Claire Holleran/The Conversation Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II features a scene in which a senator, seated at a pavement cafe in Rome, reads a printed newspaper. The moment has caused history buffs around the world to wince – the printing press wouldn’t be...
A pair of scientists who study hominin fossils and human evolution in China and East Asia claim to have discovered a new human ancestor that appeared during the Late Quaternary or Middle Pleistocene era, about 300,000 years ago. They have...
When the mad Roman Emperor Caligula was assassinated in 41 AD, his uncle Claudius ran to one of the palace's apartments and hid behind a curtain. Claudius was soon discovered by the praetorian guards and escorted to their camp, where...
Once again Ancient Origins has been blocked by Facebook for posting content deemed not fit for general consumption. This is becoming an almost monthly occurrence, with the site being put on hold for the best part of a month each...
A circle of corroded bronze, measuring 12 inches (30cm) across, adorned with golden shapes, was unwittingly discovered in 1999 in Nebra, Germany, now famously coined the Nebra Sky Disc. More than 3,600-years-old, it is widely considered to be the oldest...
Scattered over 700,000 square kilometers (270, 271 sq mi) in the southern Pacific Ocean are the Tonga islands. On one of the 176 islands that make up Tonga, there stands one of the strangest megalithic monuments in the Pacific, a...
Anna K. Behrensmeyer, Kevin Hatala & Purity Kiura/The Conversation Human footprints stir the imagination. They invite you to follow, to guess what someone was doing and where they were going. Fossilized footprints preserved in rock do the same – they...
As genetic research into the characteristics of ancient DNA has increased, scientists have uncovered a wealth of valuable information about how prehistoric people really lived. In a study conducted by an interdisciplinary team of experts from the United Kingdom, Austria,...
Gnosticism is an esoteric religious movement which has flourished in the first centuries AD. It offers a truly unique view on existence, and blends theology, mysticism and cosmology. Divine wisdom, human redemption, and cosmic error - these are the foremost...
Ancient Romans reportedly ingested the brains of a bream called the dreamfish to get high, and modern scholarly studies have confirmed the toxicity and hallucination-inducing qualities of the Sarpa salpa bream. Hallucinogenic fish live in the Mediterranean Sea, near the...
