When a drought dried up the water in Iraq's Mosul Dam reservoir, it exposed ruins from an ancient city dating to the Bronze Age.

The city included a palace with walls preserved to heights of 22 feet (7 meters); inside were chambers that had once been decorated with painted murals, archaeologists recently said in a statement.

The scientists dated the site — named Kemune — to the time of the Mittani Empire, a kingdom of the Near East that ruled portions of Syria and northern Mesopotamia from the 15th century to the 14th century B.C. Only three other sites from this period contain Mittani palaces, and all of them were found in the outer reaches of the empire. Kemune alone offers insights into life at the center of the kingdom, according to the statement.

Low water levels in the Mosul Dam in 2010 first revealed tantalizing glimpses of the submerged structure, "but we couldn't excavate here until now," Hasan Ahmed Qasim, co-leader of the excavation and an archaeologist with the Kurdistan Archaeology Organization (KAO) in Duhok, Iraq, said in the statement.

The palace once stood just 65 feet (20 meters) from the Tigris, overlooking the river from an elevated position on the bank, and a sloping terrace wall supported the palace's western side. To the north lay the rest of the city, according to archaeological surveys conducted around the palace ruins.

In Latin Americans' collective consciousness, the figure of Simón Bolívar is seen as a symbol of resistance and the fight for peoples' liberation from the yoke of bloody and thieving monarchies. The very name by which he is known, The Liberator, reinforces the belief that Bolívar was simply responding heroically to a deep-seated need that consumed an entire continent.

Within this context, Hugo Chavez used Bolívar as an archetype for his revolution, called for this reason the Bolívarian revolution, which would bring to Venezuela (and the entire region, if Chavez had been successful) the "socialism of the 21st century." Sadly, the reason why Chavez Frias' effort was destined to fail is the same reason why choosing Bolívar as the exemplary figure was a terrible mistake.

Ann Arbor-Romans are depicted as slashing and burning their way across countries in order to secure their empire. But a University of Michigan archeologist suggests that the Romans may have trapped more flies with honey.

At its peak-about the year 117-the Roman Empire ringed the Mediterranean Sea, encompassing present-day Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Syria and a swath across northern Africa. Since the Middle Ages, historians have described this expansion as a military conquest. But for all its reach, the Roman conquest yielded little evidence of warfare or a disruption of power within excavated settlements across Italy, according to author Nicola Terrenato.

Instead, Terrenato thinks that elite Roman landowners and politicians offered positions of political power to non-Roman nobles in order to woo them into their empire. A wealth of recently digitized inscriptions shows local aristocrats surviving the conquest unscathed. Some of these aristocrats even thrived as politicians in Rome.

"It seems the Romans said, 'Come quietly and be a part of this, and you will not only preserve local power, but also have the chance to play the big game in Rome,'" said Terrenato, author of the book The Early Roman Expansion into Italy.

Archaeologists have discovered an undisturbed Roman shipwreck loaded with ancient-era products, the study of which is expected to bring new understandings about ancient trade in the region.

The discovery was made in the sea off Protaras, a town of resorts popular among the tourist for its beaches in the Mediterranean, according to a statement from the Department of Antiquities in the Republic of Cyprus.

The Department of Antiquities says that the ship belongs to the time after Romans annexed the island in 58 B.C. and is loaded with "transport amphorae."

Archaeologists are excavating a 4,000-year-old burial mound on a British island linked in mythology to the mysterious order of magical priests known as the Druids.

And although the burial mound is much older than the Druids - who lived about 2,000 years ago, if they existed at all - the excavations have cast new light on the ancient inhabitants of the island of Anglesey.

Overlooking the Irish Sea from the northwest corner of Wales, Anglesey is dotted with numerous Neolithic and Bronze Age stone monuments. The most famous is the 5,000-year-old passage tomb of Bryn Celli Ddu (Welsh for "the mound in the dark grove"), which has an entrance passage that aligns with the rising midsummer sun. It was archaeologically excavated in 1928 and 1929, and later reconstructed.

Archaeologists working in two Italian caves have discovered some of the earliest known examples of ancient humans using an adhesive on their stone tools-an important technological advance called "hafting."

The new study, which included CU Boulder's Paola Villa, shows that Neanderthals living in Europe from about 55 to 40 thousand years ago traveled away from their caves to collect resin from pine trees. They then used that sticky substance to glue stone tools to handles made out of wood or bone.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that suggests that these cousins of Homo sapiens were more clever than some have made them out to be.

"We continue to find evidence that the Neanderthals were not inferior primitives but were quite capable of doing things that have traditionally only been attributed to modern humans," said Villa, corresponding author of the new study and an adjoint curator at the CU Museum of Natural History.

That insight, she added, came from a chance discovery from Grotta del Fossellone and Grotta di Sant'Agostino, a pair of caves near the beaches of what is now Italy's west coast.
Those caves were home to Neanderthals who lived in Europe during the Middle Paleolithic period, thousands of years before Homo sapiens set foot on the continent. Archaeologists have uncovered more than 1,000 stone tools from the two sites, including pieces of flint that measured not much more than an inch or two from end to end.

In a recent study of the materials, Villa and her colleagues noticed a strange residue on just a handful of the flints-bits of what appeared to be organic material.

"Sometimes that material is just inorganic sediment, and sometimes it's the traces of the adhesive used to keep the tool in its socket" Villa said.

Almost two million years ago, giant hyenas, saber-toothed cats, and camels roamed across the European continent, perhaps sometimes clashing with a few of our early human relatives. Now, in a surprise to paleontologists, it seems these Pleistocene mammals and our hominin cousins also shared their domain with an enormous bird that was almost 12 feet tall.

The discovery, described today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, represents the first giant flightless bird known to have lived in the Northern Hemisphere. The extinct animal, dubbed Pachystruthio dmanisensis, weighed in at a whopping 990 pounds-almost three times as much as its closest living relative, the ostrich.

"We think of [giant birds] in Madagascar, New Zealand, and Australia, but this is very solid evidence that they were also in the European region," says Helen James, curator of birds at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the new study.

Marianne Moen says that gender roles during Viking times weren't nearly as differentiated as we might think.

"I think we need to move away from distinguishing between men's and women's roles during the Viking times," she said. Moen has completed her PhD on Viking Age gender roles at the University of Oslo. Her research shows that upper-class men and women generally were buried with the same types of items - including cooking gear.

Moen went through the contents of 218 Viking graves in Vestfold, a county on the southwest side of Oslo Fjord, and sorted the artefacts she found according to type. Many of the graves were richly equipped with everything from cups and plates to horses and other livestock.

FOR 3200 years they have guarded their secret. The deities carved in limestone near the ancient city of Hattusa are as enigmatic as they are beautiful.

Perhaps no longer. A controversial theory suggests the ancient carvings may have functioned as a calendar, with a level of sophistication way ahead of its time. "It's not only a striking idea, it's reasonable and possible," says Juan Antonio Belmonte at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, Spain, who wasn't part of the work.

Hattusa was the capital city of the Bronze Age Hittite empire, based in what is now Turkey. A few kilometres to the north-east of Hattusa are the ruins of an ancient religious sanctuary centred on a large limestone outcrop.

When the Neanderthal genome was first sequenced in 2010 and compared with ours, scientists noticed that genes from Homo neanderthalensis also showed up in our own DNA. The conclusion was inescapable: Our ancestors mated and reproduced with another lineage of now-extinct humans who live on today in our genes.

When the Denisovan genome was sequenced soon after, in 2012, it revealed similar instances of interbreeding. We now know that small populations from all three Homo lineages mixed and mingled at various times. The result is that our DNA today is speckled with contributions from ancient hominin groups who lived alongside us, but did not survive to the present day. Genes from Denisovans and Neanderthals are not present in everyone's DNA - for example, some Africans have neither, while Europeans have just Neanderthal genes. But, these genetic echoes are loud enough to stand out clearly to scientists.

On one level, it's not shocking that DNA from other human groups resides within us. H. sapiens today is the result of millions of years of evolution; we can count numerous species of ancient hominin among our ancestors. But the Neanderthal and Denisovan contributions to our genetic makeup happened far more recently, after H. sapiens had already split from other human groups. Those interbreeding events, also called introgressions, did not create a new species of human - they enriched an already existing one. Some of the traits we acquired are still relevant to our lives today.

"There's a lot of evidence for some type of introgression from ancient hominins into modern humans, particularly modern humans out of Africa," says Adam Siepel, a computational biologists at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. "I don't think there's any real question among experts in the field as to whether the evidence overwhelmingly supports that event."
Some evidence also suggests that there may be more than two additional human groups lurking in our DNA, what researchers sometimes call "ghost lineages." Modern humans living in Africa may have interbred with one or more hominin species there, resulting in even more addition to our current DNA. And a recent study of modern-day Indonesians suggests that what we call Denisovans was actually three separate groups of hominins, at least one of which can be thought of as its own species. The ancestors of Asians and Melanesians mated with at least one of these groups, and possibly more.