Buried deep under the ground for centuries, a long-forgotten Roman skeleton has been unearthed in Lincolnshire.
The skeleton, whose age and gender remain a mystery, was uncovered during a dig at The Hoplands in Sleaford.
Little is known about the ancient figure other than the fact it was buried face down and was discovered with a plethora of other Roman items.
Wells, walls and a Roman Road were all uncovered in the vicinity of the bones, creating the picture of a thriving Roman community.
The figure was found during a dig by Network Archaeology …

Researchers excavating an ancient Roman cemetery made a surprising discovery when they extracted ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from one of the skeletons buried at the site: the 2,000-year-old bones revealed a maternal East Asian ancestry.
The results will be presented at the Roman Archeology Conference at Oxford, England, in March, and published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.
According to Tracy Prowse, assistant professor of Anthropology, and the lead author on the study, the isotopic evidence indicates that about 20% of the sample analyzed to-date was not born in the area around Vagnari. …

Chinese scholars reported Wednesday that a large ancient tomb they unearthed earlier in Northwest Shaanxi Province belongs to a high-ranking general that was guarded by hundreds of nude pottery figurines.
The large tomb, located in Chang’an district of Xi’an, the capital city of ancient Western Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD), belongs to Zhang Anshi.
Zhang was credited with preserving stability along the western border in the Xinjiang region, China Business View reported Thursday, saying the discovery might help provide clues about the military during that time period.
It is the first tomb complex of a noble …

Part of an ancient Roman law code previously thought to have been lost forever has been discovered by researchers at University College London’s Department of History. Simon Corcoran and Benet Salway made the breakthrough after piecing together 17 fragments of previously incomprehensible parchment.
The fragments were being studied at UCL as part of the Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded “Projet Volterra” — a ten year study of Roman law in its full social, legal and political context.
Corcoran and Salway found that the text belonged to the Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, …

Chimpanzees can be altruistic just like humans, according to a new study that found 18 cases of orphaned chimps being adopted in the wild.
The kind-hearted chimp parents were discovered in the Taï forest in the West African country Ivory Coast. The adoptive caregivers, both male and female, devoted large amounts of time and effort to protecting their young charges, without any obvious gain to themselves.
“I don’t know of any other cases of unrelated orphans being adopted,” said research leader Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. …