Recovery Through the Natural World

Some of the world’s oldest cave paintings have revealed how ancient people had relatively advanced knowledge of astronomy.

The artworks, at sites across Europe, are not simply depictions of wild animals, as was previously thought. Instead, the animal symbols represent star constellations in the night sky, and are used to represent dates and mark events such as comet strikes, analysis suggests.

They reveal that, perhaps as far back as 40,000 years ago, humans kept track of time using knowledge of how the position of the stars slowly changes over thousands of years.

£4,250,000/3 br

United States, 1916: The Elms

A large asymmetrical Dutch Colonial house with especially thick pillars on the porch and solarium.

Humans did not accelerate the decline of the ‘Green Sahara’ and may have managed to hold back the onset of the Sahara desert by around 500 years, according to new research led by UCL.

The study by a team of geographers and archaeologists from UCL and King’s College London, published in Nature Communications, suggests that early pastoralists in North Africa combined detailed knowledge of the environment with newly domesticated species to deal with the long-term drying trend.

It is thought that early pastoralists in North Africa developed intricate ways to efficiently manage sparse vegetation and relatively dry and low fertility soils.

Celebrate the buzzy bees of North America with a selection from the 4,000 species who pollenate our continent.

$416,863/5 br co op

Ithaca, NY

$275,000/2 br/1270 sq ft

Saint Louis, MO

The Art of the Seamless Addition

With a smart design and careful craftsmanship, the owners added square footage without sacrificing their house’s modest scale or period style

See more photos and full story at the This Old House website.