The North Arabian Desert oases were inhabited by sedentary populations in the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE. A fortification enclosing the Khaybar Oasis—one of the longest known going back to this period—has just been revealed by a team of scientists from the CNRS and the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU).

A study describing this work is published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

This new walled oasis is, along with that of Tayma, one of the two largest in Saudi Arabia. While a number of walled oases dating back to the Bronze Age had already been documented, this major discovery sheds new light on human occupation in northwestern Arabia, and provides a better grasp of local social complexity during the pre-Islamic period.

The spectacular explosion of the mine at Hawthorn Ridge—a fortified German front-line position in the First World War—marked the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, and remains one of the best-known pieces of film from the whole conflict.

More than 60ft below the surface, British miners had dug a gallery for more than 900 meters from their lines and packed it with 40,000 lbs of explosives. It was one of 19 mines placed beneath German front positions that were detonated on July 1, 1916, to mark the start of the offensive.

But the detonation of the mine at Hawthorn Ridge, famously captured by film director Geoffrey Malins, took place 10 minutes before the whistles blew at 7:30am. The early detonation, later described as a "colossal blunder," alerted the Germans the infantry attack was imminent and gave them enough time to take up defensive positions in the newly-formed crater, leading to heavy losses among the attacking British troops.

Now, findings from the first-ever multi-disciplinary scientific investigation of the 107-year-old crater have been published in the Journal of Conflict Archaeology. The team of researchers, scientists and historians, led by Keele University, used a range of cutting–edge technology, including drones with imaging cameras, to examine the area like never before.

Abstract

Non-masticatory labial striations on human anterior teeth are a form of cultural dental wear well recorded throughout the Pleistocene, which has been interpreted as resulting from the use of the mouth as a ‘third hand’ when processing different materials during daily activities, such as cutting meat or working hides with stone tools. Non-masticatory scratches have also been reported on the buccal surface of molars and premolars, although at a far lower frequency compared to the anterior dentition. Previous studies observed an apparent decrease through time in the occurrence of non-masticatory scratches on human teeth, with labial striations appearing to be rare for the Neolithic compared to earlier periods. This study further tests this previously observed pattern through the analysis of over 900 human teeth from 20 sites across England and Wales dating from the Upper Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic, to discuss the distribution and aetiology of non-masticatory striations in the British archaeological record. To record and assess the micro-morphometric characteristics of these dental alterations, macroscopic and microscopic analytical techniques were used. Results show that non-masticatory labial striations are still found on Neolithic teeth, although at a decreased frequency when compared to hunter-gatherer (Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic) samples. This may be partly due to changes in diets and food processing methods, as well as types of processed materials and changes in manual handling arising from the inception of the Neolithic in Britain. The sample also includes Upper Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic teeth with non-masticatory striations likely associated with funerary practices or cannibalistic treatment of cadavers. Analyses of these marks suggest that striations inflicted during the post-mortem cutting of cadavers from cannibalism or funerary practices differ in their location and micro-morphology, compared with non-masticatory striations produced during the life of an individual using the mouth as a ‘third hand’.

Nicholas Copernicus was the astronomer who, five centuries ago, explained that Earth revolves around the Sun, rather than vice versa. A true Renaissance man, he also practised as a mathematician, engineer, author, economic theorist and medical doctor.

Upon his death in 1543 in Frombork, Poland, Copernicus was buried in the local cathedral. Over the subsequent centuries, the location of his grave was lost to history.

The puzzling depiction of a vicious predator — either a dragon or a snake — devouring a frog on an early medieval belt buckle from the Czech Republic may be a symbol from an unknown pagan cult, archaeologists say.

The bronze belt fitting or buckle was found by a metal detectorist near the village of Lány, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) west of Prague.

Archaeologists first thought the central design — a snake or dragon devouring a frog-like creature — must be unique. But they have since learned that in the past dozen years, almost identical artifacts have been unearthed in Germany, Hungary and elsewhere in the Czech Republic.

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 separating a patchwork of otherwise moist soils.

Stone walls can be found here and there in other states, but only in New England are they nearly ubiquitous. That's due to a regionally unique combination of hard crystalline bedrock, glacial soils and farms with patchworks of small land parcels.

Nearly all were built by European settlers and their draft animals, who scuttled glacial stones from agricultural fields and pastures outward to fence lines and boundaries, then tossed or stacked them as lines. Though the oldest walls date to 1607, most were built in the agrarian century between the American Revolution and the cultural shift toward cities and industry after the Civil War.

The mass of stone that farmers moved in that century staggers the mind—an estimated 240,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) of barricades, most stacked thigh-high and similarly wide. That's long enough to wrap our planet 10 times at the equator, or to reach the moon on its closest approach to Earth.

Natural scientists have been working to quantify this phenomenon, which is larger in volume than the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall in Britain and the Egyptian pyramids at Giza combined. This work began in 1870 and generated the U.S. government's 1872 Census of Fences. Today, scientists are using a technique called LiDAR, or light detection and ranging, to measure and map stone walls across New England.

Archaeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered two gold ornaments in a 1,500-year-old tomb that feature the earliest known depictions of the great khan, or "khagan," of the Göktürks — a nomadic confederation of Turkic-speaking peoples who occupied the region for around three centuries, according to an archaeologist who excavated the site.

The lavish gold plaques portray "the crowned sovereign, majestically sitting on a throne in a saintly pose and surrounded by servants," Zainolla Samashev, an archaeologist at Kazakhstan's Institute of Archaeology who led the excavation, told Live Science in an email. "This clearly depicts the sacred nature of power in ancient Turkic society."

The finds are from the Eleke Sazy site near Kazakhstan's remote eastern borders with China, Mongolia and Russian Siberia, where Samashev and his colleagues have worked since 2016.

Archaeologists in China have unearthed a mysterious set of rectangular wooden pieces linked to an ancient astronomical calendar. The artifacts were discovered inside an exceptionally well-preserved 2,000-year-old tomb in the southwest of the country.

Each of the 23 wooden slips is about an inch (2.5 centimeters) wide and 4 inches (10 cm) long and displays a Chinese character related to the Tiangan Dizhi, or "Ten Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches" — a traditional Chinese astronomical calendar established during the Shang dynasty, which ruled from about 1600 B.C. to about 1045 B.C.