Nature Hub

 From BBC New Edited by Amal Udawatta, IMAGE SOURCE, ISRAEL ANTIQUITIES AUTHORITY Archaeologists in Israel say 44 pure gold coins dating to the 7th Century have been found hidden in a wall at a nature reserve. Weighing about 170g, the hoard found at the Hermon Stream (Banias) site was hidden during the Muslim conquest of the area in 635, experts estimated. They said the coins shed light on the end of the Byzantine rule in the area. The Byzantine Empire was the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which survived for more than 1,000 years. "We can imagine the owner concealing his fortune in the threat of war, hoping to return one day to retrieve his property," said Yoav Lerer, director of the excavation. "In retrospect, we know that he was less fortunate." IMAGE SOURCE, ISRAEL ANTIQUITIES AUTHORITY Image caption, Dr Gabriela Bijovsky says the coins help document the life of Emperor Heraclius's family Apart from the gold coins, the excavation - in a residential quarte

  By Victoria Gill Science correspondent, BBC News "It's about 8,200 years old," says Dr Alison Burns, pointing to a perfectly preserved human footprint pressed into ancient mud on Formby Beach. It is one of hundreds of newly discovered ancient footprints here. The sandy stretch of the north-west England coast is already known to be home to one of the largest collections of prehistoric animal tracks on Earth. As well as adding to that collection, researchers found the oldest prints were formed much earlier than thought. The first date back almost 9,000 years and the youngest of the prints are medieval - about 1,000 years old. These findings,  published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution , tell the story of a coastal environment that transformed over thousands of years, as sea levels rapidly rose and humans settled permanently by the water. The size and shape of the picture-perfect human footprint that Dr Burns has found suggest it belonged to a young man - perhap

  From BBC,   By Amanda Ruggeri, Edited by - Amal Udawatta, The world's oldest toys date back thousands of years – but determining whether ancient children played with them, and how, remains a mystery archaeologists are piecing together. Over the two decades that archaeologist Gus Van Beek excavated Tell Jemmeh, an Assyrian settlement inhabited from around 3,800 to 2,200 years ago, he recovered so many objects, it took the Smithsonian  40 years to catalogue them all . There were coins. Scarabs. Amulets. And an amount of pottery so vast, some of it later  would have to be discarded . But  for Van Beek , the site – in what is now modern-day south-west Israel – yielded a discovery that was "among the more enigmatic objects recovered": 17 small, rounded discs – some made of chalk, some of stone, but most upcycled from potsherds – with two deliberate holes in the centre. Van Beek wasn't the first archaeologist to discover objects like these. Nor was he the last. They'v