World Archaeology.
A dig near the famous ancient Egyptian port city of Berenice has turned up a mysterious animal cemetery dating to the 1st century AD. It emerged in the dunes to the northwest of the important ancient Red Sea port of Berenice, which saw traffic from far and wide, with ships coming from East Africa, Europe, and India.
Ninety percent of the nearly 600 burial sites explored unearthed cats, though there were also dogs and macaque monkeys, a few of them definitely imported from outside the Africa. The find was published by a team led by Marta Osypinska, an archaeozoologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, in the journal
From scavenger to household royalty: How dogs evolved from wolves to pampered pets
Scientists agree that dogs evolved from wolves and were the first domesticated animals. But exactly how that happened is hotly contested. IDEAS contributor Neil Sandell examines the theories and the evolution of the relationship between dogs and humans.
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Neil Sandell ·
Posted: Mar 01, 2021 5:13 PM ET | Last Updated: March 8
Scientists agree dogs were the first domesticated animal but exactly how that happened is contested. Did humans do it, or was it self-domestication?(John Phillips/Getty Images)
A dog buried at Berenice was protected with a piece of pottery. M. Osypinska
Graves of nearly 600 cats and dogs in ancient Egypt may be world’s oldest pet cemetery
Feb. 26, 2021 , 10:45 AM
The cats and dogs lie as if asleep, in individual graves. Many wore collars or other adornments, and they had been cared for through injury and old age, like today’s pets. But the last person to bury a beloved animal companion in this arid Egyptian land on the coast of the Red Sea did so nearly 2000 years ago.
The site, located in the early Roman port of Berenice, was found 10 years ago, but its purpose was mysterious. Now, a detailed excavation has unearthed the burials of nearly 600 cats and dogs, along with the strongest evidence yet that these animals were treasured pets. That would make the site the oldest known pet cemetery, the authors argue, suggesting the modern concept of pets wasn’t alien to the ancient world.
Million-Year-Old Mammoth Teeth Contain Oldest DNA Ever Found
A woolly mammoth tusk discovered in a creek bed on Wrangel Island in 2017.
Photo: Love Dalén
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An international team of scientists has sequenced DNA from mammoth teeth that is at least a million years old, if not older. This research, published today in Nature, not only provides exciting new insight into mammoth evolutionary history, it reveals an entirely unknown lineage of ancient mammoth.
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Mammuthus primigenius) may rival
T. rex in popular imagination, but it is, in fact, one of the last mammoth species to have evolved, and it’s only one of various, sometimes odd-looking species of large, tusked animals belonging to the order Proboscidea. Mammoths are believed to have originated in Africa approximately 5 million years ago, with populations traveling north into what is now Eurasia and eventually moving into North America. We still have much to learn about these ancient proboscidean predecessor
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Feb. 17, 2021
Scientists have retrieved DNA from mammoths that had lain in the Siberian permafrost for over a million years, in an elephantine leap forward for the study of ancient DNA.
The previous record was held by a horse who lived three-quarters to half a million years ago, whose genome was retrieved and analyzed in 2013.
Analysis of the whole genomes from two mammoths dating to more than 1.2 million years, and one that died “only” 900,000 years ago, showed there had been two distinct mammoth lineages in northern Siberia over a million years ago, Tom van der Valk and Love Dalén of the Swedish Center for Paleogenetics with colleagues reported in Nature on Wednesday. The two mammoth lineages may not even have been the same species.