Archaeologists have discovered a huge marble head, human teeth, and other artifacts from the same 2,000-year-old shipwreck where the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism—the oldest known analog computer—was found more than a century ago, according to an update from the team that is exploring the ancient underwater site. 

The Antikythera Mechanism has dazzled researchers and the public alike since divers first extracted it from the remains of a sunken Roman cargo ship off the coast of Antikythera, a Greek island, in 1901. The artifact provides a model of the solar system that acted as a sophisticated calendar, predicting the times of astronomical events, like eclipses, as well as cultural touchstones, such as the Olympic games. 

Researchers across the decades have managed to piece together many of the Mechanism’s inner workings, but it wasn’t until 2012 that divers returned to the shipwreck to search for additional clues. The mission, called “Return to Antikythera,” is led by the Hellenic Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, and has already found bronze artifacts, human remains, and other tantalizing objects in the submerged wreckage.

On Sunday, the team announced initial findings from its most recent survey, which ran from May 23 to June 15 and exposed an entirely new section of the wreck. 

“The 2022 field research included the relocation of selected sizeable natural boulders that had partially covered the shipwreck area during an event that is under investigation, weighing up to 8.5 tons each; their removal gave access to a formerly unexplored part of the shipwreck,” said the researchers in a blog post.

“The exact position and the archaeological context of each finding have been precisely documented during excavation,” added the team, with an aim “to precisely reconstruct the disposition of the wreckage and the conditions of the sinking of the ship sometime during the first half of the 1st century BC.” 

Perhaps the most striking artifact recovered is a larger-than-life-size marble head, presumed to represent the mythological Greek hero Herakles (Hercules), which probably belongs to a headless statue that was brought to the surface by sponge divers in 1900. The expedition also emphasized the value of two human teeth found in the wreckage, which researchers plan to mine for insights about their human sources.

“Important information is expected to be extracted from two human teeth, discovered in a solid agglomerate of marine deposits together with fragments of copper, wood and other materials typical of a maritime disaster,” the team said in the blog post. “Genetic and isotopic analysis of the teeth might be useful to deduce information on the genome and other characteristics relevant to the origin of the individuals they belonged to.”

The discoveries are part of a new phase of the Return to Antikythera expedition, coordinated by the University of Geneva, that will run to 2025. The researchers hope that the project will continue to shed light on the cultural context surrounding the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism, while also potentially unearthing items that might be on par with the ancient computer.

“Since the ship was transporting the highest quality of luxury goods, there is a very real possibility of unimaginable finds, similar in importance to the Mechanism,” according to the expedition website. “The Antikythera Shipwreck holds more secrets.”

The ruins of a vast ancient civilization that has remained hidden under the densely forested landscape of the Bolivian Amazon for centuries has now been mapped out in unprecedented detail by lasers shot from a helicopter, reports a new study. 

The immense settlements stretch across some 80 square miles of the Llanos de Mojos region of Bolivia and include pyramids, causeways, canals, ramparts, elevated “forest islands,” and buildings arranged in ways that hint at cosmological worldview. The structures were built by the Casarabe culture, an Indigenous population that flourished from 500 to 1400 A.D. and came to inhabit some 1,700 square miles of the Amazon rainforest. The find is “mind blowing,” according to one member of the research team. 

While field expeditions and Indigenous knowledge have previously shed light on this region’s lost settlements, a remote-sensing technique called Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) has now exposed the enormous extent and tantalizing complexity of this civilization.  

Scientists led by Heiko Prümers, an archaeologist at German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, used LIDAR to probe the remains of two large settlements called Cotoca and Landívar, along with 24 smaller sites, including 15 that were previously unknown to modern researchers. The results “indicate that the Casarabe-culture settlement pattern represents a type of tropical low-density urbanism that has not previously been described in Amazonia” and that “put to rest arguments that western Amazonia was sparsely populated in pre-Hispanic times,” according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.

“The architectural layout of large settlement sites of the Casarabe culture indicates that the inhabitants of this region created a new social and public landscape through monumentality,” Prümers and his colleagues said in the study. “We propose that the Casarabe-culture settlement system is a singular form of tropical agrarian low-density urbanism—to our knowledge, the first known case for the entire tropical lowlands of South America.”

LIDAR scanners work by shooting laser pulses at ground targets from aerial vehicles and recording the time it takes for the signal to bounce back. In this way, the method can generate minute details about topography that are beyond the range of other instruments. LIDAR is a particularly popular tool for archaeologists working at sites that are blanketed in dense vegetation, because they can expose details about past settlements that are difficult to spot or even access on the ground. 

While some of the buried structures at Llanos de Mojos were known, the new LIDAR data revealed a sprawling network of settlements linked by raised causeways that extend for miles across the verdant terrain and in which water was managed by a huge system of canals and reservoirs. 

The two large settlements, Cotoca and Landívar, were protected by concentric defensive structures that include moats and ramparts. Numerous signs of civic and ceremonial life are embedded in more densely populated areas, such as 70-foot-tall conical pyramids and earthen buildings that curiously take the shape of the letter U. 

“The scale and elaboration of civic-ceremonial architecture are key aspects of the large settlement sites,” Prümers and his colleagues said in the paper. “The orientation of the buildings that constitute the civic-ceremonial centers of the two large settlement sites is very uniform towards the north-northwest. This probably reflects a cosmological world view, which is also present in the orientation of extended burials of the Casarabe culture.”

While most of these monuments appear in more densely populated ruins, the scanned region may also have contained countless small hamlets that are too subtle to be detected by LIDAR, the team noted. Taken together, the new findings offer a captivating look at a society that thrived in this forested region for centuries, building massive agricultural and aquacultural infrastructure that sustained a rich social and ritual life.  

“The scale, monumentality, labor involved in the construction of the civic-ceremonial architecture and water-management infrastructure, and the spatial extent of settlement dispersal compare favorably to Andean cultures and are of a scale far beyond the sophisticated, interconnected settlements of southern Amazonia, which lack monumental civic-ceremonial architecture,” the researchers said in the study. 

“As such, the data contribute to the discussion of the global wealth of early urban diversity, and will help to redefine the categories used for past and present Amazonian societies,” he concluded.

Scientists have solved a paleontological mystery by examining the multihued glow of ancient spider fossils that are exposed to ultraviolet light, reports a new study. 

The discovery opens a new window into a 23-million-year-old lake ecosystem that is preserved in exceptional detail in rocks found near Aix-en-Provence, France. Researchers have been studying these fossils in the so-called “Insect Bed” since the 1700s because of their spectacular quality. But now a team led by Alison Olcott, associate professor of geology at the University of Kansas, has pinpointed the secret to their longevity over millennia, and it comes down to an odd glow. 

A new study describing the work chalks this glow up to the role of diatoms, single-celled organisms that form microalgae, which have preserved the exquisite remains of soft-bodied creatures such as spiders, which normally decompose without leaving fossils.

Olcott and her colleagues present “the first description of diatoms from the Aix-en-Provence Formation, despite its long history of investigation,” according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. The study reports that the diatoms played a “hitherto unknown” role in preserving soft-bodied species that may be “responsible for much of our understanding of insect, arachnid, amphibian, and plant life” in these lake settings.

“As far as we know, nobody has ever reported diatoms from the site,” said Olcott, who is also director of the Center for Undergraduate Research at KU, in a call. “This Aix-en-Provence fossil deposit is interesting because there's this historical aspect as well, where people have been describing fossils for centuries—looking at all these really cool insects, spiders, fish, shrimp that they pull up.” 

While the site has long been known to researchers, the mechanism that captured these incredible fossils has remained elusive. Now, Olcott and her colleagues have literally shed light on this question by studying the spider fossils under ultraviolet wavelengths.

“I have a fluorescent microscope and I love seeing what rocks and fossils do underneath it, because geological specimens can fluoresce depending on their mineralogy and chemistry,” Olcott said. With that in mind, she invited study co-author Matthew Downen, who was then a doctoral candidate at KU and now serves as the assistant director at the Center for Undergraduate Research, to take a look at the spider fossils with the instrument.  

The results were “really exciting,” she said. “It was just an amazing rainbow of autofluorescence, with all these details.”

Spider fossil with the presence of two kinds of siliceous microalgae: a mat of straight diatoms on the fossil and dispersed centric diatoms in the surrounding matrix. Image: Olcott et al

In addition to revealing incredibly fine features of the spiders, such as the hairs on their legs, the technique also exposed the presence of diatoms in the rock. Subsequent observations using a scanning electron microscope confirmed that the microalgae in this ancient lake created a complex chemical environment that was essential to entombing this rich ecosystem for posterity.

Previous studies have noted that microalgae chokes out oxygen in aquatic environments, creating anaerobic patches that slow the decomposition of dead animals. But Olcott and her colleagues show that a goopy material made by the diatoms, called extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), also plays a major role in the fossilization process. The EPS from the microalgae spurs bacteria in the environment to make sulfide, which in turn reacts with the spider exoskeleton in ways that promote fossilization.  

“It's basically the perfect combination of chemical environments,” Olcott explained. “The sulfide stabilizes the spider exoskeleton compounds, and then lets it get preserved into the rock record. It gives it a fighting chance to be fossilized.”

This overlooked process of fossilization may explain similar formations around the world, and it can reveal new information about inhabitants of bygone habitats that are largely lost to time. There are also clues about the present day hidden in these diatom structures; because lakes are generally more sensitive to environmental changes than marine habitats, scientists can study these deposits to get a sense of how modern ecosystems might respond to our era of human-driven global warming.

“We had all these time periods of climate change, so if we can understand how life responded in those time periods, that would be really useful for figuring out what could happen now,” Olcott said. “But to know how to interpret the fossil record, I think we have to know how we got that fossil record. Are we looking at an accurate representation of what that environment was? The first step to knowing that is knowing how those fossils came to be to start with.”

“Right now, we have great evidence for this is what happened at Aix-en-Provence and really intriguing hints that this could have happened wider,” she concluded. “And I really hope to go and see what else can be seen in these other deposits with their chemistry and fossils.”

A long-lost ship that carried explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew to Antarctica more than a century ago has been rediscovered in exceptional condition under nearly two miles of ice. 

On Wednesday, the quest to locate Endurance, a wooden vessel that sank into the Antarctic ice in 1915 during an epic journey of survival, officially came to an end, announced the scientific expedition Endurance22, which has been searching for the wreckage for weeks.  

“Endurance is found,” said the expedition team in a tweet that included an eerie image of the ship’s stern, which still bears the letters of its famous name above a five-pointed star (a vestige of the ship’s first name: Polaris). 

“We have made polar history with the discovery of Endurance, and successfully completed the world’s most challenging shipwreck search,” John Shears, a polar geographer leader of Endurance22, said in a statement.

Dan Snow, a historian who is part of the expedition, tweeted that the wreck is in “an astonishing state of preservation.” 

“The Antarctic seabed does not have any wood-eating microorganisms, the water has the clarity of distilled water,” he said. “We were able to film the wreck in super-high definition. The results are magical.”

Endurance was the centerpiece of a legendary attempt to make the first land crossing of Antarctica, known as the Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition of 1914 to 1917. Though Shackleton failed to achieve this goal, the expedition has become a celebrated story of, well, endurance in the face of punishing odds in an unforgiving environment. 

After the ship was ultimately crushed and swallowed by an ice floe on Nov. 21, 1915, Shackleton and his 27 crewmates were marooned for months in camps on the frozen surface of the Antactica’s Weddell Sea. In April 1916, as the ice broke, the men launched a multi-day escape on lifeboats to the uninhabited refuge of Elephant Island; Shackleton then led a small crew on a bold expedition across ​​800 miles of open ocean to the island of South Georgia where they were able to organize a rescue. All of the men survived.

For decades, explorers and scientists have hoped for an opportunity to locate the ship’s wreckage in its icy tomb. Endurance22, an interdisciplinary collaboration organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, has now made good on this dream.

Shears and his crew onboard the South African research icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II re-introduced the ship to the world in stunning video clips captured by underwater cameras. Because Endurance is considered a historical landmark under the Atlantic Treaty, the ship will remain untouched, though there are plans to extensively film and study it in future. 

“This is a milestone in polar history,” said Mensun Bound, the expedition’s director of exploration in a statement. “However, it is not all about the past; we are bringing the story of Shackleton and Endurance to new audiences, and to the next generation, who will be entrusted with the essential safeguarding of our polar regions and our planet. We hope our discovery will engage young people and inspire them with the pioneering spirit, courage and fortitude of those who sailed Endurance to Antarctica.”