Oldest Roman Hairstyle Recreated for First Time | Vestal Virgins. For the first time, the hairstyle of the Roman Vestal Virgins has been recreated on a modern head. The Vestals were priestesses who guarded the fire of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, among other sacred tasks. Chosen before puberty and sworn to celibacy, they were free from many of the social rules that limited women in the Roman era. Their braided hairstyle, the sini crenes, symbolized chastity and was known in ancient texts as the oldest hairstyle in Rome. "These were the six most important women in Rome with the possible exception of the emperor's wife," said Janet Stephens, the Baltimore hairdresser and amateur archaeologist who unraveled the secrets of the Vestals' trademark braids. [See Video of the Braiding Process] Mystery hairstyle Stephens reported her findings Friday (Jan. 4) at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Seattle.
"I said, 'Oh, that is so cool, I gotta try this at home,'" Stephens told LiveScience. Creating a Vestal Virgin 'do. Human ancestors' diet changed 3.5 million years ago. 4 June 2013 Last updated at 03:03 ET By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News Australopithecus afarensis (pictured in an artist's impression) had different diets from their ancestors New analysis of early human teeth from extinct fossils, has found that they expanded their diets about 3.5 million years ago to include grasses and possibly animals. Before this, humanlike creatures - or hominins - ate a forest-based diet similar to modern gorillas and chimps. Researchers analysed fossilised tooth enamel of 11 species of hominins and other primates found in East Africa.
The findings appear in four papers published in PNAS journal. Like chimpanzees today, many of our early human ancestors lived in forests and ate a diet of leaves and fruits from trees, shrubs and herbs. But scientists have now found that this changed 3.5 million years ago in the species Australopithecus afarensis and Kenyanthropus platyops . Their diet included grasses, sedges, and possibly animals that ate such plants. Europe’s Hypocritical History of Cannibalism. Skilled hunters 300,000 years ago. Finds from early stone age site in north-central Germany show that human ingenuity is nothing new -- and was probably shared by now-extinct species of humans.
Archeologists from the University of Tübingen have found eight extremely well-preserved spears -- an astonishing 300,000 years old, making them the oldest known weapons anywhere. The spears and other artifacts as well as animal remains found at the site demonstrate that their users were highly skilled craftsmen and hunters, well adapted to their environment -- with a capacity for abstract thought and complex planning comparable to our own.
It is likely that they were members of the species Homo heidelbergensis, although no human remains have yet been found at the site. The project is headed by Prof. The bones of large mammals -- elephants, rhinoceroses, horses and lions -- as well as the remains of amphibians, reptiles, shells and even beetles have been preserved in the brown coal. A relative from the Tianyuan Cave: Humans living 40,000 years ago likely related to many present-day Asians and Native Americans. Ancient DNA has revealed that humans living some 40,000 years ago in the area near Beijing were likely related to many present-day Asians and Native Americans. An international team of researchers including Svante Pääbo and Qiaomei Fu of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China.
Analyses of this individual's DNA showed that the Tianyuan human shared a common origin with the ancestors of many present-day Asians and Native Americans. In addition, the researchers found that the proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan-DNA in this early modern human is not higher than in people living in this region nowadays. Humans with morphology similar to present-day humans appear in the fossil record across Eurasia between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago.
The researchers then reconstructed a genetic profile of the leg's owner. The universal language of lullabies. Four millennia ago an ancient Babylonian wrote down a lullaby sung by a mother to her child. It may have got the baby to sleep, but its message is far from soothing - and this remains a feature of many lullabies sung around the world today. Deeply etched into a small clay tablet, which fits neatly into the palm of a hand, are the words of one of the earliest lullabies on record, dating from around 2,000BC. The writing is in cuneiform script - one of the first forms of writing - and would have been carefully shaped by a Babylonian scribe, with a stylus made of reed, in what is modern-day Iraq. It's a rather menacing lullaby, in which the baby is chastised for disturbing the house god with its crying - and threatened with repercussions. Frightening themes were typical of lullabies of the era, says Richard Dumbrill, a leading expert on ancient music with the British Museum in London, where the tablet is kept.
Rhythmically, there are shared patterns too.