History & Culture

Reconstruction of a mammoth and a hunter, Natural History Museum, Munster, Germany, credit: Adobe Stock

Ice Age hunters may have targeted female mammoths, ancient DNA reveals

Ice Age hunters may have preferred hunting female woolly mammoths, according to an analysis of ancient DNA from more than 500 mammoth bones.

  • Paweł Dąbrowski. Credit: Tomasz Walów

    Teeth reveal what Wrocław residents ate 200 years ago

    The teeth of Wrocław residents who lived more than 200 years ago have revealed what was on their plates, from wheat, rye and barley to peas, beans, pork and Baltic herring.

  • Source: the University of Warsaw press release
    Technology

    Polish researchers test safer way to remove old conservation layers from historic paintings

    Polish scientists have developed a nanocomposite gel that has been used to safely remove old conservation materials from a historic painting by renowned artist Włodzimierz Tetmajer.

  • Adobe Stock
    Life

    Europe's primeval landscape wasn't endless forest after all, surprising study finds

    Europe's primeval landscape was not an endless expanse of dense forest as long believed, but a patchwork of woodland, meadows and grasslands maintained by large grazing animals, according to a new study.

  • Fragments of exaggerated anthropomorphic figures. Damage caused by weathering. Credit: Paweł Polkowski

    Ancient Egyptian rock art reveals two very different relationships between humans and animals

    For thousands of years, prehistoric artists in Egypt’s Dakhleh Oasis carved humans and animals into desert rocks — but they did not always tell the same story. Some images show people and wildlife existing side by side in harmony, while others portray hunting, control and violence.

  • Giraffe held on a rope. Credit: Paweł Polkowski

    Climate change threatens Egypt’s ancient rock art as Polish archaeologists race to document it

    Thousands of ancient rock carvings scattered across Egypt’s Western Desert are slowly disappearing. Rising temperatures, stronger winds, increasingly regular heavy rainfall and human activity are damaging some of Africa’s richest collections of prehistoric art, while Polish archaeologists are working to document what remains before it is lost.

  • Credit: Wikipedia/ public domain

    Cannibalism disappeared because it was too costly for human survival

    Cannibalism did not disappear by accident. It became too costly for the societies that practiced it, with long-term human consumption driving epidemics and ultimately contributing to population decline, according to a new study by Polish and Czech scientists.

  • Argishtikhinili seen from the north. Credit: Krzysztof Jakubiak

    Polish archaeologists discover complex ancient water distribution system in Armenia

    Archaeologists have identified more than 1,000 kilometres of ancient and modern water-management features near the former Urartian city of Argishtikhinili in Armenia, uncovering evidence of a vast irrigation system that helped transform the Ararat Basin into the agricultural heartland of the ancient kingdom more than 2,700 years ago.

  • Excavations in Sobota. Photo from press release

    Study challenges view that Neolithic monument builders devastated Europe's forests

    People who built monumental tombs in Central Europe about 5,600 years ago managed forests without causing widespread environmental destruction, using selective logging and rotational land use instead of large-scale burning, according to a new study.

  • Source: dr Aleksandra Grzegorska

    Parasites in 500-year-old burials reveal clues to diet and sanitation

    Scientists have identified eight species of parasites in human burials from Chełm in eastern Poland dating back around 500 years, with most individuals showing evidence of multiple simultaneous infections, according to a study published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

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  • Katarzyna Groborz, PhD, and Marcin Poręba, PhD. Photo from the Wrocław University of Science and Technology press release.

    Polish and US scientists find way to halt deadly cell breakdown without harming healthy cells

  • Spreading conspiracy theories ‘builds inter-group hatred’

  • Procrastination is best combated with positive reinforcement, Polish research shows

  • Polish scientists calculate how to send icy worlds crashing into Mars to thicken its atmosphere

  • Scientists discover vast hidden world of RNA viruses in cities worldwide

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Adobe Stock

We are not able to reliably identify texts generated by AI, says linguist

There is currently no tool that can determine with certainty whether a text was written by artificial intelligence, while increasingly sophisticated AI models are developing distinctive writing styles that may also be influencing how humans use language, according to a linguist from the University of Gdańsk.