A 15th-century manuscript shows trees bearing (clockwise from top left): sweet apples, jujubes, lemons, cherries, dates, and sour apples. By 7,000 years ago, people in New Guinea were cultivating ...

A terracotta figurine in the form of a pig was made in Egypt around 3000 b.c., during the Early Dynastic period. Pork accounts for more than a third of the world’s meat, making pigs among the planet’s ...

Each cell in a plant, animal, or person contains millions, or even billions, of DNA base pairs—molecules connected by hydrogen bonds that are the building blocks of DNA. These base pairs collectively ...

A sculpture known as the Hell Mouth is one of several dozen fantastical creations dating to the sixteenth century that line the paths of a park called the Sacro Bosco, or Sacred Wood, near the central ...

It’s much easier to build a new building,” says Vassiliki Eleftheriou, “than to rebuild an ancient one.” Eleftheriou, an architect by training, is director of the Acropolis Restoration Service, where ...

Though her moment in time was short, Boudicca is a towering figure of British history. As the leader of a large popular uprising in A.D. 60, she has been lauded for her defense of Britain from ...

Artifacts (left to right) such as a chalcedony cameo depicting the god Dionysus, and a glass gem showing a wounded child of the mortal Niobe, a glass bead with an image of a sacred bull, probably made ...

Phys.org reports that a Kerma culture burial radiocarbon dated to between 1775 and 1609 B.C. has been discovered in Sudan’s Bayuda Desert, in what was once ancient Nubia, by a team of researchers ...

A village founded around 8,200 years ago on the banks of the Danube River in Serbia’s Iron Gates Gorge has puzzled archaeologists ever since it was excavated in the 1960s. Called Lepenski Vir, the ...

How the first excavations in an ancient city are supporting its claim as the oldest continuously inhabited place in the world The booming city of Erbil (ancient Arbela) in Kurdistan encircles the ...

The earliest evidence for encounters between humans and horses is found at Paleolithic sites in Eurasia. Butchered horse bones indicate that early peoples used horses as an important source of food.

The World Heritage site of Chauvet Cave in southern France is famous—and a source of both wonder and controversy—for having the world’s oldest cave paintings. When the cave was discovered in 1994, ...