Reconstructed Bronze Age boat aces its maiden voyage
Fast-forward to seventh century East Anglia in the United Kingdom, where an Anglo-Saxon warrior king was buried alongside exquisite goods within a massive ship. The wood of the vessel, at the famed site called Sutton Hoo, has rotted away, but iron rivets and impressions within the soft dirt reveal its span. Researchers are hoping to reconstruct the ship — and it’s not the only vessel gaining new life centuries after disappearing from time.
Using a supply list written on a clay tablet, a team of experts in the United Arab Emirates has reconstructed a Bronze Age ship. Shipwrights built the 59-foot (18-meter) Magan boat with hand tools using reeds, goat hair and animal fat. The vessel likely once ferried copper, textiles and semiprecious stones between societies living in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. The ship successfully sailed on a crewed maiden voyage in the Persian Gulf in March and will be part of a display about maritime history in the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi.
An analysis of ancient DNA collected from grave sites in Sweden and Denmark suggests that an archaic form of the plague might have been the root cause of a mystifying population collapse. Europe’s first farmers migrated from the Eastern Mediterranean about 6,500 years ago, replacing hunter-gatherer groups and introducing a more settled, agricultural lifestyle. But the population was decimated between 5,300 and 4,900 years ago. Researchers discovered plague-causing bacteria in remains across nine grave sites, and the careful burials suggest that the team found the origins of an epidemic. Separately, archaeologists working in Peru unearthed what they believe to be a 4,000-year-old temple and theater, thousands of years older than Machu Picchu, that shed light on the region’s complex religions.
Jacob the African lion has lived through many challenges during his decade within Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park. A buffalo gored him, and he got caught in a poacher’s snare and then lost a leg to a steel trap. Remarkably, he also carried out what’s likely the longest documented swim by a lion through crocodile-infested waters. Heat vision cameras captured a treacherous nighttime swim of nearly 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) by Jacob and his brother, Tibu, in February. Scientists believe the brothers were searching for lionesses after losing fights to male rivals in the hours leading up to the swim — and trying to avoid the humans shrinking their natural habitat.
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has been docked to the International Space Station for more than a month. While astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have far exceeded their expected stay of eight days aboard the orbiting laboratory, they remain ‘absolutely confident’ in Starliner’s capability to get them home, according to Wilmore. In the meantime, the duo has been helping with science experiments and maintenance tasks, while NASA and Boeing engineers conduct tests to see what caused Starliner’s thruster issues and helium leaks. Separately, the European Space Agency debuted its long-awaited new rocket, dubbed Ariane 6. The satellite launcher sailed through multiple milestones before experiencing a flight-ending anomaly.
The freezing temperatures of the Siberian permafrost preserved a piece of 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth skin so well that it contains a first-of-its-kind genetic treasure trove. Within the skin are millions of letters of genetic code contained in fossil chromosomes, or microscopic threadlike structures that carry DNA. The genetic fragments, which still largely maintain the structure they had when the mammoth was alive, will enable new insights into the extinct species. Meanwhile, a prehistoric volcanic eruption helped preserve some of the most complete specimens of buglike sea creatures called trilobites, and their fossils include never-before-seen anatomical details.
Curiosities:
- The James Webb Space Telescope captured a glowing new image of the Penguin and Egg galaxies, which have been locked in a cosmic dance for millions of years.
- Astronomers have detected a molecule on an exoplanet with glass rain that has never been seen outside of our solar system before — and the planet’s atmosphere has a rotten eggs stench.
- The most complete dinosaur skeleton found in the UK in more than a century has revealed a previously unknown species of plant-eating dinosaur that likely roamed in large herds.
- Scientists have spotted a bright blue tree frog for the first time in Western Australia that looks like it hopped straight out of the ‘Avatar’ films.