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Some episodes of human history are more severe to revisit than others.
The Battle of Waterloo ended the 23-year war, but thousands were killed on June 18, 1815, when Allied forces led by the Duke of Wellington and Gebhardt Lebrecht von Blücher defeated Napoleon Bonaparte and his forces south of Brussels.
Paintings, books and eyewitness accounts have preserved the details of the conflict for more than two centuries. Until recently, only two complete skeletons had been recovered from the battle, leaving gaps in the tragic story of what horrors unfolded during and after the conflict.
Now, archaeologists and military personnel have discovered the remains of amputated legs and horses at the site, which help explain what happened after the battle.
But other chapters detailing the loss of our ancient ancestors have been difficult to recover over time. A discovery of bones in a cave reveals clues to a very old tragic mystery.
In 2015, five teeth were found in a rock shelter in France’s Rhone Valley, which could explain why Neanderthals disappeared from the face of the earth 40,000 years ago.
The once-in-a-lifetime find, nicknamed Thorin after a character in “The Hobbit,” has puzzled researchers for nearly a decade. Although genetics suggests that the Neanderthal is 105,000 years old, the archaeological context indicates that he lived 40,000 to 50,000 years ago.
New research has found that Thorin is of Neanderthal descent, unexpectedly isolated from other groups that lived nearby by 50,000 years, making his DNA appear older than that.
That isolation put the Neanderthals at an evolutionary disadvantage and may have led to their extinction.
When scientists observed black sleeper fish devouring young Japanese eels, some of the eels managed to escape within minutes through the predator’s gills.
To get an inside look, the researchers used an X-ray video system to watch the eels break out of the fish’s stomach.
“Before capturing the first X-ray images, we never imagined that eels could escape from the stomachs of predatory fish,” said Yuha Hasegawa, an assistant professor at Nagasaki University in Japan.
“We were truly amazed to witness the eels’ desperate escape from the predator’s stomach to the gills.”
Colorful auroras over the mountains of New Zealand, the sparkling Dolphin Head Nebula and sunlit silhouettes of the International Space Station are just some of the winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.
Photographer Ryan Imperio was the overall winner of the contest for his photo taken during the October 2023 annual solar eclipse.
The film captures the progress of Bailey’s bells. This phenomenon is visible for brief moments during an eclipse, when sunlight shines through the moon’s valleys and craters, creating glowing droplets of light.
Separately, SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn crew made history after setting other space exploration records ahead of its first commercial spacewalk this week and expected returns in the coming days.
The world’s most devastating mass extinction wiped out more than 90% of life on the planet about 252 million years ago — and now, scientists think they’ve discovered a climate event that played a key role.
Previously, scientists believed that carbon dioxide released by volcanic activity triggered sudden warming of the planet, acid rain and ocean acidification.
But a multi-year El Niño event, originating from an ancient body of water much larger than today’s Pacific Ocean, would have enhanced the volcanism’s effects.
Together, the two events may have caused massive die-offs, and pre-catastrophic destruction at sea began on land.
Some scientists have long believed that the Rapa Nui population faced a catastrophic collapse hundreds of years ago. Also known as Easter Island, it is known for its hundreds of carved stone statues.
But a new analysis of the ancient DNA of 15 of the island’s former residents who lived there within the last 400 years tells a different story.
Genetic analysis suggests that the island’s small population actually increased in size until the 1860s, and that islanders reached the Americas in the 1300s, long before Christopher Columbus in 1492.
Meanwhile, the search for the origin of Stonehenge’s mysterious central altar stone is intensifying, and researchers have ruled out a seemingly ancient site as the source of the monolith.
Take a closer look at these new discoveries:
— A physics breakthrough means scientists are closer than ever to creating an atomic clock that will run for 1 billion years and never miss a second.
— Lab-grown cacao and fermented fava beans could be used to create guilt-free chocolate in the future, thereby increasing cacao prices and harming cacao farms.
– Rare, newly discovered fossils show some massive ancient flying reptiles called pterosaurs that soared like eagles, while others had a different flight style.
– NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore believes he and fellow astronaut Suni Williams could have returned to Earth in Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which returned empty last week, “but we simply ran out of time,” he said.
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