beirutThe minaret of Aleppo's ancient Umayyad mosque was destroyed on Wednesday, Syrian state media reported, with the regime and the opposition blaming each other.An archaeological treasure in Aleppo's Unesco-listed Old City, the mosque has been the centre of fighting for months and had already ...

MARY, Turkmenistan (AFP) - Over four millennia ago, the fortress town of Gonur-Tepe might have been a rare advanced civilisation before it was buried for centuries under the dust of the Kara Kum desert in remote western Turkmenistan.After being uncovered by Soviet archaeologists in the last ...

PARIS (AFP)Scans of mummies from as long ago as 2,000 BC have revealed that ancient people also had clogged arteries, a condition blamed on modern vices like smoking, overeating and inactivity, a study said Monday. The finding, published in the Lancet medical journal, casts doubt on our ...

SEOUL (AFP)A hat which belonged to South Korea's most revered monarch King Sejong has been recovered more than 500 years after it was looted by Japanese invaders, a senior scholar said Wednesday. Apart from its intrinsic value as an historical relic, the discovery has thrilled scholars after ...

ISLAMABAD  - Italian archaeologists say they have discovered a cemetery that reveals complex funeral rites dating back more than 3,000 years in Swat valley.The Italian mission began digging in the 1950s at Udegram, a site of Buddhist treasures in Swat, the district formerly known as the ...

New clues have emerged in what could be described as the world’s oldest murder case: that of Oetzi the “Iceman”, whose 5,300-year-old body was discovered frozen in the Italian Alps in 1991 Oetzi’s full genome has now been reported in Nature Communications.It reveals that he ...

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Almost 80,000 years before humans began using chemical sprays to control insect pests, Africans were using mattresses made from bug-repelling plants to ensure a good nights sleep. The finding, published in the journal Science on Friday, derives from 77,000-year-old plant ...

SYDNEY (AFP) - Australian scientists on Thursday hailed the discovery of a pair of insect-like eyes belonging to a freakish prehistoric super-predator which trawled the seas more than 500 million years ago. Measuring three centimetres (1.2 inches) across and with a whopping 16,000 individual lenses ...

LIMA (AFP) - Researchers in Peru said Tuesday they have discovered the remains of ancient insects and sunflower seeds trapped inside amber dating from the Miocene epoch, some 23 million years ago. The rare find was made in the remote mountainous jungle region near Perus northern border with ...

KAMPALA (AFP) - A team of Ugandan and French palaeontologists announced Tuesday they had found a 20-million-year-old ape skull in north-eastern Uganda, saying it could shed light on the regions evolutionary history. This is the first time that the complete skull of an ape of this age has been found ...

BEIJING (AFP) - China plans to ramp up growth in the ancient city of Kashgar in the restive Xinjiang region by making it an economic development zone focused on central Asian trade, state media said Thursday. Preferential investment and tax policies will aim to boost investment in the Silk Road ...

PORT BLAIR, India, (AFP) - The last member of a tribe believed to be descendants of one of the oldest human cultures on Earth has died on Indias Andaman and Nicobar islands, Survival International reported Thursday. The London-based organisation which lobbies for tribal peoples worldwide said Boa ...

NEW evidence of ancient lakes and rivers on Mars has been found by British scientists, increasing the likelihood that there was once life on the Red Planet. An analysis of satellite images revealed craters left along Mars equator by lakes similar to those found in Alaska and Siberia. Importantly, ...

A PREVIOUSLY unknown giant volcanic eruption that led to global mass extinction 260 million years ago has been uncovered by scientists at the University of Leeds. The eruption in the Emeishan province of south-west China unleashed around half a million cubic kilometres of lava, covering an area 5 ...

ISLAMABAD: Splendid reflections of Islamic architecture were projected at National Art Gallery (NAG), Pakistan National Council of Arts (PNCA) during an exhibition titled, "Living traditions, contemporary art from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan" here Saturday. The artworks of prominent artists from ...

THE 13-inch high ornament with its distinctive pharaoh headdress was originally designed to hold the internal organs of the dead as part of the mummification process. The canopic jar, complete with cover, was left outside in a garden in north Dorset until its owner decided to have it ...

EGYPTIAN archaeologists have found the tombs of two court officials, in charge of music and pyramid building, in a 4,000-year-old cemetery from the reign of Pharaoh Unas. The tombs were buried in the sands south of Cairo and could shed light on the fifth and the sixth dynasties of the Old Kingdom, ...

BY discovering the meaning of a rare mineral that can be used to track ancient climates, Binghamton University geologist Tim Lowenstein is helping climatologists and others better understand what we're probably in for over the next century or two as global warming begins to crank up the heat - and, ...

CARACAS (AFP) - Venezuela has found the first fossils of an extinct scimitar cat - of the sabre-toothed cat genus - in South America, during oil prospecting activities southeast of Caracas, according to paleontologists. "It's South America's most important discovery in 60 years," ...

AN ancient Greek astronomical calculator that showed the positions of the sun, Earth and the moon, and outshined any known device for 1,000 years after it, also kept track of something more mundane: when the next Olympics would take place. And its design just might have sprung from the skull ...

BURRUP PENINSULA (Australia)- Australia's greatest ancient Aboriginal rock art is at risk of being damaged or destroyed because it sits at the epicentre of the country's resources boom, experts say. The etchings of men and animals on the rocks of the Burrup Peninsula, some of which are believed ...

HUMAN ballads, bird songs, and croaky frog serenades are all controlled by a common brain circuit that first appeared in animals hundreds of millions of years ago, a new paper reveals. The finding is based on a study of toadfish and their close relatives midshipman fish, which both use their ...

THE battle to reduce carbon emissions is at the heart of many eco-friendly efforts, and researchers from the University of Missouri have discovered that nature has been lending a hand. Researchers at the Missouri Tree Ring Laboratory in the Department of Forestry discovered that trees submerged in ...

A new analysis of ancient minerals called zircons suggests that a harsh climate may have scoured and possibly even destroyed the surface of the Earth's earliest continents. Zircons, the oldest known materials on Earth, offer a window in time back as far as 4.4 billion years ago, when the planet ...