The remnants of a whale found in Sweden in 2009 are 13,000 years old and experts initially thought they were from a legendary whale species. But a DNA analysis punctured that hope.
The earliest traces of human life on the Faroe Islands date back to the Viking era. But new pollen analyses suggest that people, and perhaps even agriculture, existed on the islands long before the Vikings arrived.
Tableware dating from the Roman period demonstrates a new view of death, where the ritualised feasting culture of the elite is brought into the hereafter.
Archaeologists estimate that Greenland has more than 6,000 sites with cultural monuments. Due to climate change, a significant part of these treasures may be under threat.
DNA residues drilled up from Greenland’s ice sheet base reveal a green, lush landscape before the great island became covered by ice. New methods in DNA research make it possible to show a Greenland that’s different to the one we know today.
Analyses of Stone Age settlements reveal that the hunters were healthy and would gladly eat anything they could get their hands on, including carbohydrates – contrary to the modern definition of the Paleolithic, or Stone Age diet.
The Norse society did not die out due to an inability to adapt to the Greenlandic diet. An isotopic analysis of the Viking settlers’ bones shows that they ate plenty of seals.
Researchers have now assigned a date to the sensational find of a rowboat. The dating cements the small vessel’s position as Denmark’s only preserved medieval rowboat.
