Maeve, age 8, has a question that has stumped many scientists over the years. And that’s because it’s a surprisingly tricky question to answer. It depends a bit on what you mean by ‘person’.
The shipwreck of the Batavia and subsequent murders of 115 men, women and children have inspired many retellings. A new exhibition combines art and science to find new angles on an old tale.
Research of ancient DNA has tended to ignore previous studies about the bones themselves.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
A rush of ancient DNA projects in Africa has presented the curators of archaeological skeletons with ethical issues because research requires the destruction of human bone.
Detail from Rowan Conroy, Paphos Theatre Full Moon, April 2006.
Archaeologists have a long tradition of taking artists along on their expeditions. A new exhibition in Cyprus aims to revive the practice.
This picture of a reconstruction of a hominin skull is one of a variety of multimedia that can be experienced in the Origins Virtual Reality experience.
Wits University
Bringing the past into a digital space creates so much more overt space for interpretation and different narratives.
Vandalised site, showing fresh sand along the edges of the slab where it has been lifted and the holes left by the removal of two blocks in the centre.
Babis Fassoulas
Today the phrase ‘all roads leads to Rome’ means that there’s more than one way to reach the same goal. But in Ancient Rome, all roads really did lead to the eternal city, which was at the centre of a vast road network.
We tend to think of archaeological sites as dead silent – empty ruins left by past cultures. But this isn’t how the people who lived in and used these sites would have experienced them.
Excavating the eastern wall section of Halmyris in 2016.
Emily Hanscam
A team of archaeologists strived to improve the reproducibility of their results, influencing their choices in the field, in the lab and during data analysis.