Bite marks from a lion on a man’s skeleton, excavated from a 1,800-year-old cemetery on the outskirts of York, provide the first physical evidence of human-animal combat in the Roman empire, new research claims.

While clashes between combatants, big cats and bears are described and depicted in ancient texts and mosaics, there had previously been no convincing proof from human remains to confirm that these skirmishes formed part of Roman entertainment.

Prof Tim Thompson, an anthropologist and first author on the study at Maynooth University in Ireland, said: “This is the first time we have physical evidence for gladiators fighting, or being involved in a spectacle, with big cats like lions in the Roman empire.”

Excavations at the Driffield Terrace burial site, near York city centre, began more than 20 years ago and uncovered about 80 decapitated skeletons. Most belonged to well-built young men and bore signs of brutal violence, leading experts to suspect they had uncovered a gladiator graveyard.

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Dr John Pearce, an archaeologist from King’s College London and co-author of the study published in Plos One, said York doubled as a Roman town and legionary fortress at the time, making it the second largest population centre in Britain after Londinium.

He said: “These may be gladiators who trained in a gladiatorial school at York linked to the Roman legion based there, and their comrades from the arena or training ground took responsibility for burying them.”

If the researchers are right, their discovery raises questions about where gladiators fought their battles.

An arena probably exists beneath the city of York, but uncovering it will not be easy. “One of challenges with York is that so many old buildings are preserved, you can’t do the excavations underneath them,” Thompson said.

It is not the only mystery that remains. “This shifts the conversation,” Thompson added. “We now know that these events happened in the provinces of the Roman empire, but it raises other questions. How, for example, do you get a lion from Africa to York?”

A medieval cemetery unearthed near Cardiff Airport is continuing to confound archaeologists, as the mysteries surrounding it are multiplying.

The discovery of the site, dating to the 6th or 7th Century, was announced last year, with dozens of skeletons found lying in unusual positions with unexpected artefacts.

Now researchers have learned nearly all of those buried in the cemetery are women, and while their bones show signs of wear and tear - indicating they carried out heavy manual work - there are also surprising signs of wealth and luxury.

Another unexpected find has been a woman tossed in a ditch, in stark contrast to all the other people who were buried with great care.

"Every time we think we understand something, something else crops up and the picture gets more intriguing," said Andy Seaman from Cardiff University, who is leading the project.

Jewelry in a Roman treasure hoard found in Thetford Forest, East Anglia, indicates that Thetford was Pagan until the fifth century, which is longer than previously believed, reveals a new paper in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

The Thetford treasure was first found by a metal detectorist trespassing on a construction site at Fison's Way on Gallows Hill, Thetford in 1979. It consisted of 81 objects, including 22 gold finger-rings, other gold jewelry, and 36 silver spoons or strainers. It is now in the collections of the British Museum and can be seen on display there.

The author of the research, Professor Ellen Swift of the University of Kent, argues that there is compelling evidence that the treasure was buried in the fifth century rather than the late fourth.

Swift says, "Since wider evidence found at the site confirms the religious context previously established by inscriptions on the spoons within the hoard, this means, remarkably, that the re-dating of the Thetford hoard suggests a Pagan cult center survived there into the fifth century. The site's economic assets, indicated by the value and variety of the hoard, also show that it may have wielded significant power and authority locally."

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The paper also shows that Britain was less isolated than previously believed, with the items in the treasure originating from across the Roman empire.

A series of exceptionally dry summers that caused famine and social breakdown were behind one of the most severe threats to Roman rule of Britain, according to new academic research.

The rebellion, known as the “barbarian conspiracy”, was a pivotal moment in Roman Britain. Picts, Scotti and Saxons took advantage of Britain’s descent into anarchy to inflict crushing blows on weakened Roman defences in the spring and summer of AD367.

Senior Roman commanders were captured or killed, and some soldiers reportedly deserted and joined the invaders. It took two years for generals dispatched by Valentinian I, emperor of the western half of the Roman empire, to restore order. The last remnants of official Roman administration left Britain about 40 years later.

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The study, published in Climatic Change, used oak tree-ring records to reconstruct temperature and precipitation levels in southern Britain during and after the barbarian conspiracy. Combined with surviving Roman accounts, the data led the authors to conclude that severe summer droughts were a driving force.

Little archaeological evidence for the rebellion existed, and written accounts from the period were limited, said Charles Norman of Cambridge’s department of geography. “But our findings provide an explanation for the catalyst of this major event.”

Southern Britain experienced an exceptional sequence of remarkably dry summers from AD364 to 366, the researchers found. In the period AD350-500, average monthly reconstructed rainfall in the main growing season was 51mm. But in AD364, it fell to 29mm. AD365 was even worse with 28mm, and the rainfall the following year was still below average at 37mm.

Prof Ulf Büntgen of Cambridge’s department of geography said: “Three consecutive droughts would have had a devastating impact on the productivity of Roman Britain’s most important agricultural region. As Roman writers tell us, this resulted in food shortages with all of the destabilising societal effects this brings.”

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By AD367, the population of Britain was in the “utmost conditions of famine”, according to Ammianus Marcellinus, a soldier and historian.

Norman said the poor harvests would have “reduced the grain supply to Hadrian’s Wall, providing a plausible motive for the rebellion there, which allowed the Picts into northern Britain”.

The study suggested that grain deficits may have contributed to other desertions in this period, and therefore a general weakening of the Roman army in Britain.

Military and societal breakdown provided an ideal opportunity for peripheral tribes, including the Picts, Scotti and Saxons, to invade the province.

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The researchers expanded their climate-conflict analysis to the entire Roman empire for the period AD350-476. They reconstructed the climate conditions immediately before and after 106 battles and found that a statistically significant number of battles were fought following dry years.

Perched high above the cliffs of South Ronaldsay, one of Scotland’s most remarkable ancient sites offers a window into life and death thousands of years ago.

Known as the Tomb of the Eagles, the Neolithic chambered cairn has fascinated visitors since its discovery in the 1950s, and is now set to reopen after a major funding boost.

Discovered by local farmer Ronnie Simison, the 5,000-year-old tomb revealed a treasure trove of human bones and artefacts, with the remains of some 300 individuals found buried alongside sea eagles. The striking find gave the site its dramatic name and cemented its place as one of Orkney’s most important archaeological landmarks.

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And now, thanks to almost £358,000 in fresh funding, a community trust on the island is set to become the first in Scotland to purchase an ancient monument. The move will secure the Tomb of the Eagles' long-term future as a key piece of local and national history.

The Tomb of the Eagles, a protected site that has long attracted visitors, has been closed since the pandemic after the family who managed it decided to retire.

Located on their land, the tomb was temporarily shut to the public, leaving the community of South Ronaldsay and Burray to find a way forward.

After much consideration, Orkney Isles Council determined that the best path for preserving the site was for the local community to purchase it.

Big food brands dramatically increased their spending on advertising last year, months before new junk food regulations aiming to curb Britain’s obesity crisis are due to come into force, the Observer can reveal.

Food companies spent an extra £420m in 2024, an increase of 26% year on year that coincided with a bumper 12 months for sales of snack foods. Shoppers bought an extra 45.4m packs of chocolate, cakes and crisps from the top-selling brands.

The spending bonanza came as campaigners said food corporations were switching tactics to circumvent the impact of the upcoming regulations, which will bring in a 9pm watershed for TV commercials showing unhealthy food products, and ban them online from October, after five years of delays.

Outdoor posters, audio advertising on podcasts and streaming services such as Spotify, and partnerships with social media influencers are not covered by the regulations.

The increase in spending and the suggestion it may have led to an increase in sales may fuel calls for further restrictions. James McDonald, the director of data, intelligence and forecasting at WARC Media, which monitors ad spend and recorded the 26% increase, said it was “not surprising that we saw sales lift in line with spend”. He added: “I think the timing is interesting, given the introduction of HFSS [foods high in fat, salt or sugar] regulation this year.”

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Health campaigners say food companies are adopting tactics similar to those used by the tobacco industry in the battle over cigarette advertising, by focusing on brands and logos rather than products. The advertising industry has argued that uncertainty over regulations threatens the sector and said ministers should legislate to exempt brand-only ads from the regulations.

Something was wrong with the squirrels of Appalachia. It was the fall of 1968, and they appeared to be making a sudden pilgrimage: attempting improbable swims across lakes, sprinting over highways and bursting into buildings. One squirrel, while fleeing, climbed into a critical piece of infrastructure and reportedly short-circuited power to much of Clarkesville, Georgia. “The squirrel,” the wire services reported, “was also extinguished.” The highways were lined with hundreds of dead squirrels. One scientist spotted 13 squirrels swimming due north across the reservoirs of North Carolina. Nothing could make them turn around. Assuming the squirrels must be starving, concerned citizens began sending boxes of acorns and hickory nuts to the afflicted areas, and grocery stores put up signs encouraging shoppers to feed the squirrels.

The problem was that the squirrels were, by and large, well-fed. There was no shortage of food. Yet by some estimates, 20 million squirrels were on the move. Wildlife officials were flummoxed. So they notified the Smithsonian Center for Short-Lived Phenomena.

The CSLP was a kind of clearinghouse for news of intriguing phenomena that scientists might want to study as they occurred—from volcanic eruptions to oil spills, meteorite strikes, sudden islands, unusual migrations and explosions in the populations of non-native species. Every day, an odd phenomenon occurred somewhere, offering a priceless natural experiment. But researchers worried they were missing most of them.

“For years, scientists have been aware of the almost total lack of the essential research information on the very earliest beginnings of natural events,” Sidney Galler, then assistant secretary for science at the Smithsonian Institution, told Newsweek about how the idea for the CSLP had come about. “We come in the middle and have to go back and attempt to reconstruct what actually happened.”

But now the Smithsonian had built an unprecedented network to help scientists get fast, accurate information about developing situations. “We have our finger,” said Robert Citron, the director of the center, “on the pulse of planet Earth.”

In its seven years of existence, the CSLP logged oil spills and ashened snowfalls, chased still-warm meteorites, laid the foundation of an essential global database of volcanic activity, and heralded the (erroneous) discovery of at least one prehistoric sea monster. And it left, in the archives of the Smithsonian, a rather large paper trail. Decades later, those archives are a window into a moment of epistemological uncertainty at the dawn of the environmental age, when nothing quite seemed to make sense anymore and concerned researchers were starting to piece it all together, one strange event at a time.

Wikipedia

Declassified CIA documents claim that the mystical Ark of the Covenant was located by a psychic decades ago in the Middle East as part of one of the intelligence agency’s experimental, secret projects in the 1980s.

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The CIA conducted experiments as part of the secret Project Sun Streak with individuals known as “remote viewers”, a type of clairvoyant, who claimed they could project their consciousness to receive information about faraway objects.

There is no credible scientific evidence that remote viewing exists, and it is generally regarded as pseudoscience.

In a remote viewing session on 5 December, 1988, remote “viewer #32” was tasked with identifying the coveted Ark, according to CIA documents recently circulating on social media. The documents were first declassified in August 2000. They allegedly did not know the object they were being tasked to find.

The psychic described a location in the Middle East that they claimed housed the object and said it was being “protected by entities”, says the CIA document.

“Target is a container. This container has another container inside of it. The target is fashioned of wood, gold, and silver,” they said, allegedly not knowing they were trying to find the Ark. “Similar in shape to a coffin and is decorated with seraphim.”

The declassified document shows several pages of drawings depicting one of the four seraphim standing out on the corners of the Ark, along with a drawing of mummies lined up on a wall.

“Visuals of surrounding buildings indicated the presence of mosque domes,” they added.

They said the object was hidden underground in dark, wet conditions.

“There is an aspect of spirituality, information, lessons and the historical knowledge far beyond what we now know,” remote viewer #32 continued.

They described the Ark as being protected by entities that would destroy individuals who attempted to damage the object.

“The target is protected by entities and can only be opened by those who are authorised to do so – this container will not/cannot be opened until the time is deemed correct,” the remote viewer continued.

“Individuals opening the container by prying or striking are destroyed by the container’s protectors through the use of a power unknown to us.”

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Joe McMoneagle, a US Army chief warrant officer and the first person to do remote viewing for the CIA, told The New York Post that they allegedly do not know what was scrawled down and are guided through the process by another person.

However, Mr McMoneagle does not believe that this remote viewing case is worth the paper it is written on, claiming the session is “bogus”.

“If someone claims that remote viewing proves the existence of something, such as the Ark of the Covenant, they must produce the Ark to substantiate their claim,” he added.

It’s been 25 years since China Miéville stepped into the literary spotlight with his novel “Perdido Street Station.”

Combining elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, the novel introduced readers to the fantastically complex city of New Crobuzon, filled with insect-headed khepri, cactus-shaped cactacae, and terrifying slake moths that feed on their victims’ dreams. It also sparked broader interest in what became known as the “new weird.”

After “Perdido”’s success (commemorated this year with a quickly-sold-out collector’s edition from The Folio Society), Miéville continued to meld genres in novels like “The City and the City” and “Embassytown.” But he stopped publishing fiction for nearly a decade, only to reemerge last year with The New York Times bestseller “The Book of Elsewhere,” co-written with Keanu Reeves. (Yes, that Keanu Reeves.)

Miéville is also a compelling observer and critic — of politics, of cities, of science fiction and fantasy. So while we started our conversation by discussing his breakthrough book, I also took the opportunity to ask about the relationship between science fiction and the real world, particularly what seems to be a growing tendency among tech billionaires to treat the science fiction they grew up reading as a blueprint for their future plans.

To Miéville, it’s a mistake to read science fiction as if it’s really about the future: “It’s always about now. It’s always a reflection. It’s a kind of fever dream, and it’s always about its own sociological context.”

He added that there’s a “societal and personal derangement” at work when the rich and powerful “are more interested in settling Mars than sorting out the world” — but ultimately, it’s not science fiction that’s responsible.

“Let’s not blame science fiction for this,” he said. “It’s not science fiction that’s causing this kind of sociopathy.”

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Getting back to your own writing, I know there have been whispers about a big new book coming from you. It sounds like it’s going to be out next year?

Yes, it will be out. I don’t know the exact date, but it will be out before the end of next year. I’m just doing the last bits on it now.

Is there anything you can say about it?

I will just say that I’ve been working on it for 20 years, and that’s not an exaggeration. I’ve been working on this book for considerably more than half of my adult life, and it is a very big deal for me, for it to be coming out. I’m very excited for it.

New archaeological research is revealing that, more than a thousand years before Britain became part of the Roman Empire, it was part of an extraordinary Mediterranean-based trading network.

Investigations being carried out by archaeologists from five European countries suggest that around 3,300 years ago, the western Mediterranean island of Sardinia started to become a powerful trading centre, eventually linking Britain, Scandinavia, Spain and Portugal in the West to what are now Turkey, Syria, Israel, Cyprus and Crete in the east.

A series of ground-breaking discoveries are revealing, for the first time, the remarkable role played by the island - one of the world's least known ancient civilizations, known to archaeologists as the Nuragic culture.

And it is showing the remarkable way in which Britain seems to have contributed to that civilization's development.

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The island (a series of chiefdoms) was rich in copper ore - which helped turn it into a Bronze Age mercantile and economic superpower (because copper was one of the two key ingredients needed to make high quality bronze, which was far stronger than copper on its own).

But the second key ingredient, needed to make high quality bronze, was tin - and one of the best sources of tin in the ancient world was Cornwall. Tin played a crucial role in human history - because it enabled the production of really strong manufactured goods and its acquisition usually necessitated and promoted long distance trade.

Recent scientific research has revealed that Cornish tin was being delivered, probably by Sardinian or Sardinian-connected merchants, to what are now Israel and Turkey.

What's more, a study of a shipwreck off the Devon coast has revealed that a Bronze Age ship, carrying Cornish tin ingot exports, were also carrying items from Sardinia or Spain. The English Channel appears to have been a Bronze Age highway for delivering Mediterranean copper ingots and Cornish tin ingots to Scandinavia and for transporting Danish amber to Britain, Ireland, Spain and the Mediterranean.

And a growing body of evidence now suggests that, at the heart of this Bronze Age international trade, lay Sardinia's mysterious Nuragic civilization.

All parts of the network prospered as a result of that trade - and recent archaeological excavations have found a Bronze Age settlement at one of the most likely ports used at the Cornish end of the maritime route, St. Michael's Mount near Penzance

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All the new research suggests that Sardinia itself acted as the major trading hub - with British, Scandinavian and Iberian raw materials and products (including tin, copper and amber) being shipped to Sardinia for transhipment to points further east like Crete, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon and Israel. In the other direction Sardinian and perhaps other ships are now thought to have carried Middle Eastern glass beads, Egyptian faience, Cypriot copper ingots, precious gemstones and other products to customers in the West.

In Britain, archaeologists have found Iranian and Egyptian beads, Scandinavian amber items, Aegean metalwork, Cypriot and Spanish copper ingots and Sicilian razors, all of which would have had to have been imported by sea.

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But there is one tantalising piece of evidence that ancient Sardinians themselves may have visited Britain - for there is an enigmatic and mysterious rock-cut tomb (the only one of its sort ever found in Britain) in northern Scotland, on the island of Hoy in Orkney, the nearest rock-cut parallel for which is in Sardinia.

Claims that researchers discovered previously unknown structures beneath the Pyramid of Khafre — the pyramid situated in the center of the Great Pyramids of Giza — using radar technology circulated online in March 2025.

The purported discovery was that of "five identical structures near the Khafre Pyramid's base, linked by pathways, and eight deep vertical wells descending 648 meters underground."

Users took to social media to express their excitement over the alleged findings, posting on social media platforms like X (archived), Instagram (archived) and TikTok (archived). Some referred to the discovery as "a vast underground city." One YouTube video sharing the claim stood at over 35,000 views as of this writing.

Despite the popularity of the claim, there is no evidence to support it. In addition, no credible news outlets or scientific publications have reported on this rumor.

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The researchers named in the recent claims, Corrado Malanga and Filippo Biondi, did publish a paper and book about their work using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to explore the Giza pyramid in 2022.

According to NASA, SAR is "a type of active data collection where an instrument sends out a pulse of energy and then records the amount of that energy reflected back after it interacts with Earth."

However, it does not appear that this research has been peer-reviewed or corroborated by credible archaeologists. Additionally, the research alludes to fringe theories about ancient civilizations and otherworldly intentions for the structures, which aligns with Malanga's well-documented interest in UFO and alien abduction research as well as Dunn's "power plant" theory.