The material on the covers of books from a French abbey was too hairy to have come from calves or other local mammals.

The books hail from Clairvaux Abbey, founded in 1115 by Cistercian monks in northern France, and its daughter monasteries. Some tomes are nearly 900 years old. Researchers had thought they were ...

A scientific analysis of dozens of 12th- and 13th-century books found in European monasteries reveals they were bound in ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific ...

A scientist has made a bold claim about the location of the Garden of Eden. He used Medieval world maps to find the Biblical ...

Which material was popularized in ancient Egypt (and later used by Greece and the Roman Empire) for writing books and other ...

Visitors to the site of Pompeii, the ancient Roman town buried (and so preserved for thousands of years) by the eruption of ...

Eratosthenes became the first person to calculate the Earth's circumference with remarkable accuracy, a feat that stands as a ...

The heroic days of deciphering hieroglyphics and cuneiform make for great stories, but will we ever see that happen again?

Today’s global problems are caused by broken systems, but the studios still feed us a diet of movies focused on individuals ...

New discoveries in archaeology are overturning the assumptions that used to be made about a woman’s place in society all the ...

A shroud of mystery remains conceals the knowledge contained within the lost works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.