally unwrapped in four stages

Egyptian boy mummy was buried with a ‘second heart’ made of gold

24 January 2023

X-rays have been used to digitally unwrap the mummy of a teenage boy dating back about 2300 years, revealing 49 precious protective amulets, including a gold scarab signifying the heart

Owl-like engravings from Copper Age may have been made by children

1 December 2022

Slate plaques from about 5000 years ago engraved with images of what look like owls may have been children’s artwork rather than funeral offerings, but not everyone is convinced

17th-century infant's life and health revealed by 'virtual autopsy'

26 October 2022

A young child found in an unmarked coffin in an Austrian crypt was exceptionally well preserved, and his bones and organs show signs of rickets and pneumonia

The analysis of a grave at Issendorf cemetery in Germany

DNA records reveal mass migration from Europe into Anglo-Saxon Britain

21 September 2022

In some parts of England in Anglo-Saxon times, more than three-quarters of the population's ancestry could be traced to recent migration from Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Jamie Wiseman/Daily Mail/Shutterstock (2654098a) Soldiers Turned Archaeologists Pictured At Work On The Barrow Clump Anglo-saxon And Bronze Age Burial Site On Salisbury Plains One Of The Most Important Discoveries Was The Find Of A Skeleton Of An Anglo-saxon Male Found With His Spear And His Almost Completely Preserved Bronze And Wooden Cup See Ian Drury Story 11 7 12 Soldiers Turned Archaeologists Pictured At Work On The Barrow Clump Anglo-saxon And Bronze Age Burial Site On Salisbury Plains. One Of The Most Important Discoveries Was The Find Of A Skeleton Of An Anglo-saxon Male Found With His Spear And His Almos

Buried review: Did the Anglo-Saxons really invade Britain?

25 May 2022

Who were the Anglo-Saxons? Biological anthropologist Alice Roberts's informed, sophisticated new take digs deep to re-examine their true origins

A farmer?s wife breastfeeds her baby while two other women give water to a child from a pitcher. From The Five Senses Series by Fredrick Bloemaert, after Abraham Bloemaert, 1632-1670. CREDIT: F. Bloemaert/A. Bloemaert/N. Visscherimage/Rijks Museum/Public Domain

Women in a 19th-century Dutch farming village didn't breastfeed

13 April 2022

An analysis of bones from about 500 individuals who died between 1830 and 1867 in Middenbeemster suggests women in the dairy farming community did not breastfeed

letter from Queen Marie-Antoinette to Count de Fersen

Marie Antoinette's censored love letters have been read using X-rays

1 October 2021

Love letters that Marie Antoinette wrote to a Swedish count have been impossible to read because he added extra handwriting on top of hers – but now the original words have been deciphered with X-rays