Search results for carved stone

Archaeology Mar 21, 2024

Plant material on obsidian blades on Rapa Nui suggests settlers there visited South America and returned

A team of archaeologists affiliated with several institutions in Chile reports evidence that early settlers on the island of Rapa Nui sailed to South America, interacted with people living there and then returned. In their ...

Archaeology Feb 14, 2024

New evidence of independent written language on Easter Island before arrival of Europeans

A team of philologists, chemists, environmental physicists and engineers affiliated with several institutions across Europe has found evidence of an undeciphered script on wooden tablets created on Easter Island that represents ...

Plants & Animals Feb 13, 2024

The world's spectacular animal migrations are dwindling. Fishing, fences and development are fast-tracking extinctions

In 1875, trillions of Rocky Mountain locusts gathered and began migrating across the western United States in search of food. The enormous swarm covered an area larger than California. Three decades later, these grasshoppers ...

Earth Sciences Feb 6, 2024

Geoscientists find Pacific plate is scored by large undersea faults that are pulling it apart

A team of geoscientists from the University of Toronto is shedding new light on the century-old model of plate tectonics, which suggests the plates covering the ocean floors are rigid as they move across the Earth's mantle.

Archaeology Jan 30, 2024

Study of ancient adornments suggests nine distinct cultures lived in Europe during the Paleolithic

A team of anthropologists at Université Bordeaux has found evidence of nine distinct cultures living in what is now Europe during the Gravettian period. In their study, reported in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the ...

Archaeology Jan 3, 2024

New England stone walls deserve a science of their own

The abandoned fieldstone walls of New England are every bit as iconic to the region as lobster pots, town greens, sap buckets and fall foliage. They seem to be everywhere—a latticework of dry, lichen-crusted stone ridges ...

Ecology Jan 1, 2024

The zaï technique: How farmers in the Sahel grow crops with little to no water

Hubert Reeves once wrote that "on the cosmic scale, liquid water is rarer than gold". And what is true for the universe is even truer in the Sahel, the name given to the vast, arid belt that skirts the Sahara and stretches ...

General Physics Dec 14, 2023

Lighting a fire using friction requires an understanding of physics principles—there are ways to make the process easier

Humans have been making fire using friction for thousands of years, with evidence of its use found in archaeological records across different cultures worldwide.

General Physics Nov 30, 2023

Study suggests nature may have had a hand in shaping Great Sphinx of Giza

A trio of experimental physicists and applied mathematicians at New York University has found evidence that Egypt's Great Sphinx of Giza may have originated as a natural formation. For their study, published in the journal ...

Archaeology Nov 15, 2023

Late Prehistoric discovery turns archaeological assumptions on their head

For a team of archaeologists digging in southwest Spain, the discovery of a Bronze/Iron Age stela—a funerary stone slab with carvings depicting an important individual—would have been exciting enough. But to find a stela ...

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