The Ancient Origins News Desk

The Baghdad Battery, a Parthian-era clay jar with a copper cylinder and iron rod, will produce about half a volt when filled with an acid, and a 2026 replica reached over 1.4 volts with lye. No ancient apparatus, plated object or text shows it was used for electricity, so the battery claim is Unverified.

A newly enlarged royal archive from Kayalıpınar in central Türkiye records a fever moving from city to city, the illness and death of a baby princess, and generals pleading with their king for horses and chariots.

A woman whose bone lay in Isturitz Cave carried ancestry from central and eastern Europe, and human DNA from cave dirt in Spain fills a gap with no bones. The data are new, but how far they rewrite the Ice Age map is still an open question.

A Saqqara tomb near Merenre's pyramid held bronze tools that may be medical, yet none of its owner Weni's titles call him a physician.

Legon (Discussions in Egyptology 33, 1995) showed the Orion correlation requires Orion to be inverted, that the Belt diverged by more than 30 degrees from the pyramid line around 2500 BC, and that outlying pyramids do not fit. Fairall (Astronomy and Geophysics 1999) measured 38 degrees for the pyramid line against about 47 to 50 degrees for the Belt in 10,500 BC. Radiocarbon (Bonani et al. 2001) and Spence (Nature 2000) place construction around the mid third millennium BC. Orofino (arXiv 2011) finds the pattern compatible but calls the early date very unlikely. Bauval himself says the monuments were not built in 10,500 BC.