Crumb of ancient Egyptian bread found in Leeds museum archive
Believed to be up to 3,000 years old, records show the bread was originally found in Thebes.In the 19th Century it was collected and preserved by an unknown Victorian microscopist and has since been stored as part of a collection of hundreds of previously uncatalogued slides.Stored in small, wooden trays, the items are being reviewed by volunteer Stephen Crabtree, who began working with the museum to study fossilised plants.While cataloguing the slides he also found a mote of dust from the Krakatoa volcanic eruption of 1883.It is thought the speck landed on the deck of a ship called the Arabella, which was sailing 1,000 miles to the west of the Indonesian island.
Specimens of microscopic sea creatures found by the HMS Challenger are also among the array of slides.The ship left Kent in 1872 on a mission to circumnavigate the globe and explore the deep seas for the first time.Returning three and a half years later, the crew had gathered marine plants and animals, sea-floor deposits and rocks, which changed scientific understanding of the oceans.Examples found in the Leeds collection today include small disc-like fossils called orbitolites, which were gathered off the coast of Fiji.Ms Brown added: "We don't know exactly how or where many of these slides were collected, but we do know that each one of them was meticulously preserved for study and posterity by a diligent microscopist more than a century ago."That in itself is evidence of how important they thought these specimens were and how much they wanted future generations to see and be inspired by them."Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North or tell us a story you think we should be covering here.
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BBC News
5 days ago
- BBC News
Sunken navy warship flag restored by University of Wolverhampton
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Scottish Sun
12-08-2025
- Scottish Sun
New clues to mysterious extinct & ancient ‘Hobbit' humans that roamed earth 1 million years ago uncovered by scientists
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) SCIENTISTS have found new clues about a mysterious ancient human species - indicating they roamed around the earth a million years ago. The species called "Hobbit" was first discovered in 2004 when archaeologists searching a cave on an Indonesian island found a 60,000-year-old skull no bigger than a grapefruit. 6 Stone tools are pictured at the site where archaeologists found small, chipped tools, used to cut little animals and carve rocks Credit: Reuters 6 Archaeologists from Australia and Indonesia work at the site where they found small, chipped tools Credit: Reuters 6 A reconstruction sculpture of Homo floresiensis who lived tens of thousands of years ago Credit: Alamy And after some digging, archaeologists uncovered some very well-preserved fossil remains in the Liang Bua cave on Flores Island, Indonesia. The diminutive size of this new human species, scientifically called homo floresiensis, earned it the nickname "Hobbit". Shockingly, researchers believe the three-foot-tall hominin had survived until the end of the last Ice Age, some 18,000 years ago. That was much later than Neanderthals lived, later than any human species other than our own. But a new reseach has now found new stone tools that date back to at least a million years - near the place where homo floresiensis once existed. This suggests that the "Hobbit" species may have arrived far earlier than scientists previously estimated. The seven stone tools were found at an Early Pleistocene (Ice Age) site called Calio, located southern Sulawesi. Researchers from Griffith University and Indonesia's National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) dug up small, sharp flakes which early humans would have used as knives and blades. And through advanced dating techniques, the experts were able to confidently place the age of these tools at over 1.04 million years old. Gerrit van den Bergh, a vertebrate paleontologist from the University of Wollongong in Australia, told National Geographic: "At least one million years ago, there were tool-producing hominins on Sulawesi." Mystery Solved: The Story of 'The Screaming Woman' Mummy (1) Professor Adam Brumm, who led the study added: "This discovery adds to our understanding of the movement of extinct humans across the Wallace Line, a transitional zone beyond which unique and often quite peculiar animal species evolved in isolation." However, mystery still remains if the tools were used by "Hobbit" or members of a yet-undiscovered Human species. The homo floresienis were ancient humans that lived between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. Adults stood just three-and-a-half feet tall and their brains were roughly one-third the size of our own, about the size of a chimpanzee's. 6 Researchers believed the three-foot-tall hominin had survived until the end of the last Ice Age 6 The Liang Bua cave on Flores Island where scientists found remains of 'hobbits' Credit: Alamy Scientists are still debating where they came from. One theory states the Hobbits may have arrived on the island from Java after being washed out to sea by a tsunami. Over time, they could have shrunk on their new island home – a strange yet common phenomenon known as island dwarfism. Their extinction happened around the time modern humans arrived, but the exact reasons are unknown. Who were the homo floresiensis? Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "the Hobbit", was a tiny human species discovered in 2003 on the Indonesian island of Flores. Fossils found in the Liang Bua cave revealed they were about 1 metre tall with very small brains, much smaller than modern humans. Despite this, they lived successfully on the island. They existed from around 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, at the same time as modern humans arrived in the area. They made stone tools, hunted small elephants and large rodents, and adapted to life alongside predators like Komodo dragons. Their ability to survive in such conditions was remarkable. Scientists are still debating where they came from. Some think they evolved from larger humans like Homo erectus, becoming smaller over time due to island living. Others believe they descended from much older ancestors. What's clear is that they were a completely unique species. The discovery of Homo floresiensis changed how we understand human evolution. It showed that brain size doesn't always equal intelligence and that humans were much more varied than previously thought.
BBC News
04-08-2025
- BBC News
Another day of dinosaur fun is coming to Hull city centre
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