Archaeology & History

An Egyptian-American team of archaeologists has uncovered a 5,000-year-old brewery capable of producing some 22,400 litres of beer at a time, the Egyptian Tourism Ministry has announced. The ministry said in a Facebook statement on Saturday that it believed that the site at North Abydos, Sohag, was "the oldest high-production brewery in the world."

Although the existence of the brewery was ascertained by British archaeologists at the start of the 20th century, its precise location has not been identified until now, according to the statement.

The 2000-year-old mummies were buried with golden artifacts as tongues, in order to be able to speak in their afterlife.

"The mission discovered 16 tombs cut into the rock... in the temple of Taposiris Magna, west of Alexandria," the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities said in a statement reported.

A well-preserved dinosaur footprint has been discovered on a beach near Barry in south Wales and could help scientists establish more about how dinosaurs walked.

Four-year-old Lily Wilder and her family made the discovery whilst out on a walk in their local area in January.

Lily was the first to spot the new footprint on a loose block near the sea at Bendricks Bay - a well-known beach for its dinosaur footprints, preserved for 220 million years in desert muds.

Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum of Wales Palaeontology curator Cindy Howells was notified of the find and has described it as the best specimen ever found on this beach. The specimen is a type of footprint called Grallator, although it is impossible to identify which dinosaur made the print 220 million years ago.

"This is a completely unique discovery," said Erik Seiffert, the study's lead author and Professor of Clinical Integrative Anatomical Sciences at Keck School of Medicine of USC. "We're suggesting that this group might have made it over to South America right around what we call the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary, a time period between two geological epochs when the Antarctic ice sheet started to build up and the sea level fell," said Seiffert.

When Seiffert was asked to help describe these specimens in 2016, he noticed the similarity of the two broken upper molars to an extinct 32 million-year-old parapithecid monkey species from Egypt he had studied previously. Fossils discovered at the same site in Peru had earlier offered the first proof that South American monkeys evolved from African primates.

Archaeologists have found a snack bar during excavations in Pompeii that is surprisingly well preserved. Rooster on a stick or lamb to go instead of burgers and fries - in the ancient city of Pompeii, fast food was apparently also eaten, but not the same dishes as we do today. The reason for this assumption is a find by archaeologists. The researchers have excavated an exceptionally well-preserved street restaurant: a colourfully painted counter and imprints of food.

In clay pots, archaeologists also discovered duck bones and remains of pigs, goats, fish and snails that may have been cooked together. The findings are expected to provide information about eating habits in Pompeii at the time of the disaster in 79 AD.

Underwater archeologists, who were commissioned by the environmental organization WWF to clean the Baltic sea from abandoned fishing nets, found inside of one of those fishing nets an old German Enigma machine from the Second World War. The Enigma machine from the M3 series was probably part of one of the vessels which were sunk by the German Kriegsmarine in 1945 during the operation "Regenbogen" to avoid surrendering them to the Allied Forces.

Cambridge University Library has announced that two notebooks written by Charles Darwin, have been missing for 20 years. One of them contains the 19th Century scientist's famous Tree of Life sketch, exploring the evolutionary relationship between species. Curators have now concluded they have probably been stolen.

The mystery of the 2005 excavated grave in Krems-Wachtberg in Austria, which is about 31000 years old and in which two skeletons of new-born children were found, was unraveled by Archeologists of the Natural History Museum Vienna and the University Vienna. Gene analytics showed that the two boys, who were buried under a mammoth scapula, were identical twin brothers.

The one boy died during or shortly after birth, the second one about six or seven weeks later. Those children are the oldest recorded identical human twins. A nearby found skeleton of a male toddler of 13 or 14 weeks appears to be related to both brothers - he was their cousin.

In September 2020, two archaeologists, Rupert Gebhard from the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection in Munich, and Rüdiger Krause from the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main, expressed doubts that the world-famous Nebra sky disk, part of the UNESCO Memory of the world register, which is assumed to be the oldest concrete depiction of the cosmos, really is 3.600 years old, as stated by the state archeologist of Saxony-Anhalt.

Gebhard and Krause claim, that the sky disk is about a thousand years younger and thus from the Iron Age, not the Bronze Age. A research group, consisting of thirteen scientists, now has found more evidence, that the original dating was correct and therefore the doubts are unsubstantial.

Scientists at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz got new insights into the famous mills of Barbegal, which date from the Roman imperial age. The sophisticated techonology of the mills is a strong indicator for industrial work in the Roman antiquity according to Professor Cees Willem Passchier, lead researcher of the team.

New findings from the period between 12000 and 6000 BCE, made in South America, indicate that about 30 to 50 percent of women in that period in Mesoamerica have been huntresses and regularly engage in hunts even for big game like mammoths. This stands opposite of common ideas about women being gatherers and men being hunters in the Palaeolithic age.