Photo/Xinhua] "The goal is to let oracle bone script step out of the classics, live in the present and reach audiences around ...

Excavations at the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu have uncovered a ritual pit more than eight feet deep, filled with 300 ...

Intrigue, whining, and negotiations—all these and more can be found in one of the greatest troves of ancient diplomatic ...

This cuneiform tablet, just over ten centimetres wide, describes a ceremonial ritual. The lines of text are clearly visible from a distance. A closer look (right) reveals just how badly worn the ...

A decade-long study of older women found that tea drinkers had slightly stronger bones, while moderate coffee drinking caused no harm. Heavy coffee intake—over five cups a day—was linked to lower bone ...

The From Labs to Lives Blog connects everyday topics with UC Davis research. Each post is reviewed by our experts, ensuring you always get useful information you can trust. Because we can’t see them, ...

Archaeologists recently unearthed a bone projectile point someone dropped on a cave floor between 70,000 and 80,000 years ago—which, based on its location, means that said someone must have been a ...

What does it take to decipher an extinct writing system? If Joshua Hammer’s new book The Mesopotamian Riddle: An archaeologist, a soldier, a clergyman, and the race to decipher the world’s oldest ...

Ancient human relatives crafted sharp-edged tools out of animal bones around 1.5 million years ago, researchers say. Discoveries at Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, a famous East African fossil location, ...

Deciphering some people's writing can be a major challenge—especially when that writing is cuneiform characters imprinted onto 3,000-year-old tablets. Now, Middle East scholars can use artificial ...

Sample results: aligning the prototypes (first row) to target cuneiform images (second row). Results are illustrated both after global alignment (third row) and also after refinement (bottom row).