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Every old object has a story to tell.
When researchers dust off an object during an excavation, a new window opens into the past. Each piece recovered is a small clue that often leads to a larger mystery begging to be solved.
For example, construction workers recently unearthed a nearly 2,000-year-old statue while constructing a parking lot in the United Kingdom. First, one of the crew found a marble head of a Roman lady, and two weeks later the bust turned up nearby, reuniting the pieces.
But how did the statue, probably bought by the ninth Earl of Exeter for his Burghley House estate in the 18th century, come to be buried outside? Until additional evidence emerges, the estate says it is a “complete mystery.”
These historical ties allow us to find similarities with people who lived millennia ago. And sometimes an entire place can be found frozen in time, upending the way we understand everyday life as it happened centuries ago.
We are family
Must Farm was a thriving Bronze Age stilt village perched above a river in eastern England when it burned down 2,850 years ago – just nine months after its residents built it.
Hailed by experts as ‘Britain’s Pompeii’, the site has preserved rare data that reveals a new, less hierarchical portrait of Bronze Age society. The excavation of Must Farm (above) took place in 2016.
Extensive research near Peterborough revealed remarkably well-preserved bits of life, including a spoon left in a half-eaten bowl of porridge, along with other artefacts such as wooden buckets and ceramics.
“One of those buckets… the bottom of it had a lot of cut marks on it, so we know that people living in that Bronze Age kitchen when they needed a makeshift cutting board, they just turned that bucket upside down,” said Chris Wakefield, a archaeologist at the University of Cambridge.
Dig this
When paleontologists decided to take a closer look at a tiny, 270-million-year-old amphibian skull tucked away in a fossil collection, they made a kind of rainbow connection to Kermit the Frog.
The fossil, with its big eyes and cartoonish grin, bore such a striking resemblance to Jim Henson’s beloved Muppets character that the newly identified species is now named Kermitops gratus.
The slightly crushed skull remained unstudied at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History for 40 years before researchers examined it. And the specimen could help researchers solve an evolutionary puzzle about early amphibians that lived before the dinosaurs.
Throughout the universe
Astronomers have discovered two streams of ancient stars that likely helped build the Milky Way galaxy billions of years ago.
The scientists discovered the stellar wonders using the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, allowing them to conduct a bit of ‘galactic archaeology’ in the heart of our own galaxy.
The streams, named Shakti and Shiva after Hindu gods, were likely parts of other galaxies that merged in the Milky Way’s infancy between 12 and 13 billion years ago.
Speaking of stars, NASA expects that a violent outburst called a nova will cause a “new star” to appear in the night sky between now and September.
Power of nature
When a supervolcano erupted 74,000 years ago, it likely caused a climate change that could also be felt by early humans in Africa.
Initially, researchers thought the eruption would have been severe enough to cause a volcanic winter, which could have wiped out many of our ancient ancestors.
Microscopic fragments of volcanic glass, found alongside stone tools and animal remains near Ethiopia’s Shinfa River, showed how people survived – and adapted – after the eruption.
Now, a new analysis has revealed that arid conditions caused by the cataclysmic event could have created a pivotal time when humanity migrated from Africa to live around the world.
Fantastic creatures
Giant pandas have striking patterns, but it turns out they’re not all black and white.
A rare handful of bears with brown and white fur inhabit a single mountain range in China.
With only 11 reported sightings of the creatures in the Qinling Mountains of Shaanxi province since a forest ranger first spotted one in 1985, researchers believed the unusual coloration was the result of inbreeding.
By studying pandas in the wild and in captivity, including a male brown panda named Qizai, researchers discovered that there is a recessive genetic trait – similar to that for blue eyes or red hair in humans – behind the brown fur.
Curiosities
You might do a double take after reading these stories:
– About 25 million years ago, an evolutionary shift involving a “jumping gene” occurred that caused great apes and eventually humans to lose their tails.
– A 4,000-year-old stone bottle found in southeastern Iran is believed to be the oldest known tube of red lipstick.
Despite a faulty metal detector, a treasure hunter has found the largest gold nugget believed to have ever been found in England.
– An unusual horned “devil comet” will be visible in the sky during the total solar eclipse, but experts recommend keeping an eye out for it until the end of March.
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