Another Mayan Ruin in Belize. Not the one that was destroyed. Image: Rita Alexandrea

In Belize, they needed to build a road. Roads require rocks, there happened to be a really convenient, large pile of rocks for the construction team to use nearby. It also happened to be one of the largest Mayan pyramids in the country. Now that pyramid is gone, destroyed by bulldozers and backhoes.

The construction company building the road appears to have extracted crushed rocks from the pyramid to use as road fill. The pyramid, called the Nohmul complex, is at least 2,300 years old and sits on the border of Belize and Mexico. It’s over 100 feet tall, the largest pyramid in Belize left over from the Mayans.

Jaime Awe, the head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology said that the news was “like being punched in the stomach.” The pyramid was, he said, very clearly an ancient structure, so there’s no chance the team didn’t realize what they were doing. “These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It’s just bloody laziness,” Awe told CBS News. He also said:

“Just to realize that the ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these buildings, using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the stone, and carried this material on their heads, using tump lines. To think that today we have modern equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroyed this building. Why can’t these people just go and quarry somewhere that has no cultural significance? It’s mind-boggling.”

And it turns out that this is an ongoing problem in Belize. The country is littered with ruins (although none as large as Nohmul), and construction companies are constantly bulldozing them for road fill. An archaeologist at Boston University said that several other sites have already been destroyed by construction to use the rocks for building infrastructure. There isn’t much in the way of protection or management of these sites in Belize, so many people who live in the country either aren’t aware of their significance, or aren’t taught to care.

The Huffington Post has photographs from the scene, showing backhoes and bulldozers chipping away at the stone structure. HuffPo ends this story on a lighter note, pointing out that due to the destruction, archaeologists can now see the inner workings of the pyramid and the ways they were built.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Why Did the Mayan Civilization Collapse? A New Study Points to Deforestation and Climate Change
Spectral Images of a Mayan Temple

Dunwich beach, across which storms pulled the ancient city. Image: modagoo

In 1066, the town of Dunwich began its march into the sea. After storms swept the farmland out for twenty years, the houses and buildings went in 1328. By 1570, nearly a quarter of the town had been swallowed, and in 1919 the All Saints church disappeared over the cliff. Dunwich is often called Britain’s Atlantis, a medieval town accessible only to divers, sitting quietly at the bottom of the ocean off the British Coast.

Now, researchers have created a 3D visualization of Dunwich using acoustic imaging. David Sear, a professor at the University of Southampton, where the work was done, described the process:

Visibility under the water at Dunwich is very poor due to the muddy water. This has limited the exploration of the site. We have now dived on the site using high resolution DIDSON ™ acoustic imaging to examine the ruins on the seabed – a first use of this technology for non-wreck marine archaeology.

DIDSON technology is rather like shining a torch onto the seabed, only using sound instead of light. The data produced helps us to not only see the ruins, but also understand more about how they interact with the tidal currents and sea bed.

Using this technology gives them a good picture of what the town actually looks like. Ars Technica writes:

We can now see where the local churches stood, and crumbling walls pinpoint the ancient town’s remits. A one kilometer (0.6 mile) square stronghold stood in the center of the 1.8km2space (about 0.7 square miles), with what looks like the remains of Blackfriars Friary, three churches, and the Chapel of St Katherine standing within it. The northern region looks like the commercial hub with lots of smaller buildings largely made of wood. It’s thought that the stronghold, as well as its buildings and a possible town hall, may date back to Saxon times.

Professor Sears sees this project as not just one of historical and archaeological importance, but also as a forecast of the fate of seaside cities. “It is a sobering example of the relentless force of nature on our island coastline. It starkly demonstrates how rapidly the coast can change, even when protected by its inhabitants. Global climate change has made coastal erosion a topical issue in the 21st Century, but Dunwich demonstrates that it has happened before. The severe storms of the 13th and 14th Centuries coincided with a period of climate change, turning the warmer medieval climatic optimum into what we call the Little Ice Age.”

So, in a million years, when aliens come to look at our planet, it might look a lot like Dunwich.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Underwater World
Underwater Discovery

Photo: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The U.S. government has decided to return looted national treasures to their respective countries. Mongolia will get a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar (a slightly smaller cousin to T. rex) skeleton back, and Cambodia will receive two life-sized 10th century Khmer statues called the Kneeling Attendants.

The reconstructed skeleton, which is 8 feet tall and 24 feet long, was unearthed in the Gobi desert in 1946 by a Soviet and Mongolian team, Reuters reports. In 2010, the skeleton arrived in the U.S. from the U.K. along with a customs document that falsely stated that the fossils originated in Britain and that they were only worth $15,000. 

Mongolia demanded that the U.S. return the T. bataar skeleton after it was auctioned for $1.05 million last spring by Floridian Eric Prokopi. Here’s how the auction house described the item:

This is an incredible, complete skeleton, painstakingly excavated and prepared, and mounted in a dramatic, forward-leaning running pose. The quality of preservation is superb, with wonderful bone texture and delightfully mottled grayish bone color. In striking contrast are those deadly teeth, long and frightfully robust, in a warm woody brown color, the fearsome, bristling mouth and monstrous jaws leaving one in no doubt as to how the creature came to rule its food chain. Equally deadly and impressive are the large curving claws, with pronounced blood grooves. The body is 75% complete and the skull 80%…

Because of the kerfuffle, the sale was eventually canceled. Charges have since been filed against Prokopi, and the skeleton was returned to Mongolia on Monday. An official from the U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement told Reuters that this “is one of the most important repatriations of fossils in recent years.”

Cambodia, likewise, will soon be reunited with its missing relics. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City received the two sandstone statues, which came as separate broken heads and torsos, as gifts in 1987 and 1992, Archaeology reports. But over the years, evidence mounted that the statues had been looted from Cambodia’s Koh Ker temple during the tumultuous Cambodian Civil War in the 1970s. Witnesses, Archeology writes, can remember seeing the statues in the temple up until 1970 but that they were gone by 1975.

According to the New York Times, the museum assured Cambodia in a letter last month that the statues will be returned as soon as appropriate transit arrangements can be sorted out, though no timeline has been set.

The Met’s decision reflects the growing sensitivity by American museums to claims by foreign countries for the return of their cultural artifacts. Many items that have long been displayed in museums do not have precise paperwork showing how the pieces left their countries of origin. In recent years, at the urging of the Association of Art Museum Directors and scholars, many museums have applied more rigorous standards to their acquisitions.

Cambodian officials have asked the Met to examine another two dozen artifacts that may have been looted, and, according to Reuters, the U.S. is also helping to return additional fossils to Mongolia.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Looters Destroy Dinosaur Nest Sites  
Looters Are Selling Artifacts to Fund War in Syria 

Native Australians, 1939. Photo: National Archives of Australia

When Dutch explorers first arrived in Australia in 1606, they found they’d been beaten to it. But where did these indigenous Australians come from themselves? LiveScience:

Even the indigenous, or aboriginal, population in 1788 is a bit of a mystery, with estimates of the population ranging from 250,000 to 1.2 million. Further back, the story of Australia’s human population is shrouded, though gene studies suggest a relatively large founder population would have been necessary to result in the genetic diversity seen today.

Now, new research indicates that between 1,000 to 3,000 people originally made the trek some 50,000 years ago. And rather some chance encounter with the continent down under, researchers think that the original migrants set out to deliberately colonize Australia.

To arrive at the new discovery, researchers used nearly 5,000 radiocarbon isotopes from 1,750 ancient cooking, burial and settlement sites around the contient to reconstruct the past migration events. ScienceNOW explains what they found:

Relying on the radiocarbon-date database, Williams worked out the rates at which the population changed over time. Then he back-calculated from the aboriginal population at the time of the first European settlement in 1788. He found that for the aboriginal population to reach the estimated 770,000 to 1.2 million at the time of settlement (it’s roughly 460,000 today), the founding population that arrived in Australia roughly 45,000 years ago must have been between 1000 and 3000 people.

In other words, the researcher told ScienceNOW, Australia’s original migrants weren’t just a family or two who got shipwrecked on the continent.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Indians Made it to Australia More than 4,000 Years Before the British 
Contemporary Aboriginal Art 

A tunnel excavation in Guatemala. Photo: Takeshi Inomata

Ancient Maya were mathematical, engineering and artistic experts, but anthropologists still aren’t sure exactly how they developed such a rich culture. Most adhere to one of two theories when discussing the Maya’s origins. One group assumes that the Maya developed on their own in the Central American jungles without the influence of other cultures. The second group believes that the Maya were indeed significantly influenced by other civilizations, specifically the older Olmecs, the first major civilization known in Mexico.

New research, published in the journal Science, tells a third story. This new study, which is based on several years of excavation work in Guatemala, found that ancient Maya benefited from a melting pot of contact with other peoples across Mesoamerica between 1,000 to 700 BCE. This wider world of cultural experience may have helped kickstart and shape Mayan culture.

A husband-and-wife duo led the research team that undertook excavations at Ceibal, a Mayan site in Guatemala. The site, they found, was built before La Venta, a major Olmec center, by around 200 years. This means that, since it did not exist yet, La Venta couldn’t have been a significant influence on Ceibal.

Still, the Olmecs were around at the time, and they could have come into contact with the Maya. The researchers think that both La Venta and Ceibal represent a general, complex shift in cultures around that time period. In other words, one site did not provide the model for the other, even though similarities such as pyramids and evidence of ritual practices unite them.

“Basically, there was a major social change happening from the southern Maya lowlands to possibly the coast of Chiapas and the southern Gulf Coast, and this site of Ceibal was a part of that broader social change,” the researchers say in a statement. “The emergence of a new form of society – with new architecture, with new rituals – became really the important basis for all later Mesoamerican civilizations.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

El Mirador, the Lost City of the Maya 
Maya Holy Snake Queen’s Tomb Unearthed in Guatemala 

Photo: Cheezburger

We’re guessing that most people have seen the original Star Wars and that, if not, you probably still know half of the quotable lines anyway. But have you seen the movie in your native tongue? If you speak English or French or Spanish or German or one of the other massive world languages, then you probably have. But what if you speak Diné bizaad, the traditional language of North America’s Navajo?

Until now, you’ve been out of luck. But the Daily Times from Farmington, New Mexico, says that the Navajo Nation is teaming up with Lucasfilm and a Hollywood production company to re-release A New Hope in Diné bizaad, a language spoken by around 210,000 people. PBS:

Of all the major tribes, the Navajo language seems to be the most robust. According to the U.S. Census, almost 70 percent of Navajos speak their tribal language in the home, and 25 per cent do not know English very well. For many Navajo, English has been a second language.

But, among younger generations, the traditional tongue is on its way out. Translating Star Wars could bring the tale to those who’ve yet to experience it, but also offer a fun way to get young people to dust off some potentially underused language skills. Star Wars, says the Daily Times, will be the first movie ever translated and re-cut in Diné.

The Dine version is scheduled to debut July 4 at the Navajo Nation Fair in Window Rock, and the tribe is hoping to show it in area theaters later in the year.

According to the Daily Times, the tribe said that they “could not release any of the translated script” before the showing. You wouldn’t want any spoilers.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Work of R.C. Gorman, the Picasso of American Indian Art
The Sauropods of Star Wars

A computer-generated image of how the woman would have appeared when she was first laid to rest. Photo: Wessex Archaeology

For one  ancient woman, a diamond—or, at least, her jewelry—is indeed forever. At a quarry between Heathrow airport and Windsor Castle, just outside London, archaeologists just uncovered the remains of a 4,400-year old corpse that may turn out to be the first queen of Windsor. Though her clothes long since decomposed and her bones are almost completely decayed, her lavish jewelry remains behind, giving hints to her identity and possible royal status. LiveScience reports:

The woman’s bones have been degraded by acid in the soil, making radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis impossible. Nonetheless, excavators believe she was at least 35 years old when she died sometime between 2500-2200 B.C., around the era Stonehenge was constructed.

When this woman was buried, she wore a necklace of tube-shaped gold beads and black disks made from a coal-like material called lignite. Scattered around her remains, archaeologists also found amber buttons and fasteners, hinting that she was buried in an adorned gown that has long since disintegrated. Black beads near her hand were probably once part of a bracelet. A large drinking vessel, a rare find in graves from this time period and area, was also buried near her remains

From initial isotope analyses, the researchers found that the gold probably originated in southeast Ireland and southern Britain, the black beads from eastern Europe, and the amber perhaps from the Baltic region, Discover writes. As far as who she was:

According to the archaeologists in charge of the excavation, Gareth Chaffey of Wessex Archaeology, the woman was probably “an important person in her society, perhaps holding some standing which gave her access to prestigious, rare and exotic items.”

This means, Chaffey continued, that she could have been a leader, a person of power or perhaps even a queen.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Extraordinary Discoveries 
Dispatch from Stonehenge 

Click to zoom. Photo: Library of Congress

On Monday afternoon, four hours after the annual Boston marathon began, two bombs exploded in the area just around the finish line, killing three and injuring nearly 200 people. Four days later, one suspect in the bombing attack is dead, and, as of this writing, the city of Boston is in lockdown mode as a manhunt is underway for a second. Authorities have identified the bombing suspects as Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, two brothers who moved to the area roughly a decade ago from Makhachkala, Dagestan, a region that is part of the North Caucasus that forms southwestern Russia.

The area has been a hotbed for conflict in recent decades, including terrorist bombings carried out elsewhere in Russia. Starting in 1994, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the First Chechen War broke out. It was during this time that the Tsarnaevs would have grown up. The Council on Foreign Relations:

In the early 1990s, following the Soviet collapse, separatists in the newly formed Russian Federation Republic of Chechnya started an independence movement called the Chechen All-National Congress. Russian President Boris Yeltsin opposed Chechen independence, arguing that Chechnya was an integral part of Russia. From 1994 to 1996, Russia fought Chechen guerillas in a conflict that became known as the First Chechen War. Tens of thousands of civilians died, but Russia failed to win control of Chechnya’s mountainous terrain, giving Chechnya de facto independence. In May 1996, Yeltsin signed a ceasefire with the separatists, and they agreed on a peace treaty the following year.

But violence flared again three years later. In August 1999, Chechen militants invaded the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan to support a local separatist movement. The following month, five bombs exploded in Russia over a ten-day period, killing almost three hundred civilians. Moscow blamed Chechen rebels for the explosions, which comprised the largest coordinated terrorist attack in Russian history. The Dagestan invasion and the Russian bombings prompted Russian forces to launch the Second Chechen War, also known as the War in the North Caucasus. In February 2000, Russia recaptured the Chechen capital of Grozny, destroying a good part of the city center in the process, reasserting direct control over Chechnya. Tens of thousands of Chechens and Russians were killed or wounded in the two wars, and hundreds of thousands of civilians were displaced.

The First Chechen War (so-called, though not actually the first) broke out in 1994, causing more than 300,000 people to flee the region as refugees. The Second Chechen War added to this emigration.

The Chechen’s (or Nokhchi in their own tongue) bid for independence, however, has stretched back hundreds of years. “The Chechens have evidently been in or near their present territory for some 6000 years and perhaps much longer,” says University of Berkeley professor Johanna Nichols. “There is fairly seamless archaeological continuity for the last 8,000 years or more in central Daghestan.”

PBS has a detailed look at the history of the region, tracing the lands change of hands from the 1400s onward, from the Mongols to the Ottoman Empire to the Russians under Ivan the Terrible in 1559.

In 1722, says PBS, “Peter the Great, ever eager for trade and military routes to Persia, invaded Chechnya’s neighbor Daghestan.”

Repulsed by the Daghestanis and Chechen mountain warriors, Russia fell back again, but would press on for the next 50 years with sporadic raids on Chechen and Daghestani territory. In 1783, Russia finally gained a strategic toehold in the Caucasus with the recognition of Georgia, Chechnya’s Christian neighbor to the south, as a Russian protectorate.

In 1784, led by Muslim leader Imam Sheik Mansur, the Chechens took back their land. This struggle went back and forth through the 19th and 20th centuries. Starting in the late 17th century, says Berkeley professor Nichols, the Chechens largely converted to the Sunni branch of Islam. “Islam is now, as it has been since the conversion, moderate but strongly held and a central component of the culture and the ethnic identity,” according to Nichols. Muslim beliefs are common throughout the region, as well as in nearby Turkey.

In 1944, in the midst of World War II, “Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the Chechens and their Ingush neighbors — some 400,000 people — to be deported to Central Asia and Siberia for “mass collaboration” with invading Nazis.” Evidence to support Stalin’s charges,” however, “remains limited.”

Over the centuries, the motivations for war have varied, from invaders wanting a trading path through the mountains to religious holy wars to pure political oppression.

*This post has been updated for clarity.*

More from Smithsonian.com:
Georgia at a Crossroads

An A. sediba skull. Photo: Brett Eloff

Around 2 million years ago, the first humans evolved from australopiths, our smaller-brained ape-like ancestors. Back in 2008, researchers found two skeletons in South Africa from the ape-like Australopithecus sediba. A male and female skeleton, called MH1 and MH2, were buried together, and further excavations revealed an infant and another partial adult skeleton nearby. All of the remains dated back to around 1.8 to 1.9 million years old. These skeletons began to raise questions about what we really know about human evolution and Homo origins.

The researchers published their results in the journal Science in 2010, writing:

Despite a rich African Plio-Pleistocene hominin fossil record, the ancestry of Homo and its relation to earlier australopithecines remain unresolved. Here we report on two partial skeletons with an age of 1.95 to 1.78 million years. The fossils were encased in cave deposits at the Malapa site in South Africa. The skeletons were found close together and are directly associated with craniodental remains. Together they represent a new species of Australopithecus that is probably descended from Australopithecus africanus. Combined craniodental and postcranial evidence demonstrates that this new species shares more derived features with early Homo than any other australopith species and thus might help reveal the ancestor of that genus.

Until this discovery, researchers had assumed that Lucy, the remains, more than 3 million years old, of an Australopithecus afarensis female found in 1974, represented either our direct evolutionary ancestor or else a very close ancestor. But Lucy’s skeleton was found in Ethiopia, about 4,000 miles away from the A. sediba remains uncovered in South Africa. 

Immediately,  i09 explains, researchers began to second guess whether Homo emerged from East Africa after all. Our origins instead may be more southerly. Now, a new slew of studies published by the same research team in Science answers some questions about what our ancestor was like while also opening up some new mysteries. The New Scientist gives a run down of the “bizarre mosaic” of qualities resembling both Homo and Australopithecus africanus (another South African species that lived around 2 to 3 million years ago) that a closer examination of the A. sediba specimens revealed.

The Homo-like traits included:

• Same number of vertebrae
• Human-like waist
• Bottom of the ribcage narrows
• Walked upright
• Small canine teeth.

And the ape-like traits were:

• Top of the ribcage tapered towards the shoulders, preventing the arms from swinging when walking  
• Arms and legs appear well equipped to swing and balance on branches
• When walking, rather than planting its heel first like Homo, A. sediba’s gait was more twisty and hoppy thanks to a flexible midfoot.

Where A. sediba fits into the evolutionary tree is still under debate. Based upon studied of the specimens’ teeth, it does not appear that A. sediba evolved from A. afarensis (Lucy) in East Africa. Instead, the New Scientist writes, A. africanus seems to be the most likely ancestral candidate.

That suggests the roots of both lineages of australopiths – from East and South Africa – are even older. “It appears that there may be a ‘ghost lineage’ of unrecognised hominins that goes back deeper in time than afarensis,” says Lee Berger at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who discovered A. sediba.

National Geographic points out that the questions surrounding A. sediba, such as why it seemed to return to the trees after it first evolved to walk on the ground and where it fits in on the human evolution puzzle, are far from resolved.

Are the ways that Australopithecus sediba resembles early Homo species true indicators of a close evolutionary relationship—or are they traits that evolved independently in both lineages?

Few scientists believe this question has even begun to be settled.

But A. sediba will likely leave a significant mark on science, in any case:

Regardless of what Australopithecus sediba turns out to be, however, the fossils offer an important caution about interpreting more fragmentary human remains found elsewhere.

The hominin “is so curious in its totality,” [paleoanthropologist Rick] Potts says, “it might lead to some rethinking of how we classify fossil humans and place them in our evolutionary tree.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Human Evolution World Tour 
A Human Evolution Summer Reading List 

Photo: Helga Weber

The Greeks set the bar on ideal, universal beauty back in the pre-Socratic days of Pythagoras. Beauty, these mathematically inclined philosophers and scholars concluded, depends upon proportion and symmetry  regardless of whether it applies to a woman’s body or a Greek palace.

In the Renaissance, these ideas were taken up with a new fervor and this time applied more directly to judging the human form. The Renaissance ideal of “classical beauty” survived the years, defining the standard of both male and female beauty that has endured until today, especially in the West. More recently, studies reinforced the idea of a shared universal ideal for human beauty based upon symmetry’s underlying indication of good genes.

Chins, however, may be the exception. New research published in PLoS One proves that there is no global consensus for what makes an ideal chin. 

Dartmouth researchers studied chin shapes of 180 recently deceased male and female skeletons from Australia, Africa, Asia and Europe. Chin shapes, they found, differ significantly in all of these regions. According to what researchers call the universal facial attractiveness hypothesis, some facial features are preferred across cultures because they’re a good signal of mate quality. If chins were indeed an important factor in determining a mate’s attractiveness and quality, they reasoned, then over the years human chins of shared proportions would have been selected for and become the norm, regardless of location.

“Our results suggest that chin shape is geographically variable in both sexes, challenging the notion of universal sexual selection on chin shape,” the researchers say in a statement. 

More from Smithsonian.com:

Beautiful Woman  
Virtue and Beauty

A construction project in London turned into an archaeological dig when crews discovered the relics of ancient Rome entombed in the mud. Bloomberg News, whose new headquarters is set to go up atop the site, says that “some 10,000 well-preserved objects” have so far been found:

Museum of London archeologists have discovered good-luck charms, coins, drains and even leather shoes — dating from the mid-40’s A.D. (when the Romans founded London) to 410 A.D. The objects are in good condition because a now-lost river, the Walbrook, kept the ground wet and prevented their decay.

“What we’ve found is essentially a slice through the entire history of Roman London,” said Sophie Jackson, project manager for the Bloomberg Place excavation. “We’ve got, in one corner of this site, the whole sequence: every year of Roman occupation, represented by buildings and yards and alleyways — places where people lived and worked for 350 years, one layer above another.”

“We’re calling this site the Pompeii of the north,” said Jackson.

On top of the charms and coins, says CNN, the dig also turned up fragments from Roman writing tablets—a rare find even in the formerly-Roman and permanently-under-construction city.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Greek Subway Dig Uncovers Marble Road from Roman Empire
Scientists Think They’ve Found Richard III’s Body Under a Parking Lot

A screenshot from the free version of Shroud 2.0

Easter is behind us yet again, but for tech-savvy Christians, honoring of the resurrection of Jesus may have been a little different this year. On Good Friday, says the New York Times, Haltadefinizione, a company that makes ultra-high resolution images, released Shroud 2.0: a hip, modern, high-tech look at one of the religion’s potentially most important artifacts, the Shroud of Turin.

The app provides (for a price) a detailed glimpse at the Shroud. To get their high-resolution photo, says Haltadefinizione, they captured 1649 photos of the cloth, “each of which represents the area of the size of a business card, creating a single image of 12 billion points stored in one file of 72 Gigabytes, equal to the contents of 16 DVDs.” (The free version of the app provides just a basic photo.)

According to some Christian believers, the Shroud was the cloth worn by Jesus when he was buried following crucifixion—his resurrected body rising from its folds. “The Vatican,” for its part, says USA Today, “has never claimed that the 14-foot linen cloth was, as some believers claim, used to cover Christ after he was taken from the cross 2,000 years ago.”

According to scientists, the Shroud was a fourteenth century work of art: “Many experts have stood by a 1988 carbon-14 dating of scraps of the cloth carried out by labs in Oxford, Zurich and Arizona that dated it from 1260 to 1390, which, of course, would rule out its used during the time of Christ.” New findings dating the cloth to the fourth or fifth century (published in a book, not a scientific publication) put the 1988 results in dispute, but obviously more work will be needed.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Dead Sea Scrolls Just Went Digital

Photo: Kyle Rush

The famous story of Cleopatra’s suicide gets points for drama and crowd appeal: Her lover, Mark Antony, had been defeated in battle by Octavian and, hearing that Cleopatra had been killed, had stabbed himself in the stomach. Very much alive, after witnessing his death, the beautiful last Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt pressed a deadly asp to her breast, taking her own life as well.

But what if Cleopatra didn’t commit suicide at all?

Pat Brown, author of the new book, The Murder of Cleopatra: History’s Greatest Cold Case, argues that the “Queen of Kings” did not take her own life. Rather, she was murdered, and her perpetrators managed to spin a story that has endured for more than 2,000 years.

Brown, writing for The Scientist, says she decided to treat Cleopatra’s story as any typical crime scene.

I was shocked at the number of red flags that popped up from the pages of the historical accounts of the Egyptian queen’s final day. How was it that Cleopatra managed to smuggle a cobra into the tomb in a basket of figs? Why would the guards allow this food in and why would they be so careless in examining them? Why would Octavian, supposedly so adamant about taking Cleopatra to Rome for his triumph, be so lax about her imprisonment? Why would Cleopatra think it easier to hide a writhing snake in a basket of figs rather than slip poison inside one of the many figs? How did all three women end up dead from the venom? Wasn’t it unlikely that the snake cooper­ated in striking all three, releasing sufficient venom to kill each of them? Why was the snake no longer present at the crime scene? Was a brand-new tomb so poorly built that holes remained in the walls of the building? Why did the guards not look for the snake once they thought it had killed the women? Why were the wounds from the fangs of the snake not obvious? Why did the women not exhibit the symptoms of death by snake venom or even by poison? Why did the guards not see any of the women convulsing, vomiting, or holding their abdomens in agony? Why didn’t they see any swelling or paral­ysis of face or limbs or any foaming at the mouth?

Brown began pursuing these answers through historical texts and more recent scholarly works. She spoke with Egyptologists, poison experts, archeologists and historians of the ancient world, slowly forming her own version of what really took place August 12, 30 BC.

With each step back in time from the end of Cleopatra’s life to the beginning, I discovered more and more evidence pointing to a radically different explanation of history than the ancients and Octavian wanted us to believe.

In this story, Cleopatra never loved Antony or Julius Caesar. Antony was murdered, and Cleopatra was tortured and strangled to death.

I believed Cleopatra may have been one of the most brilliant, cold-blooded, iron-willed rulers in history and the truth about what really happened was hidden behind a veil of propaganda and lies set in motion by her murderer, Octavian, and the agenda of the Roman Empire.

This book, Brown hopes, will set the record straight.

*This post has been updated.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Who Was Cleopatra? 
Rehabilitating Cleopatra 

Image: Joe Mabel

Shrunken heads are a key part of the “scary tribal people” setup. And some cultures did, in fact, create miniature heads for religious and spiritual purposes. But how does one take a regular sized human skull and miniaturize it?

The process is gruesome, according to Today I Found Out. First, the skin and hair had to be separated from the skull to allow them to shrink at different rates. Then, the eyelids were sewn shut and the mouth was stuck closed with a peg. And for the actual shrinking, the heads were put in a big pot and boiled for a very specific amount of time. Then, Staci Lehman writes:

Once removed from the pot, the head would be about 1/3 its original size and the skin dark and rubbery. The skin would then be turned inside out and any leftover flesh scraped off with a knife. The scraped skin was then turned with the proper side out again and the slit in the rear sewn together. The process wasn’t done yet. The head was shrunk even further by inserting hot stones and sand to make it contract from the inside. This also “tanned” the inside, like tanning an animal hide, in order to preserve it.

Once the head reached the desired size and was full of small stones and sand, more hot stones would be applied to the outside of the face to seal and shape the features. The skin was rubbed with charcoal ash to darken it, and as tribesmen believed, to keep the avenging soul from seeping out. The finished product was hung over a fire to harden and blacken, then the wooden pegs in the lips pulled out and replaced with string to lash them together.

When Westerners and Europeans started traveling and discovering cultures that practiced head shrinking, they were both terrified and fascinated. Many of them brought back shrunken heads and souvenirs. In the 1930s, a shrunken head sold for $25—$330 in today’s dollars. In fact, they were popular and lucrative enough that unscrupulous head-peddlers started trading in fake shrunken heads, made from the heads of sloths and other animals. And telling the difference between a real and fake shrunken head can be hard. In fact, one researcher claims that most shrunken heads on display at museums (including the American Museum of Natural History) are fake. Forensic researchers write about some of the ways to tell:

Tsantsas, or shrunken head, are an ancient traditional technique of the Jivaro Indians from Northern Peru and Southern Ecuador. Tsantsas were made from enemies’ heads cut on the battlefield. Then, during spiritual ceremonies, enemies’ heads were carefully reduced through boiling and heating, in the attempt to lock the enemy’s spirit and protect the killers from spiritual revenge. However, forgers have made fake tsantsas out of sloth heads, selling them as curios to international travelers. Morphologic criteria can help in the distinction of forged and authentic tsantsas. Presence of sealed eyelids, pierced lips with strings sealing the mouth, shiny black skin, a posterior sewn incision, long glossy black hair, and lateral head compression are characteristic of authentic tsantsas. On the other hand, fake tsantsas usually present few or none of those criteria. To establish authenticity of the shrunken head, we used all of the above-mentioned morphologic criteria along with microscopic hair examination and DNA analysis.

If you don’t have a DNA sequencer handy to identify your human head, William Jamieson Tribal Art says to look at the ears:

Imitation tsantsa are classified under two categories, being either non-human or human but prepared by someone other than the Jivaro tribesmen. As the most common non-human fakes are often made out of goat or monkey skin, one must pay particular attention to distinguishing between authentic and replicas. Indications of counterfeit tsantsa are characterized by looking for nasal hairs which is a notable distinction between identifying authentic heads and non-human replicas. In addition to this, it is also quite difficult to duplicate a shrunken human ear. The ear should remain in its original form only smaller. Fakes generally cannot match the intricate details of the human ear.

As for many topics of cultural anthropology in which the culture in question still exists and its members would like to be treated as people, head shrinking is a bit contentious. In the Shuar culture, shrunken heads (or ”tsantsas”) are extremely important religious symbols. One anthropologist writes:

That Shuar have killed people to make powerful objects, whereas we have made powerful objects to kill people, does not sustain any meaningful distinction between the savage and the civilized.

Is is hard for many people to not see shrinking of heads as a gruesome act. (Shrunken heads were found in the German concentration camp at Buchenwald, but never identified.) And many say that no new shrunken heads have been made for twenty years. In South America, many countries outlawed selling human heads in the 1930s. Whether or not heads have been shrunk since is still up for debate, but at least now you know how it happens.

More from Smithsonian.com:

An Evolving Ritual
Egyptian Mummification Rituals Uncovered at Natural History

In the middle of the 14th century, the black plague hit London, killing in a year and a half as many as 40,000 people. “There were so many dead that Londoners had to dig mass graves,” says the Museum of London.

In some of the trenches, the bodies were piled on top of each other, up to five deep. Children’s bodies were placed in the small spaces between adults. By 1350 the Black Death had killed millions of people, possibly half the population of the known world.

During recent construction efforts in London, archaeologists announced the discovery of a pit, 18 feet wide, housing the skeletons of people thought to have been killed during the earliest waves of the the black plague’s rampage across the Europe. NPR:

Thirteen skeletons were found lying in two neat rows about eight feet beneath the road in central London, as workers surveyed land for the Crossrail project, a transportation effort that’s building new rail lines for London. It’s believed they’re from a bubonic plague outbreak in 1348: researchers also found pottery dating from that time period, and say the depth at which the bodies were buried, also indicates an approximate time of death.

The relative organization of the bodies in the pit, says The Independent, suggests that these Londoners were killed before the chaos of the full-blown black plague outbreak.

Experts believe that the skeletons’ arrangement in two neat rows suggests they date from the earlier period of the plague, before it became a pandemic and before bodies were thrown randomly into mass graves.

In the land around the excavation site, says NPR, “as many as 50,000 people could be buried in the area. Records suggest these no man’s land burial grounds for plague victims were used through the 1400′s, but no evidence of a huge cemetery has ever been found.”

The Independent: “Although that number is now widely believed to have been an exaggeration, the discovery of further remains has not been ruled out.”

According to The Independent, any fears that may have sprung to mind about disturbing the peaceful slumber of these medieval skeletons, is—fortunately—misguided:

Mr Elsden was quick to reassure the public that there was no longer any health risk from the plague which killed over a quarter of the British population in 1348.

“It’s not something that stays in the soil. You have to actually meet someone who has it in order to catch it.”

That being said, recent research suggests that the black plague is still a threat today—maybe even more-so than before. Though better preventative measures and quarantines and health surveillance programs exist now than they did in the middle ages, the emergence of antibiotic resistant strains of the bacteria that cause the plague is a worrying development.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Black Death Never Left – And It Might Defeat Our Best Defenses