Scientists studying the remains of people who died in the devastating Mount Vesuvius eruption that buried the ancient city of Pompeii have made major DNA discoveries more than a 1,000 years after the event took place.

It was back in 79 AD that the Italian volcano erupted 33 kilometres in to the sky, throwing molten rock, hot ash, and super hot clouds of gas across the Bay of Naples.

For those who want to try and quantify it in modern terms, the mount of thermal energy released in the eruption was 100,000 times that of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mount Vesuvius And Pompeii Ruins (Getty Stock Images)

The eruption of Mt Vesuvius was one of the deadliest volcano blasts in history, with several Roman towns destroyed and covered. Pompeii and Herculaneum were two settlements wiped off the face of the Earth and buried under pyroclastic surges, with left victims frozen in suspended actions as they instantly died.

To this day the death toll remains unknown, with 20,000 people living in both cities. So far, remains of more than 1,500 people have been found across the two locations.

After the ruins of Pompeii were excavated, with it now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the desperate remains of people caught up in the eruption were found by archeologists.

Cast of a man with a child, both of whom died in Pompeii (Marilla Sicilia/Archivio Marilla Sicilia/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)

Observers who look at such remains see the final moments and stories in the plaster casts later made of their bodies, like a mother holding a child and two women embracing as they die.

But new DNA evidence suggests things were not as they seem, and these prevailing interpretations come from looking at the ancient world through modern eyes.

“We were able to disprove or challenge some of the previous narratives built upon how these individuals were kind of found in relation to each other,” said Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

“It opens up different interpretations for who these people might have been.”

Ms Mittnik and her colleagues carried out tests on 14 casts of victims found in Pompeii’s ruins, where they found that they had been wrongly identified.

It wasn’t just people who perished in the eruption (Ivan Romano/Getty Images)

Instead of being family, one cast of a man holding a child found that the youngster was unrelated to the person assumed to be their parent. This discovery was found in a location known as ‘the house of the golden bracelet’; named after an intricate piece of jewellery, for which the house was named, reinforcing the impression that the victim was a woman.

And at least one of the two people locked in an embrace, long assumed to be sisters or a mother and daughter, was a man. Their research was published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

Long thought to be a sister with their mother or daughter, the other person was in fact a man (Archaeological Park of Pompeii)

The study builds upon research from 2022 when scientists sequenced the genome of a Pompeii victim for the first time and confirmed the possibility of retrieving ancient DNA from the human remains that still exist.

“They have a better overview of what’s happening in Pompeii because they analysed different samples,” said Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, a co-author of that research who was not involved in the current study.

“We actually had one genome, one sample, one shot.”

A 90-million-year-old fossil could definitively change everything we know about the history of Antarctica.

What do you think when someone says the words ‘Antarctica’ or ‘South Pole’? It’s most likely extreme cold, penguins and maybe even the Drake Passage – if you’re familiar with a certain area of TikTok.

However, we’d imagine that rolling rainforests and lush greenery isn’t on that list.

Well, it looks like things haven’t always been that way.

The Antarctic wasn’t always blisteringly cold (Getty Stock Images)

The argument that Antarctica harbours more than just mounds of snow and ice isn’t anything particularly new. With numerous conspiracy theorists over the years peddling the ideas such as secret mega civilisations, secret bunkers for global elites, Game of Thrones-esque ice walls and even a gateway to the inside of Earth doing the rounds over the years.

While the above are hardly much more than evidence that a lot of people have a very over-active imagination, there is emerging evidence in the scientific community which suggests the barren landmass wasn’t always completely frozen over.

The latest evidence to support this theory comes courtesy of scientists in Germany, who have revealed they have discovered the presence of amber on the west side of the continent.

The amber discovered on the continent (Alfred Wegener Institute)

Now, this may not sound as exciting as lizard people or ice pyramids, but is nonetheless a very important piece of evidence when it comes to decoding Antarctica’s past.

Amber is formed from resin found in tree bark, which has since fossilised and hardened for more than 40,000 years.

Pretty cool, huh?

“It was very exciting to realise that, at some point in their history, all seven continents had climatic conditions allowing resin-producing trees to survive,” Johann Klages, study lead and marine geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, said of the discovery.

Explaining what’s next for researchers, he added: “Our goal now is to learn more about the forest ecosystem – if it burned down, if we can find traces of life included in the amber.

“This discovery allows a journey to the past in yet another more direct way.”

The location in which the amber was discovered (Alfred Wegener Institute)

The existence of amber on the continent also confirms that trees would have once stood in its place, with the ancient discovery suggesting a swampy and temperate rainforest once stood in this location.

Amber isn’t the only evidence of life on the continent either, with previous discoveries from scientists including fossils of roots, pollen and spores.

The 90-million-year-old date means the trees likely stood during the cretaceous period.

Spanning a period of time 145 million to 66 million years ago, the cretaceous period was a time where the Earth was a lot warmer than it is today, while the landmass known as Pangea has already broken apart and begun to form the continents we’re more familiar with.

When you think of the Milky Way that, you wouldn’t be blamed if your head didn’t connect the massive galaxy with the ancient Egyptians.

But their relationship is closer than you and many others previously might have thought, with a new study connecting what we see in the sky to that viewed thousands of years ago.

Space itself continues to be an unravelling ball of knowledge, with another supermassive black hole discovered just this week by NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope.

And don’t get us started on the baffling ‘question mark’ spotted in deep space.

Humanity’s relationship with what we see in the night sky goes way, way back, though.

When it comes to ancient Egypt, it’s well documented that its people had strong religious beliefs and astronomical knowledge of the Sun, Moon, and planets.

But the relationship between the civilisation and the Milky Way was not known – until now.

A new study by a University of Portsmouth astrophysicist sheds light on the relationship between the Milky Way and a lesser known Egyptian sky-goddess called Nut.

Pyramids of Giza (Getty Stock Images)

We have to remember that ancient Egypt existed thousands of years ago; a time when light pollution simply wasn’t a thing. No modern cities and no street lamps meaning they could see a whole lot more than most of us today.

In ancient artwork from the Egyptian civilisation, Nut is depicted as a goddess of the sky who you will regularly see depicted as a star-studded woman arched over her brother, the earth god Geb.

Her role was to protect Earth from being flooded. Ancient religious beliefs say she played an important role in the solar cycle, swallowing the Sun as it sets at dusk and giving birth to it once more as it rises at dawn. Of course this was a time where modern astronomy simply didn’t exist, so this existed as a way to rationalise what we now know as the lunar cycle.

The new paper draws on ancient Egyptian texts and simulations to argue that the Milky Way might have shone a spotlight, as it were, on Nut’s role as the sky.

The work suggest that in winter, the Milky Way was portrayed by Nut’s outstretched arms. And then in summer her backbone portrayed the galaxy.

Have a look at the below image to see what we’re on about a bit better:

Sky goddess Nut, covered in stars as the rising sun (the falcon-headed god Re) sails up before setting down her arms (E . A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, Vol. 2 (Methuen & Co., 1904))

Associate Professor in Astrophysics, Dr Or Graur, said: “I chanced upon the sky-goddess Nut when I was writing a book on galaxies and looking into the mythology of the Milky Way.

“I took my daughters to a museum and they were enchanted by this image of an arched woman and kept asking to hear stories about her.

“This sparked my interest and I decided to combine both astronomy and Egyptology to do a double analysis – astronomical and cross-cultural – of the sky-goddess Nut, and whether she really could be linked to the Milky Way.”

Dr Graur consulted ancient sources in his studies, including Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, and the Book of Nut.

He then compared them alongside sophisticated simulations of the Egyptian night sky where he says he found strong evidence that the Milky Way was found in illustrations of Nut.

The Milky Way (Getty Stock Images)

He said: “My study also shows that Nut’s role in the transition of the deceased to the afterlife and her connection to the annual bird migration are consistent with how other cultures understand the Milky Way. For example, as a spirits’ road among different peoples in North and Central America or as the Birds’ Path in Finland and the Baltics.

“My research shows how combining disciplines can offer new insights into ancient beliefs, and it highlights how astronomy connects humanity across cultures, geography, and time. This paper is an exciting start to a larger project to catalogue and study the multicultural mythology of the Milky Way.”

A unique ancient burial ground has been unearthed in Norway, leaving officials scratching their heads regarding the ‘very curious’ yet heartbreaking discovery.

Back in 2023, a team of archaeologists from Norway’s Museum of Cultural History traveled to Southern Norway where they discovered stones set into a particular formation.

It’s said that the meticulously placed stones originated from the Bronze and Iron Ages and that each one measured up to around six feet wide.

Archaeologists were shocked with what they found under the stones. (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)

While the stones themselves are pretty fascinating, it’s what is underneath that’s really got scientists confused.

Upon further inspection, the experts learned that the 40+ stones were placed on top of pottery shards and burned bones.

And new analysis of the site – situated around 80 kilometres south of Oslo – has shown that almost all of these bones belonged to children aged three to six years old.

It’s thought that these ancient infants died between 800 and 200 B.C. and archaeologists claim high child mortality rates at the time could have played a part in the site’s creation.

“They’ve lain here as a secret until we found them,” museum archaeologist Guro Fossum explained to Science Norway.

“The dating shows that the burial site was used over a long period, so they couldn’t all have died in the same natural disaster or outbreak of disease or epidemic.”

Burnt bones and pottery shards were recovered from the graves. (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)

According to a statement by the museum, a concentration of ancient graves containing the remains of children is extremely unique in Europe.

This is even though in the Nordic Bronze and Iron Ages, a flat layer of stones would be laid out in a spiral pattern over cremation sites.

“The graves are very close together,” Fossum lamented further. “They must have been in an open landscape, with thoroughfares nearby, so everyone would have known about them.

“Cooking pits and fireplaces around the site suggest that gatherings and ceremonies were held in connection with burials.”

Following the graveyard’s discovery, it’s since been revealed that researchers will continue to analyze artefacts found on site.

Their plan? To get a serious handle on why this ‘secret’ burial spot exists and who built it ‘with so much care’.

“Analyses of the pottery fragments can tell us a lot,” Fossum continued.

“It doesn’t appear that all the vessels were containers for burnt bones; some were placed between the graves, and we are very curious about what was inside them.”

Experts plan to continue their research into the discovered objects. (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)

Fossum and her team are determined to discover ‘who put in so much effort’ after further tests revealed each gravestone had been sourced from a different location and had been set in a particular pattern.

The burial site near Fredrikstad is a heartbreaking but fascinating tribute to the dead.

If you find yourself in Oslo this summer, then you can head to The Historical Museum to see a reconstructed stone grave.

According to the institution’s site, the exhibit works to: “Provides insights into the delicate and sometimes emotional work process of the archaeologists who carried out the excavations.”

Visitors can gain insight into the significance of the 2023 find through photographs and video material from June 26 to September 29.