A new study reveals that the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia (c. 6200–5500 BCE) produced the earliest systematic plant imagery in prehistoric art, flowers, shrubs, branches, and trees painted on fine pottery, arranged with precise symmetry and numerical sequences, especially petal and flower counts of 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. This suggests that early farming villages in the Near East already possessed sophisticated, practical mathematical thinking about dividing space and quantities, likely tied to everyday needs such as fairly sharing crops from collectively worked fields, long before writing or formal number systems existed.

- Ancient Historian at University of Leicester reveals that the Rutland mosaic depicts an alternative telling of the Trojan War to Homer’s Iliad

- Suggests that Roman Britain was not as isolated from the classical world as assumed

- Craftspeople in 4^th century Britain were using patterns passed down over 800 years from across the ancient Mediterranean