A late Iron Age building in the Negev Desert has us asking questions. Why is it filled with dead young women? Who were they and what were their connections with Yemen? Why don’t we call it The Yemen any more? And what does frankincense really smell like anyway?

Newly published excavations of cultic rooms cut into the living rock of the City of David have us asking questions. Why are there big grooves cut in the floor? Who was crushing olives and/or grapes and for what? Why was the standing stone so skinny? And why did Hezekiah put this funky little place out of business? Spring cleaning or something else?

New research shows that prehumans collected and prepared carb heavy foods around 780,000 years ago. So who says that processed foods are bad for you? After all, it made their brains bigger. With a shoutout to everyone’s favorite starch, the potato!

The publication of a really long Roman legal document from the Judean Desert has us wondering about crime. Is changing a location on a contract really forgery? How about a little light counterfeiting of silver coins? Ok fine, but there’s sales tax on slaves? That makes all this even worse.

You know that giant prehistoric stone circle on the Golan Heights, Rujm el Hiri? Yeah, its not really aligned with the sun and stars and isn't the only big stone thing up there. So what is it? Beats us, but never underestimate the human need to get other people to pile up stones. And really, aren't we all aligned with the sun and stars?

In 4th and 3rd century BCE Athens lead curse tablets were snuck into cemeteries so the dead could take the messages to the underworld. Asking the departed to help put a hit on a business or romantic rival seems like a lot of responsibility. Pretty good business if you were a living sorcerer though.

Some lightly baked clay cylinders from a late third millennium tomb in Syria have alphabetic markings. They’ve got us thinking. Does this mean -the- alphabet originated hundreds of years earlier than we thought? What is -the- alphabet anyway? Why did we think we understood any of this? Who, in fact, is lightly baked in this scenario? 

An excavation in southern Jerusalem revealed a tax office belonging to Hezekiah. This raises a question, was Jerusalem really a capitol district and not just a city? A more pressing question, however, is why Hezekiah thought rebelling against the Assyrians was a good idea in the first place.

A wonderful newish video about the famous 6th century Babylonian tablet showing a map of the world has us thinking. Sure, there are a bunch of Mesopotamian field and building plans, more of a zoning and taxes thing, but why aren’t there more maps? Maybe they knew that no matter where you go, there you are.

See the video here!

New studies on the origins of the wheel have us wondering, why did it take thousands of years to go from 10th millennium BCE spindle whorls in Israel to 4th millennium BCE wheels in the Carpathian mountains, were rollers and copper mining really involved, and how much rotational energy is really provided courtesy of Fred Flintstone’s two feet?