Why would people lock lips and swap spit?

The kiss’ allure is a matter of ongoing psychological and physiological research. Some suggest kissing helps humans size up potential mates. When going in for a smooch, one might encounter bad breath, for example, which would typically be a turnoff. That breath might also warn some part of your brain of decay, diseases or other indicators of unfitness. 

And that saliva passed mouth to mouth contains hormones and other compounds that may give the brain clues to determine a kissing partner really is suitable as a match.

Clear evidence exists that humans had sexual relations with Neanderthals—the proof can be seen in our DNA. But did they kiss? 

Scientists studying Neanderthal tooth plaque uncovered the genetic signature of a 48,000-year-old microorganism still found in human mouths today, and different from those of the era’s Neanderthals. How did it get there? 

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New research reveals how reliefs on the walls of the Temple of Hatshepsut in Thebes were crafted—and corrected.

As Andrew Curry reports for Science magazine, the new study sheds light on oft-overlooked members of ancient Egyptian society, suggesting that artisans of different ability levels collaborated to produce the temple’s art. 

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In the search for emissions-free cooling, the "wind catcher" could once again come to our aid.

The city of Yazd in the desert of central Iran has long been a focal point for creative ingenuity.

 Yazd is home to a system of ancient engineering marvels that include an underground refrigeration structure called yakhchāl, an underground irrigation system called qanats, and even a network of couriers called pirradaziš that predate postal services in the US by more than 2,000 years. 

 Among Yazd's ancient technologies is the wind catcher, or bâdgir in Persian. 

These remarkable structures are a common sight soaring above the rooftops of Yazd. 

They are often rectangular towers, but they also appear in circular, square, octagonal and other ornate shapes. Yazd is said to have the most wind catchers in the world, though they may have originated in Ancient Egypt. In Yazd, the wind catcher soon proved indispensable, making this part of the hot and arid Iranian Plateau livable.

 Though many of the city's wind catchers have fallen out of use, the structures are now drawing academics, architects and engineers back to the desert city to see what role they could play in keeping us cool in a rapidly heating world.

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Are You Ready to Rock?!

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Dozens of Dead Sea Scroll Fragments Found in Israeli Cave

For the first time in 60 years, archaeologists in Israel have discovered new fragments of a Dead Sea Scroll. Numbering in the dozens, the pieces of parchment were likely hidden in a desert cave between 132 and 136 A.D., during the Jewish people’s failed Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans. 

As Ilan Ben Zion reports for the Associated Press (AP), the 80 or so fragments are inscribed with Greek translations of verses from the biblical books of Zechariah and Nahum. 

Researchers with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) found the nearly 2,000-year-old scrolls in the Cave of Horror, a site in the Judean Desert that derives its name from the 40 skeletons discovered there during excavations in the 1960s.

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20,000 years ago—not long in geological terms—Britain was not, in fact, an island.

Instead, the terrain that became the British Isles was linked to mainland Europe by Doggerland, a tract of now-submerged territory where early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived, settled and traveled. Doggerland gradually shrank as rising sea levels flooded the area. 

Then, around 6150 B.C., disaster struck: The Storegga Slide, a submarine landslide off the coast of Norway, triggered a tsunami in the North Sea, flooding the British coastline and likely killing thousands of humans based in coastal settlements.

 Historians have long assumed that this tsunami was the deciding factor that finally separated Britain from mainland Europe. But new archaeological research published in the December issue of Antiquity argues that Doggerland may have actually survived as an archipelago of islands for several more centuries.

 Co-author Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford, has spent the past 15 years surveying Doggerland’s underwater remains as part of the Europe’s Lost Frontiers project. 

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Archaeologists Unearth a Nearly 2,000-Year-Old Cat Geoglyph Lounging on a Peruvian Hillside

This week, archaeologists unearthed a 120-foot-wide etching of a cat at the Nazca Lines site in Peru, which is home to a series of geoglyphs depicting a spider, monkey, hummingbird, whale, and fish. 

The feline rendering dates back to the Late Paracas period between 200-100 BC, making it the oldest in the area.

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Ruines, Joseph Koudelka

For nearly thirty years, Josef Koudelka has traveled around 200 archaeological sites around the Mediterranean, from which he has taken hundreds of black and white panoramic photographs.

 From this unique project, the BnF National Library of France is presenting 110 exceptional prints: a new collection entitled Ruines, which reveals all the strength and beauty of Koudelka’s visual lexicon. 

 

CT Scans Reveal Miniature Mummies' Surprising Contents

For almost half a century, researchers at the Haifa Museums in Israel thought that a pair of miniature Egyptian mummies housed in their collections contained human hearts. But when museum staff brought the sarcophagi to a local hospital for a computerized tomography (CT) scan last month, they realized the ancient wrappings actually concealed the remains of a bird and a wad of grain and mud. 

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Researchers discovered hnefatafl game pieces made of whale bone in upper- and middle-class Vendel graves.

Also known as Viking chess, hnefatafl is a board game in which a centrally located king is attacked from all sides.
The game wasn’t exclusive to the Vendels—people across northern Europe faced off over the gridded board from at least 400 BCE until the 18th century. But during the Vendel period, love for the game was so great that some people literally took it to their graves.
Now, a new analysis of some hnefatafl game pieces unearthed in Vendel burial sites offers unexpected insight into the possible emergence of industrial whaling in northern Europe.
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Possibly world’s first customer service complaint, at nearly 4,000 years old.

Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message: When you came, you said to me as follows: “I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots.” You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: “If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!” What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one (trifling) mina of silver which I owe(?) you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper, and Umi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Samas. How have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore (my money) to me in full. Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt. 

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Who Was the Most Powerful Woman in Ancient History?

Cleopatra, famous for her influence over the most powerful men of her day, is one of several ancient women who found their own ways to power.

 

The Wild Ancient Greek Drinking Game That Required Throwing Wine

For the ancient Greeks, a party wasn’t good unless the wine flowed freely.
The Greeks didn’t just fling their glasses of wine about willy-nilly, though. This game of wine-slinging—known as kottabos—had a discernible target, and both pride and prizes were on the line.
 Kottabos had two iterations. The preferred way to play, which is the iteration often depicted in plays and especially on pieces of pottery, involved a pole. Players would balance a small bronze disk, called a plastinx, on top of it. The goal was to flick dregs of one’s wine at the plastinx so that it would fall, making a clattering crash as it hit the manes, a metal plate or domed pan that lay roughly two-thirds down the pole. The competitors reclined on their couches, arranged in a square or circle around the pole a couple of yards away. Each then took turns launching their wine from their kylix, a shallow, circular vessel with a looping handle on each side. A less common version of the game featured players aiming at a number of small bowls, which floated in water within a larger basin.
 In this case, the object of the game was to sink as many of the small bowls as possible with the same arcing shots. Since it lacked the resounding clang of the plastinx striking the manes, this version of kottabos has been regarded as the quieter, more civilized way to play. Read more

 

Rise and Fall of the Mighty Minoans

In the epic poem The Odyssey, the Greek poet Homer praised an island that lies “out in the wine-dark sea . . . a rich and lovely sea-girt land, densely peopled, with 90 cities and several different languages.” This sophisticated place is not just a random spot in the Mediterranean—Homer is describing Crete, southernmost of the Greek islands and home to one of the oldest civilizations in Europe. Located some 400 miles northwest of Alexandria in Egypt, Crete has been inhabited since the Neolithic period, around 7000 B.C. The culture that developed there during the second millennium B.C. spread throughout the entire eastern Mediterranean world. Crete’s command of the seas would allow its stunning art and architecture to deeply influence the Mycenaean Greek civilization that would succeed it.
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The Ancient History of Cheating in the Olympics

Ancient Olympians didn’t have performance-enhancing drugs at their disposal, but according to those who know the era best, if the ancient Greeks could have doped, a number of athletes definitely would have. “We only know of a small number of examples of cheating but it was probably fairly common,” says David Gilman Romano, a professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Arizona.
 And yet the athletes had competing interests. “Law, oaths, rules, vigilant officials, tradition, the fear of flogging, the religious setting of the games, a personal sense of honor – all these contributed to keep Greek athletic contests clean,” wrote Clarence A. Forbes, a professor of Classics at Ohio State University, in 1952. “And most of the thousands of contests over the centuries were clean.”
 That said, ancient Greeks proved to be creative in their competitiveness. Some attempted to jinx athletes to prevent their success. According to Romano, “curse tablets could be found in athletic contexts.
For instance, strips of lead were inscribed with the curse, then folded up and placed in the floor at a critical part of the athletic facility.” continue

 

Ancient Arabic Text Shines Light on Massive Supernova

In 1006 A.D., a new star appeared, lighting the skies in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and perhaps even North America. Many spotted the glowing orb. And though they didn't know it at the time, these lucky ancient observers were gazing at one of the brightest supernovas ever recorded, now cataloged as SN 1006. Modern astrophysicists have learned a great deal from the records of many of these ancient observers, including astronomer Ali ibn Ridwan in Egypt and the Benedictine monks at the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland. In recent years, astronomers have also taken pictures of the remnants of the explosion, 7,200 light years from Earth in the constellation Lupus.
 But those ancient sources still have more to tell.

 

See the World’s Oldest Dress

New tests show that a linen dress found in an Egyptian tomb dates back more than 5,000 years, making it the oldest woven garment yet found. Beautifully stitched and pleated, it signals the complexity and wealth of the ancient society that produced it.

 

The Secret Language of Hands in Indian Iconography

There is no one key to unlocking the mysteries of India, a nation at once so traditional and so dynamic, so anarchic and so arresting. But mudra, the gestural vocabulary used in imagery, dance, and yoga, can help. With root meanings in a verb that can signify cleansing and purification as well as satisfaction and delight, mudra is used in Indian rhetoric to denote “the expression of things by their right names.”
 More concretely, a mudra is a seal or an emblem. As a system of hand gestures, it can sum up a god’s or goddess’s character—or a dancer’s mood—in a moment of concentrated symbolism and meaning.

 

Atheism has ancient roots and is not ‘modern invention’, claims new text

Pioneering disbeliever ... statue of Socrates in Athens. Photograph: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

Atheism is not a modern invention from the western Enlightenment, but actually dates back to the ancient world, according to a new book by a Cambridge academic – which challenges the assumption that humanity is naturally predisposed to believe in gods.
 In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, lays out a series of examples showing that atheism existed in polytheistic ancient Greece.

 

Rare Unlooted Grave of Wealthy Warrior Uncovered in Greece

Along with the well-preserved skeleton of a man in his early thirties, the grave contains more than 1,400 objects arrayed on and around the body, including gold rings, silver cups, and an elaborate bronze sword with an ivory hilt. More surprising were 50 stone seals intricately carved with goddesses, lions, and bulls, as well as a half-dozen delicate ivory combs, a bronze mirror, and some 1,000 carnelian, amethyst, and jasper beads once strung together as necklaces. Between the man’s legs lay an ivory plaque carved with a griffin.
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