Asia - Archaeology News

1,700-year-old Korean genomes show genetic heterogeneity in Three Kingdoms period Gaya

June 21, 2022

An international team led by The University of Vienna and the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in collaboration with the National Museum of Korea has successfully sequenced and studied the whole genome of eight 1,700-year-old individuals dated to the Three Kingdoms period of Korea (approx. 57 BC-668 AD). The first published genomes from…

Archaeology, Asia, Forensics, Genetics, Korea, South East Asia

Origins of the Black Death identified

June 15, 2022

The Black Death, the biggest pandemic of our history, was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and lasted in Europe between the years 1346 and 1353. Despite the pandemic’s immense demographic and societal impacts, its origins have long been elusive. Now, a multidisciplinary team of scientists, including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary…

Archaeology, Asia, Central Asia, Genetics, Kyrgyzstan

‘Homo erectus’ from Gongwangling could have been the earliest population in China

June 13, 2022

Scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigacion sobre la Evolucion Humana (CENIEH) form part of a team of Chinese, Spanish, and French scientists that has just published a study of what may prove to be China’s most ancient human fossil, in the Remains of jawbone and teeth of Gongwangling skull [Credit: Xing Song] This site…

Anthropology, Asia, China, Early Humans, East Asia, Fossils

Millet in the Bronze Age: A Superfood conquers the World

June 8, 2022

A research team at Kiel University has reconstructed in detail the spread of the grain from East Asia to Central Europe. Broomcorn millet shortly before harvest [Credit: © Wiebke Kirleis] People were already living in a globalized world 3,500 years ago. That is the conclusion of researchers at Kiel University (CAU). They have been able…

Archaeology, Asia, China, East Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Ticker

New evidence about when, where, and how chickens were domesticated

June 6, 2022

New research transforms our understanding of the circumstances and timing of the domestication of chickens, their spread across Asia into the west, and reveals the changing way in which they were perceived in societies over the past 3,500 years. Comparison of chicken tarsometatarsi from: A) Mogador (Becker 2013); B) modern broiler; C) Iron Age Weston Down…

Archaeology, Asia, South East Asia, Thailand, Zooarchaeology

How the black rat colonized Europe in the Roman and Medieval periods

May 3, 2022

New ancient DNA analysis has shed light on how the black rat, blamed for spreading Black Death, dispersed across Europe — revealing that the rodent colonised the continent on two occasions in the Roman and Medieval periods. The Black Rat (Rattus rattus) is one of the most common of the world’s 56 Rattus species, and…

Africa, Americas, Archaeology, Asia, Australasia, Europe, Fossils, Genetics

A population Hub out of Africa explains East Asian lineages in Europe 45.000 years ago

April 7, 2022

The ancient human remains unearthed in the Bacho Kiro cave (in present-day Bulgaria) and recently genetically described were surprisingly reported to be more closely related to contemporary East Asians than contemporary Europeans. Several scenarios were proposed to account for the finding, but this puzzling result so far raised more questions than answers concerning the underlying…

Anthropology, Asia, Early Humans, Eurasia, Europe, Genetics, Ticker

Complex urban processes discovered in the Indus civilization

February 17, 2022

Mesopotamia and the Indus civilization were both urban civilizations with large, densely populated and planned cities, 6000–1990 BCE. A new thesis in archaeology points out that the ancient Indus society showed complex patterns of urbanity that were rare in other ancient societies. The Ganweriwala settlement is located in the desert and was discovered around 40…

Archaeology, Asia, India, Pakistan, South Asia

Lessons from the Ice Age: Alpine lakes react to climate change in their ecology

January 10, 2022

Lakes in alpine locations react sensitively to climate change. Researchers led by the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), and the Faculty of Geosciences at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, China, have analyzed in detail the changes in a lake in the northern Tibetan highlands since the end of the last ice…

Asia, China, Climate Change, Earth Science, Geochemistry, Geology, Palaeoclimate, Palaeontology, Tibet

Work on Angkor Wat’s central tower to be completed by Mar-Apr

January 8, 2022

Apsara National Authority (ANA) has confirmed that work to reinforce the structure of Angkor Wat temple’s central tower-like spire, or “prang” in Khmer, was expected to finish in March-April. Credit: Apsara National Authority ANA, the government body responsible for the conservation and management of Angkor Archaeological Park, emphasised in a statement that the intricately-carved spire,…

Archaeology, Asia, Cambodia, Heritage, South East Asia