The Arctic archipelago of Svalbard is one of the most remote places on earth—more than 500 miles north of Europe, and about as far from the North Pole, it was entirely uninhabited by humans until the late 19th century, aside for a few early attempts by whalers to overwinter that mostly ended in disaster. The original name for this archipelago was “Spitsbergen,” translated from Dutch it means simply “pointy mountains,” and from the distance of a ship at sea, that’s all one sees here: jagged, snow-capped mountains spaced apart by...

In 2019, while excavating the necropolis of Qubbet el Hawa, across the Nile from Aswan in southern Egypt, Belgian and Spanish archaeologists unearthed a trove of mummified crocodiles: five almost complete skeletons, plus five heads. Although crocodiles are often found in Egyptian tombs, it is rare to discover 10. The findings, published in the journal PLOS One, shed light on the embalming technique used and even how the animals might have died. Archaeologists study one of the best preserved crocodile specimens. Egyptians saw crocodiles as intermediaries between humans and Sobek,...

Virginia Allen was just 16 years old when she joined the nursing staff at Sea View Hospital in New York City, a facility that opened specifically to address the millions dying of tuberculosis, also called “consumption”. At the time, the highly contagious illness was poorly understood and many white healthcare workers refused to help. Allen was one of the thousands of Black nurses— the “Black Angels”—who stepped up, joining her aunt Edna Sutton Ballard at the Staten Island hospital. It was a “rich work experience [and] when I look back...

Dead puppies, potential human sacrifices and a painted dog penis bone buried in a ritual deposit in an ancient quarry shaft in southern England are revealing what fertility rituals may have looked like in the early decades of Roman conquest. “It was filled with an absolutely shocking number of bones,” says Ellen Green, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Reading. “You couldn’t move around in there without stepping on something.” Green describes the find in a recent issue of the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. The hole full of bones—the largest...

On a hot January morning in 1971, plainclothes security agents knocked on the door of the beachfront home of former Brazilian lawmaker Rubens Paiva. Hustled into his car, Paiva was sped away under armed escort and never seen again, leaving his wife and five children to pick up the pieces. This is the broad plotline of I’m Still Here, the Oscar-winning film set during Brazilian military rule. But rather than dwell on the dictators’ dungeons and the all too visceral horrors of state-sponsored violence, director Walter Salles flips the narrative....

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), are the human species that has attracted the most attention as our closest evolutionary relatives. The first fossils related to Neanderthals weren’t recognized as such until 1863, although they were discovered decades earlier. The ongoing intrigue should come as no surprise because, for a long time, Neanderthals were the model for the missing link between our own species, Homo sapiens, and the first apelike pre-human ancestors—but then they disappeared. This is the story of an extinction.