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Dead Sea scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls comprise roughly 600 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves in and around the Wadi Qumran (near the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea). The texts are of great religious and historical significance, as they are practically the only remaining Biblical documents dating from before AD 100.

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Fossils & Ruins News

February 27, 2026

A lost cache of 250-million-year-old fossils from Australia has rewritten part of the story of life after Earth’s worst mass extinction. Instead of a single marine amphibian species, researchers ...
Deep inside a Romanian ice cave, locked away in a 5,000-year-old layer of ice, scientists have uncovered a bacterium with a startling secret: it’s resistant to many modern antibiotics. Despite predating the antibiotic era, this cold-loving microbe ...
An Ice Age double burial in Italy has yielded a stunning genetic revelation. DNA from a mother and daughter who lived over 12,000 years ago shows that the younger had a rare inherited growth disorder, confirmed through mutations in a key bone-growth ...
Long before agriculture, humans were transforming Europe’s wild landscapes. Advanced simulations show that hunting and fire use by Neanderthals and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers reshaped forests and ...
Dinosaur footprints have always been mysterious, but a new AI app is cracking their secrets. DinoTracker analyzes photos of fossil tracks and predicts which dinosaur made them, with accuracy rivaling human experts. Along the way, it uncovered ...
A 5,500-year-old skeleton from Colombia has revealed the oldest known genome of the bacterium linked to syphilis and related diseases. The ancient strain doesn’t fit neatly into modern categories, hinting at a forgotten form that split off early ...
Around 1,000 years ago, a major climate shift reshaped rainfall across the South Pacific, making western islands like Samoa and Tonga drier while eastern islands such as Tahiti became increasingly ...
Fossils from Qatar have revealed a small, newly identified sea cow species that lived in the Arabian Gulf more than 20 million years ago. The site contains the densest known collection of fossil sea cow bones, showing that these animals once thrived ...
Researchers found that ancient hominids—including early humans—were exposed to lead throughout childhood, leaving chemical traces in fossil teeth. Experiments suggest this exposure may have driven genetic changes that strengthened ...
Researchers discovered that living horsetails act like natural distillation towers, producing bizarre oxygen isotope signatures more extreme than anything previously recorded on Earth—sometimes resembling meteorite water. By tracing these isotopic ...
Dinosaurs weren’t dying out before the asteroid hit—they were thriving in vibrant, diverse habitats across North America. Fossil evidence from New Mexico shows that distinct “bioprovinces” of dinosaurs existed until the very end. Their ...
New research shows that hippos lived in central Europe tens of thousands of years longer than previously thought. Ancient DNA and radiocarbon dating confirm they survived in Germany’s Upper Rhine Graben during a milder Ice Age phase. Closely ...

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