news 2018

A new study has found ground-breaking evidence from an ice core in the Swiss-Italian Alps that proves the 7 th century switch from gold to silver currencies in western Europe actually occurred a quarter of a century earlier than previously thought. The findings, from the University of Nottingham and which are published in the journal Antiquity , will have major implications on the history of the European monetary system, and what we thought we knew about trade and the economy during this period.

Scientists have sequenced 15 ancient genomes spanning from Alaska to Patagonia and were able to track the movements of the first humans as they spread across the Americas at "astonishing" speed during the last Ice Age, and also how they interacted with each other in the following millennia.

New research conducted for the current independent inquiry suggests that - despite recent policy improvements - cultures of child abuse are liable to emerge while youth custody exists, and keeping children in secure institutions should be limited as far as possible.

The most common form of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) originated in Europe and spread to Asia, Africa and the Americas with European explorers and colonialists, reveals a new study led by UCL and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. TB takes more lives than any other infectious disease and while its global burden has slowly declined over the past decade, the rise of antibiotic resistance (ABR) presents a major obstacle to its control.

A radical new approach combining archaeology, genetics and microscopy can reveal long-forgotten secrets of human diet, sanitation and movement from studying parasites in ancient poo. Researchers at the University of Oxford's Department of Zoology and School of Archaeology have applied genetic analysis to 700-year-old parasites found in archaeological stool samples to understand a variety of characteristics of a human population.

Scientists are on the look-out for damaged and unreadable ancient scrolls as brand new techniques have revealed the hidden text inside a severely burnt 16th century sample. The new development, the latest in a long line of advancements in the field in recent years, has shown how 'virtual unravelling' can be achieved using a more autonomous approach and with scrolls that contain multiple pages.

Electrically charged volcanic ash short-circuited Earth's atmosphere in 1815, causing global poor weather and Napoleon's defeat, says new research. Historians know that rainy and muddy conditions helped the Allied army defeat the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo. The June 1815 event changed the course of European history.

People buried at Stonehenge 5,000 years ago likely lived in west Wales where Stonehenge's smaller standing stones - bluestones - originated from, according to a new study involving UCL, University of Oxford, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, France. The study, published in Nature Scientific Reports , suggests that a number of people buried at the Wessex site had moved with and likely transported the bluestones, which were sourced from the Preseli Mountains in west Wales and used in the early construction of Stonehenge.

Epic poems telling of cultures colliding, deeply conflicted identities and a fast-changing world were written by the Greeks under Roman rule in the first to the sixth centuries CE. Now, the first comprehensive study of these vast, complex texts is casting new light on the era that saw the dawn of Western modernity.

Despite over a century of intense study, we still know very little about the people buried at Stonehenge or how they came to be there. Now suggests that a number of the people that were buried at the Wessex site had moved with and likely transported the bluestones used in the early stages of the monument's construction, sourced from the Preseli Mountains of west Wales.

How 18th and 19th century London supported its unmarried mothers and illegitimate children - essentially establishing an earlier version of today's Child Support Agency - is the subject of newly-published research by a Cambridge historian.

Bronze Age Britons spliced plant fibres together to make cloth rather than spinning, a new study has found. The study, published this week in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences identified that the earliest plant fibre technology for making thread in Early Bronze Age Britain and across Europe and the Near East was splicing not spinning.

The charred remains of a flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers over 14,000 years ago has been discovered in north-eastern Jordan by a team of researchers from UCL, University of Copenhagen and University of Cambridge. It is the oldest direct evidence of bread found to date, predating the advent of agriculture by at least 4,000 years.

PA 143/18 New research provides insights into the extinction of Britain's largest native carnivore. The study - ' The Presence of the brown bear in Holocene Britain: a review of the evidence' published in Mammal Review - is the first of its kind to collate and evaluate the evidence for the brown bear in post-Ice Age Britain.

Volunteers, students and staff at the Auckland Castle excavation site. Credit: Jamie Sproates, courtesy of The Auckland Project. Medieval mysteries, hidden beneath the grounds of a 900-year-old British castle, have been uncovered during a major archaeological excavation. More than 90 archaeologists, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and volunteers from Durham University and The Auckland Project spent a month peeling back the centuries at Auckland Castle, Bishop Auckland, as part of the latest excavation at the former home of the powerful Prince Bishops of Durham.

The psychological trauma experienced by soldiers during the First World War - and relatives who have been traumatised by researching their family's history of the conflict - will be the focus of a new community engagement project led by academics at the University of Nottingham.

University of Glasgow research identifies barley beer in Bronze Age Mesopotamian drinking vessels People living some 3500 years ago in Mesopotamia, which now is modern-day Iraq, enjoyed a pint as much as we do today.

Three 11,500-year-old deer skull headdresses - excavated from a world-renowned archaeological site in Yorkshire - will go on display, one for the first time, at Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) from today. The most mysterious objects found at Star Carr are 33 deer skull headdresses.

A lost world in a former empire in Europe has been brought to life thanks to University of Bristol researchers who used artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to analyse 47,000 multilingual pages from newspapers dating back to 1873. The study, published in Historical Methods , aimed to discover whether historical changes could be detected from the collective content of local newspapers from the Princely County of Gorizia and Gradisca.

New research using ancient DNA finds that a population split after people first arrived in North America was maintained for millennia before mixing again before or during the expansion of humans into the southern continent. The lab-based science should only be a part of the research. We need to work with Indigenous communities in a more holistic way Dr Christiana Scheib Recent research has suggested that the first people to enter the Americas split into two ancestral branches, the northern and southern, and that the "southern branch" gave rise to all populations in Central and South America.