Category: 9. Environment

An extended period of turmoil in the Maya city of Mayapan in Mexico was marked by population declines, political rivalries and civil conflict.

Between AD 1441 and 1461 the strife reached an unfortunate crescendo — the complete institutional…

Melting ice patches across Norway are revealing archaeological treasures from thousands of years ago that are under threat from climate change.

In recent years, hundreds of discoveries have been made that shows traces of ancient hunting, trapping,…

Extreme dry conditions contributed to the decline of the ancient South Arabian kingdom of Himyar.

Combined with political unrest and war, the droughts left behind a region in disarray, thereby creating the conditions on the Arabian peninsula that…

Were Neanderthals really as well adapted to a life in the cold as previously assumed, or did they prefer more temperate environmental conditions during the last Ice Age?

To answer these questions, it is worthwhile to examine Neanderthal sites on…

Researchers will soon be able to reconstruct the climate of north-west Europe including the UK over the last 4500 years, and to date wooden buildings and objects more accurately, by analysing the chemistry of ancient oak trees, through a new…

Current global climatic warming is having, and will continue to have, widespread consequences for human history, in the same way that environmental fluctuations had significant consequences for human populations in the past.

The so-called ‘8.2…

A study led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published recently in Science Advances, upends the previously accepted theory on why the Vikings abandoned Greenland.

Greenland, or Grœnland in Old Norse, was settled by Norwegian and…

‘The uplift of the Tibetan Plateau’ is invoked to explain various phenomena, from monsoon dynamics to biodiversity evolution and everything in between. It’s not accurate, finds a new paper.

The orogeny of the Tibetan region (Tibet, The Himalaya…

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, a coalition of activist groups which recently charged that climate change is contributing to exploitation of women, is now arguing that various factors are causing 2,000 species of…

Insects scuttle, chew and fly through the world around us. Humans rely on them to pollinate plants, prey on insects that we don’t get along with, and to be movers and shakers for Earth’s ecosystems. It’s hard to imagine a world without…