Topic
Branch of archaeology that studies animal bones from sites to understand past diets, economies, domestication, environments and human–animal relationships.
Sled dogs have radius, ulna and tibia bones about 6% shorter than other canids after size adjustment, University of Haifa researchers report. The authors say the proportions could identify possible sled dogs where no sled equipment survives.
Reality
The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities reports a young male horse buried with harness fittings inside a New Kingdom fort in the western Nile Delta, where tablets also name Ramesses II and Merneptah. Researchers not on the dig say horse remains from Pharaonic Egypt are scarce.
Reality
Gabriele Russo's team re-read fossils excavated in Lebanon more than a century ago, dating Ras el-Kelb to about 400,000 years and Nahr Ibrahim to about 250,000, and finding forests unlike the southern Levant's.
Reality
Two fossils and a set of chewed bones from the Juukan 2 rockshelter place Tasmanian devils in Western Australia's Pilbara from about 45,000 years ago into the mid-Holocene, on the same bones people carried in and butchered.
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Matilda Holmes and colleagues aged livestock from 701 bone groups across 460 English sites and found the oldest cattle clustered between 900 and 1100, when grain output was rising and horses were about 5 percent of draft animals.
Reality