Genetic research suggests that all modern Europeans have common ancestors who lived 1,000 years ago.

Whether they are a Serb and a Swiss, or a Finn and a Frenchman, any two Europeans are likely to have many common ancestors who lived around 1,000 years ago. A genomic survey of 2,257 people from 40 populations finds that people of European ancestry are more closely related to one another than previously thought, and could help to bring about new insights into European history.

The first efforts to trace human ancestry through DNA relied on ‘uniparental genetic markers’ — DNA sequences from the mitochondrial genome, which is inherited through mothers, or on the Y chromosome, which men inherit from their fathers.

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Story: Ewen Callaway, Nature | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A quarry, complete with ancient tools, has been uncovered in Jerusalem.

Some of the huge stones would’ve reached about 6.5 feet (2 meters) in length and weighed tens if not hundreds of tons, the researchers said.

In total, the team uncovered an area of around 11,000 square feet (1,000 square meters) where the ancient quarry would’ve existed. The quarry connects with other previously identified quarries, all of which seem to be situated in Jerusalem’s so-called “city of quarries” dating to the Second Temple period.

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Story: Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience | Photo: Clara Amit, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority

Researchers have mapped the medieval port town of Dunwich which was submerged by the waters of the Dunwich River in the 15th century.

He comments, “Visibility under the water at Dunwich is very poor due to the muddy water. This has limited the exploration of the site.

“We have now dived on the site using high resolution DIDSON ™ acoustic imaging to examine the ruins on the seabed — a first use of this technology for non-wreck marine archaeology.

“DIDSON technology is rather like shining a torch onto the seabed, only using sound instead of light. The data produced helps us to not only see the ruins, but also understand more about how they interact with the tidal currents and sea bed.”

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Story: Science Daily | Photo: University of Southampton

Roman-era mosaics have been found in the ancient city of Milas in southwestern Turkey.

Milas District Governor Bahattin Atç?, gendarmerie Lt. Col. Ertu?rul Memi? and gendarmerie Lt. Gürkan Uygun held a press conference on Friday about the findings. Atç? said he believes the newly found tiles will significantly contribute to Turkey’s cultural wealth. “We already knew that there were very precious historical artifacts in the region. We need to focus more on unearthing them,” he said.

Atç? noted that the mosaic tiles that have been found might be as valuable as ones found in the ancient city of Zeugma in the southern province of Gaziantep. Zeugma is one of the four most important historical settlements under the reign of the Kingdom of Commagene.

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Story: World Bulletin | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The graves of an infant and and adult have been found during excavations at the Church of Saints James and Philip just outside of Milan, Italy.

Excavations of the Church of Saints James and Philip, which began in March, led to discoveries that are especially important to the history of the Lombardy region and its earliest inhabitants.

Findings related to the community, once known as Nocetum, include tombs of an infant and an adult, and coins dating from the time of Roman emperor Magnentius, usurper of the empire from 350 to 353.

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Story: Ansa.It | Photo: Guarda la foto

The remains of a British soldier who died during a battle in 1799 has been found in a sand dune in the Netherlands.

For more than two centuries, the remains of a soldier lay undisturbed on a windy beach in the northern Netherlands.

But in March 2011, birdwatchers discovered bones and metal artefacts among sand-dunes that had once been covered in asphalt.

The find was near an area known as the “Bonehole” because of the number of historic remains that had previously been unearthed.

A team of archaeologists was called in to dig further. Among them was 28-year-old Esther Poulus, whose involvement was to lead her to the National Archives in Kew, Surrey, in an attempt to discover the identity of the fallen soldier.

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Story: Caroline Wyatt, BBC News | BBC News

A research team has discovered that the Cerro del Gentil pyramid in Peru aligns perfectly with two geoglyphs and the setting sun.

An ancient astronomical alignment in southern Peru has been discovered by researchers between a pyramid, two stone lines and the setting sun during the winter solstice. During the solstice, hundreds of years ago, the three would have lined up to frame the pyramid in light.

The two stone lines, called geoglyphs, are located about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) east-southeast from the pyramid. They run for about 1,640 feet (500 meters), and researchers say the lines were “positioned in such a way as to frame the pyramid as one descended down the valley from the highlands.”

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Story: Owen Jarus, LiveScience | Laura Griffin

New research suggests that the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon may actually have been built in Niniveh, 300 miles from Babylon.

The evidence presented by Dalley, an expert in ancient Middle Eastern languages, emerged from deciphering Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform scripts and reinterpreting later Greek and Roman texts. They included a 7th-century BC Assyrian inscription that, she discovered, had been mistranslated in the 1920s, reducing passages to “absolute nonsense”.

She was astonished to find Sennacherib’s own description of an “unrivalled palace” and a “wonder for all peoples”. He describes the marvel of a water-raising screw made using a new method of casting bronze – and predating the invention of Archimedes’ screw by some four centuries.

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Story: Dalya Alberge, The Guardian | Photo: Bettmann/Corbis

Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist from the University of Reading, believes that many of today’s languages could have stemmed from one original language that dates back 15,000 years.

Because words don’t have DNA, researchers use cognates found in different languages today to reconstruct the ancestral “protowords.” Historical linguists have observed that over time, the sounds of words tend to change in regular patterns. For example, the p sound frequently changes to f, and the t sound to th—suggesting that the Latin word pater is, well, the father of the English word father. Linguists use these known rules to work backward in time, making a best guess at how the protoword sounded. They also track the rate at which words change. Using these phylogenetic principles, some researchers have dated many common words as far back as 9000 years ago. The ancestral language known as Proto-Indo-European, for example, gave rise to languages including Hindi, Russian, French, English, and Gaelic.

Some researchers, including Pagel, believe that the world’s languages are united by even older superfamilies, but this view is hotly contested. Skeptics feel that even if language families were related, words suffer from too much erosion, both in terms of sound and meaning, to be reliably traced back further than 9000 or 10,000 year, and that the similarities of many cognates may be pure chance. What was missing, Pagel says, was an objective method of analysis.

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Story: Elizabeth Norton, Science Magazine | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A 1,700-year-old Roman cemetery has been found beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England.

The new discovery, found at the junction of Newarke and Oxford Streets, includes numerous burials and skeletal remains from 13 individuals, both male and female of various ages. The cemetery is estimated to date back to around A.D. 300, according to University of Leicester archaeologists who led the dig.

“We have literally only just finished the excavation and the finds are currently in the process of being cleaned and catalogued so that they can then be analyzed by the various specialists,” John Thomas, archaeological project officer, told LiveScience in an email.

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Story: Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience | Photo: University of Leicester Archaeological Services

An ancient rock art site on Vancouver Island, titled Cedar By the Sea, has been damaged by a local power company’s contracted workers.

Douglas White, chief of the Snuneymuxw First Nation said the damage is disrespectful of native heritage and he doesn’t understand how crews could make the mistake, since existing petroglyph rock art sites are documented and protected by legislation.

Petroglyphs can be more than 2,000 years old and typically feature etched drawings that serve as a record of First Nations history on the surface of flat bedrock sandstone.

“This is a notoriously well-known site,” White said. “I don’t understand this to be a mistake that can be made … this is the kind of desecration where I would expect charges to be laid.”

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Story: Ben Ingram, The Record | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Dancing naked men found on a restored 15th century painting may be the first Western depictions of Native Americans.

The painting, by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio, was finished in 1494, just two years after Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World.

It has adorned the walls of the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican for 500 years but was only recently subjected to restoration work.

The naked men, who appear to be dancing, were spotted by a restorer, Maria Pustka, as she removed centuries of grime.

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Story: Nick Squires, The Telegraph | Photo: Musei Vaticani

Irrigation features dating back to Spanish colonial times have been found in Brackenridge Park in San Antonio after being buried for 300 years.

Local and state officials will provide more details Friday of recent excavations that unearthed waterway features linking the park to the Spanish colonial era in San Antonio.

City Archaeologist Kay Hindes said the discoveries, done under contract with the river authority for trailheads and other features of the Museum Reach of the San Antonio River Improvements Project, revealed “one of the most concentrated groupings of acequia features in the past 10 or 15 years.”

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Story: Scott Huddleston, My San Antonio | Photo: Darren Abate, The San Antonio Express-News

Logging equipment is responsible for damaging a prehistoric Native American village in California.

“We don’t want to impact a cultural site. We’re very concerned about that,” Nelson said.

A quick on-the-ground inspection of the area produced numerous obsidian chips and other American Indian artifacts, leading Nelson and Cal Fire officials to immediately expand a buffer area from less than an acre to around 3 acres.

The Maidus welcomed the temporary protections but remained skeptical about the company’s commitment to protect the valley it owns.

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Story: Jane Braxton Little, The Sacramento Bee | Photo: Jane Braxton Little, The Sacramento Bee

Archaeologists have been finding ancient artifacts in piles of dirt left behind by moles digging through the Roman fort of Epiacum in Cumbria, England.

As well as fragments of pottery and glass, the moles have dragged up some attractive and intact artefacts.

A molehill recently pushed up a piece of Samian ware – a type of brown pottery common on Roman sites – thought to be a stand for a vase or bowl, or possibly an egg cup.

Last year they discovered a jet bead and a decorative bronze dolphin.

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Story: BBC News | Photo: BBC News

A collection of 300 leather fragments belonging to an Egyptian Old Kingdom royal chariot have been rediscovered in the storerooms of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Ikram describes the discovery as very important and the collection as “extremely rare.” Only a handful of complete chariots are known from ancient Egypt, and of these, only one heavily restored in Florence and one in the Egyptian Museum have any significant amount of leather.

“Even then, they are largely unembellished and not as well-preserved as the fragments we found,” asserted Ikram. Although horse-drawn chariots are often illustrated in ancient Egyptian artwork, she said, archaeological evidence that goes beyond wooden frames is rare due to their organic nature, as leather fragments seldom survive.

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Story: Ahram Online | Photo: Ahram Online

Several cracks have appeared in six buildings in Alexandria, Egypt, due to an illegal excavation in the vicinity.

Six buildings sustained damage early Thursday morning in Alexandria’s Karmouz neighbourhood, possibly due to unauthorised excavations under an adjacent building. No casualties have so far been reported.

Police have arrested one suspect, Ahmed Hassan Ali, 29, who had several clay pots – which appeared to be very old – in his possession.

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Story: Ahram Online | Photo: Reuters

Hundreds of spheres have been found beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacan in Mexico.

The mysterious spheres lay in both the north and south chambers. Ranging from 1.5 to 5 inches, the objects have a core of clay and are covered with a yellow material called jarosite.

“This material is formed by the oxidation of pyrite, which is a metallic ore,” Gómez Chávez said. “It means that in pre-hispanic times they appeared as if they were metallic spheres. There are hundreds of these in the south chamber.”

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Story: Rosella Lorenzi, Discovery News | Photo: DMC, INAH/M. MARAT

Archaeologists working in the state of Georgia have found the location of Carr’s Fort, a frontier fortification that was attacked in 1779.

“The search for Carr’s Fort was like looking for a needle in a haystack, only harder. We had no map and few descriptions of the fort, so its location was entirely unknown. Historians and land surveyors provided some clues to about a dozen potential target areas, which helped narrow the search. The LAMAR field team discovered Carr’s Fort on the last hour of the last day of the field project. Although our funds were depleted, I had no trouble convincing my crew to return with me to volunteer with me for another day or two to better establish the identity of the archaeological finds as Carr’s Fort”, stated Daniel Elliott, President of the LAMAR Institute. The archaeological team used metal detectors to systematically comb the woods for any evidence of the fort and battlefield. Each find was labeled and carefully plotted using GPS technology. More than a dozen 18th century settlements were located, but none of these proved to be the fort.

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Story: WJCL | Photo: LAMAR Institute

A modern cemetery is encroaching upon the ancient Egyptian pyramids of Dashur.

In Manshiet Dahshur, 25 miles south of Cairo, the villagers recently extended the boundaries of the cemetery. For Ahmed Rageb, a carpenter who buried his cousin in the annexe, it was a logical decision. “We want to bury the dead,” he said, strolling through the new cemetery after visiting his cousin’s tomb. “The old cemetery is full. And there is no other place to bury my family.”

There is just one problem. The new tombs are perilously close to some of Egypt’s oldest: the pyramids of Dahshur, less famous than their larger cousins at Giza, but just as venerable. This is protected land, and no one is supposed to build here – yet more than 1,000 illegal tombs have appeared in the desert since January.

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Story: Patrick Kingsley, The Observer | Photo: The Guardian

An ancient canal built by the Hohokam people 1,500 years ago to irrigate their crops has been unearthed during Sky Train construction in Arizona.

The network of canals belonged to the Hohokam people who settled in the area around A.D. 400 to 500. Knowledge of their existence is nothing new — through the 20th century, many researchers studied and mapped the Hohokam’s expansive network of canals, hundreds of miles long, built to direct water from the Salt River to their fields.

However, the unearthing of these canals is no less exciting, said Laurene Montero, archaeologist for Phoenix.

The Hohokam people continued to use those canals through the 1400s, and some remained visible into the 1920s. Gradually, as the Valley exploded into one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the nation, new developments covered what researchers referred to as Canal System 2.

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Story: Amy B. Wang, AZCentral | Photo: Mark Henle, The Republic

Bones found in a medieval cemetery in England may belong to a soldier who was killed during the Battle of Lewes in 1264.

Most of the skeletons show signs of leprosy and other medieval diseases, but Skeleton 180 is different.

The skull has been hacked with a sword and was buried near Lewes Prison, close to where the most brutal fighting happened during the famous battle nearly 750 years ago.

Edwina Livesey, a Battle of Lewes officer for Sussex Archaeological Society, said the discovery was “incredible”.

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Story: Bill Gardner, The Argus | Photo: The Argus

Two nude Greek statues have been pulled from an Olympic exhibition in Qatar in order to “avoid scandalising female visitors”.

Greek Deputy Culture Minister Costas Tzavaras, who visited the Muslim country last month for the exhibition opening, objected, saying the works should be displayed as they were or shipped home.

So the statues were returned to Athens last week, the official said on condition of anonymity because she was not authorised to speak on the record.

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Story: AP | Photo: AFP

Archaeologists are developing new techniques to preserve the footprints of our ancestors.

The authors explored two methods in this study: digital photogrammetry, where researchers strategically photograph an object in order to derive measurements; and optical laser scanning, where light is used to measure the object’s physical properties. To begin, the authors filled trays with mixtures of sand, cement, and plaster and instructed a participant to walk through these samples. Four wooden 1 cm cubes were then placed beside a select number of footprints and photographs were taken. A laser scanner was then used to measure the same footprints. This simple procedure was also replicated outside of the lab, at a beach in North West England.

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Story: Souri Somphanith, PLOS | Photo: PLOS

Construction of a sports club in Oman has led to the discovery of a huge ancient tomb which contains the buried bodies of 200 people.

The chamber itself was an impressive structure. But with limestone material and rocks sourced from a local wadi, the structure measured 14 metres long and 3.5 metres wide. Using ground penetrating radar (GPR), the international teams are scouring the surrounding area for similar burial chambers or other subterranean structures that may yield evidence of a much larger archaeological find.

Significantly, the site is the most important archaeological find to date in the Musandam peninsula, a rugged region of Oman known for its dramatic massifs and magnificent fjords.

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Story: GulfNews | Photo: Oman News Agency