A team of UK paleontologists has unearthed three 380-million-year-old fossil forests in Svalbard, an archipelago administered by Norway and located far north of continental Europe in the Arctic Ocean.
The fossil forests in Svalbard were formed mainly of lycopod trees, better known for growing millions of years later in coal swamps that eventually turned into coal deposits.

The forests grew near the equator during the Late Devonian, according to the paleontologists - Dr Chris Berry of Cardiff University and Prof. John Marshall of the University of Southampton.

They were extremely dense, with very small gaps around between each of the trees, which probably reached roughly 13 feet (4 m) high.

"In-situ trees are represented by internal casts of arborescent lycopsids with cormose bases and small ribbon-like roots occurring in dense stands spaced 8 inches (20 cm) apart, identified as Protolepidodendropsis pulchra," Dr Berry and Prof. Marshall wrote in a paper published recently in the journal Geology.

Just a couple of decades ago, the people of ancient civilizations were viewed as simple, primitive people. However, numerous discoveries since then have revealed a number of surprising facts about ancient cultures, namely that many of them possessed advanced knowledge of metallurgy, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, and more. With this knowledge they forged steel stronger than anything else seen until the Industrial Revolution, created a recipe for concrete so durable that their buildings would endure for millennia longer than the constructions of today, cut stones and assembled walls so precisely that attempts at modern-day replications have failed. Scientists are still scratching their heads over some of the amazing accomplishments of ancient civilizations. Here we feature ten of them.

1. Aqueducts and hydro technology

Who would have thought that 21^st century governments would be looking to 1,500-year-old technology for guidance on how to solve water access problems? But that is exactly what is happening in Lima, Peru.

Peru has been facing a severe water crisis as chronic problems, such as polluted water supplies, and environmental change combine to undermine the water security of the entire country. However, a new plan has been put forward by Lima's water utility company, Sedapal, to revive an ancient network of stone canals that were built by the Wari culture as early as 500 AD, in order to supply the population with clean, unpolluted water.

The Wari built an advanced water conservation system that captured mountain water during the rainy season via canals. The canals transported the water to places where it could feed into springs further down the mountain, in order to maintain the flow of the rivers during the dry season.

Many ancient civilizations are known for their advanced construction of cisterns, canals, aqueducts, and water channelling technology, including the Persians, Nabataeans, Romans, Greeks, Harrapans, and many more.

Geneticists have detected a fourth ancestral "tribe" which contributed to the modern European gene pool.

Research shows Europeans are a mixture of three major ancestral populations - indigenous hunters, Middle Eastern farmers and a population that arrived from the east during the Bronze Age.

DNA from ancient remains in the Caucasus has now revealed a fourth population that fed into the mix.

Details are published in Nature Communications.

Scientific advances in recent years have allowed researchers to retrieve and analyse genomes from ancient burials. The genome is the genetic blueprint for a human, contained within the nucleus of every cell.

This deluge of data has transformed our understanding of the modern human genetic landscape. It has also shown that present-day genetic patterns are poor guides to ancient ones.

The first layer of European ancestry, the indigenous hunter-gatherers, entered Europe before the Ice Age 40,000 years ago. But 7,000 years ago, they were swept up in a migration of people from the Middle East, who introduced farming to Europe.

Populations of hunter-gatherers weathered the Ice Age in apparent isolation in Caucasus mountain region for millennia, later mixing with other ancestral populations, from which emerged the Yamnaya culture that would bring this Caucasus hunter-gatherer lineage to Western Europe.

The first sequencing of ancient genomes extracted from human remains that date back to the Late Upper Paleolithic period over 13,000 years ago has revealed a previously unknown "fourth strand" of ancient European ancestry.

This new lineage stems from populations of hunter-gatherers that split from western hunter-gatherers shortly after the 'out of Africa' expansion some 45,000 years ago and went on to settle in the Caucasus region, where southern Russia meets Georgia today.

Here these hunter-gatherers largely remained for millennia, becoming increasingly isolated as the Ice Age culminated in the last 'Glacial Maximum' some 25,000 years ago, which they weathered in the relative shelter of the Caucasus mountains until eventual thawing allowed movement and brought them into contact with other populations, likely from further east.

An elegant 2,200-year-old Hellenistic bronze incense shovel found this summer could help determine how and when Judeans settled the hills near the Kinneret

The tapered head, flattened bill and graceful curve of the neck are unquestionably that of a duck. The bird's head decorates a small, 2,200-year-old bronze incense shovel found during this summer's dig at a Hellenistic-era site near the Sea of Galilee, and its ancient owners may be the key to an investigation into how and when ancient Judeans populated the Galilee.

A Hebrew University team led by Dr. Uzi Leibner discovered the shovel amid the ruins of Khirbet el-Eika, a site just west of the Sea of Galilee near the Horns of Hattin, during August's excavations. Leibner sought to elucidate who the inhabitants of the Galilee were in the early Second Temple period.

The hills of the Galilee were densely populated with Jewish villages during the late Second Temple period and thereafter. The historical Jesus was born in the small Galilean town of Nazareth a little more than 2,000 years ago. The gospels and contemporary historical texts describe a region populated by Jews who rose up against the Roman Empire en masse in 66 CE. In the centuries thereafter it was the heartland of rabbinic scholarship, literature and Jewish life in Roman Palestine.

A lost island in İzmir's Dikili, which was mentioned in ancient sources, was recently found within the scope of a research project carried out by a group of Turkish and foreign experts

A lost island where the ancient city of Kane was located has been found by geo-archaeologists in the Aegean province of İzmir's Dikili district. The island was mentioned in ancient sources.

During surface surveys carried out near Dikili's Bademli village, geo-archaeologists examined samples from the underground layers and learned one of the peninsulas there was in fact an island in the ancient era, and its distance from the mainland was filled with alluviums over time.

With a comprehensive research project carried out by geo-archaeologists from Cologne University and led by the German Archaeology Institute, the relation of harbors on Dikili's Karadağ peninsula was examined.

Back in 1985, hikers climbing Argentina's Aconcagua mountain stumbled upon a ghastly surprise: the frozen corpse of a 7-year-old boy. It was apparent that he'd been there for a long time, so the hikers notified archaeologists, who carefully excavated the body. They determined that the Aconcagua boy, as he came to be known, was sacrificed as part of an Incan ritual 500 years ago and had been naturally mummified by the mountain's cold, dry environment. Now, a new analysis of the Aconcagua boy's mitochondrial DNA reveals that he belonged to a population of native South Americans that all but disappeared after the Spanish conquest of the New World.

The Aconcagua boy died as part of an Incan ritual of child sacrifice called capacocha. Children and adolescents were taken to the tops of high peaks and left to die of exposure or killed outright; the Aconcagua boy was likely executed with a blow to the head. Several capacocha mummies have been found on mountains scattered throughout Inca territory, but the Aconcagua boy is "one of the best preserved," says Antonio Salas, a human geneticist at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain and an author of the new study. The boy died 5300 meters above sea level in "one of the driest climates that exist," Salas says. That gave him hope that the mummy might still contain traces of DNA.

It did. Salas and his team extracted the mummy's complete mitochondrial genome—comprising 37 genes passed down solely from the mother—from one of its lungs. Sampling an internal organ was a good choice for minimizing the risk of contamination, says Bastien Llamas, a geneticist at the University of Adelaide in Australia who studies ancient South American populations. In the years since the mummy was found, "you assume ... no one has touched the lung with their own hands, so there is no contamination from the people who have been working on it," says Llamas, who was not involved in the study. But to make sure his research team wasn't contaminating the find with its DNA, Salas genotyped every last one of them.

It was a time when stone-age hunter gatherers were spreading across northern Europe and into Britain as the glaciers of the last ice age retreated.

But just as these mesolithic tribes were settling in these newly uncovered areas a giant tsunami triggered by an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway devastated large parts of Europe.

Waves of up to 65 feet (20 metres) are thought to have smashed into Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Scotland and parts of England's northern coastline.

Scientists have now uncovered evidence that shows just how powerful these huge waves were and the huge area that they effected.

Ancient rock formation is believed to be 5,000 years old -- but no one is sure what it was used for.


A mysterious stone circle in the Middle East is estimated to be nearly 5,000 years old -- about the same age as Stonehenge.

It's known in Arabic as Rujm el-Hiri, or "stone heap of the wild cat," and Gilgal Refaim in Hebrew, which means "Wheel of Giants" and refers to a race of giants mentioned in the Bible.

"It's an enigmatic site. We have bits of information, but not the whole picture," Uri Berger, an expert on megalithic tombs with the Israel Antiquities Authority, told Reuters. "Scientists come and are amazed by the site and think up their own theories."

The tombs, which city archaeologists knew existed but were unsure exactly where, were discovered during a water main dig and are about two centuries old

City workers have discovered two burial vaults underneath Washington Square Park in New York City, uncovering the remains of at least a dozen people interred around two centuries ago.

Contractors for the city department of design and construction (DDC) uncovered the first vault on Tuesday, during excavations to replace a century-old water main on the east side of the park, in the heart of bustling Greenwich Village. The workers called an archaeologist contracted by the city, who opened a way into the chamber only 3.5ft beneath the sidewalk.

Inside they found an arched brick chamber with skulls, femurs and other bones littered on the dirt floor.

The first vault was actually a rediscovery: power company ConEdison first uncovered the vault in 1965, finding 25 skeletons inside. Before this week's excavation archaeologists knew the tomb existed, but were not sure where thanks to the company's poor record-keeping.