The movies make it seem like someday we’ll be able to make people and objects grow really big or shrink really small. Whether this will be possible comes down to the smallest of things.
The DNA of microbes and food trapped in the teeth can reveal information about diet and health.
A scene from the Books of the Dead (based at the Egyptian Museum) shows the ibis-headed god Thoth recording the result of “the final judgement”.
Wasef et al./PLOS ONE
An estimated 1.75 million ibises were deposited at a single location in ancient Egypt. But the birds disappeared entirely from the region around 1850, and no one knows why.
The Turin mummy was deliberately preserved, not just desiccated by dry, hot sands.
R. Bianucci
A mummy unearthed during construction in Iran may be the body of a former shah. For the Islamic regime, the discovery is an unwelcome reminder of Iran’s secular past. For protesters, it holds promise.
Who gets to decide for the dead, such as this Egyptian mummy?
AP Photo/Ric Feld
Are DNA samples today’s version of the human skeletons that hung in 20th-century natural history museums? They can provide genetic revelations about our species’ history – but at an ethical price.
The earliest hominin cancer.
Patrick Randolph-Quinney (University of Central Lancashire/University of the Witwatersrand)
Cancer is not the modern disease many believe it to be. New fossil evidence from two South African caves suggests that its origins lie deep in prehistory.
This clay facial reconstruction of Kennewick Man, carefully sculpted around the morphological features of his skull, suggests how he may have looked alive nearly 9,000 years ago.
Brittney Tatchell, Smithsonian Institution
A 9,000-year-old skeleton became a high-profile and highly contested case for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. How do we respectfully deal with ancient human remains?
A morbid curiosity makes it hard not to be fascinated.
Yelp Inc.
You don’t have to be a physician or anatomist to be curious about how bodies work. Exhibits of dead human specimens have been around for quite a while – capitalizing on our fascination with death.
A three-dimensional volume rendering of the Tuli mummy.
SA Journal of Science
Modern techniques such as CT scanning and ancient DNA analysis have allowed scientists to discover a great deal about a mummy found in a shallow grave in Botswana.