Ancient news stories

A convoy of Spaniards and allies was ritually sacrificed in 1520 at Tecoaque – ‘the place where they ate them’ – before Hernán Cortés wreaked revenge.

The gravitational waves we’ve detected so far have been like tsunamis in the spacetime sea, but it’s believed that gentle ripples should also pervade the universe. Now, a 13-year survey of light from pulsars scattered across the galaxy may have revealed the first hints of these background signals.

Image from: https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA24036 (Wiki Commons)

Scientists have identified the presence of a non-tobacco plant in ancient Maya drug containers for the first time.

Roughly 8,200 years ago, the island of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov in Lake Onega in the Republic of Karelia, Russia, housed a large burial ground where men, women and children of varying ages were buried.

Palaeoproteomics, a new technology that studies the proteins of ancient remains, is shaking up history. Not only can we now peer further back in time, but the technique is also letting us see our past in a new way.

Image from: MAKY.OREL (Wiki Commons)

A study of two ancient skeletons recovered from Guam indicates that the early settlers of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific may have originated from the Philippines.

Around one of the galaxy’s oldest stars, an orange dwarf named TOI-561 just 280 light-years away, astronomers have found three orbiting exoplanets – one of which is a rocky world 1.5 times the size of Earth, whipping around the star on a breakneck 10.5-hour orbit.

A study of extinct dire wolf DNA reveals surprises, including that the carnivores, made famous as fictional pets in Game of Thrones, weren’t closely related to wolves.

Image from: Flickr: Dire Wolf Skeleton (Wiki Commons)

More than 45,500 years ago, perched on a ledge at the back of an Indonesian cave, an artist was at work.

Remarkably well-preserved fossils are helping scientists unravel a mystery about the origins of early animals that puzzled Charles Darwin.

Based on what we know about gravitational waves, the Universe should be full of them. Every colliding pair of black holes or neutron stars, every core-collapse supernova – even the Big Bang itself – should have sent ripples ringing across spacetime.

A 500-year-old statue of a mysterious woman wearing a large, “Star Wars”-like headdress has been discovered in central Mexico, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Researchers at CENIEH, have participated in a study published in the Journal of Human Evolution, on one of the few human fossils known from late Early Pleistocene China…

Scientists have uncovered the youngest known Middle Stone Age tools in modern-day Senegal, on the west coast of Africa, dated to as recently as 11,000 years ago.

Having survived the meteor impact that wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago, crocodiles are one of the most resilient animals on Earth.