Ancient news stories

A fresh excavation of the eastern deposit at Riparo Mochi, a rock shelter near today’s French–Italian border, has pushed back the timeline for when Ice Age hunter-gatherers from Spain first entered Italy… A study of a recent excavation published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports uncovered several new things from the site, including an intact ancient hearth surrounded by marine shells, Noailles burins and tools used for domestic activities and butchery.

It’s not easy to extract iron from its ore. But the peoples of the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe—the capital of a thriving kingdom in southern Africa between A.D. 1000 and 1700—were masters.

A new study by Tel Aviv University researchers suggests that this practice stretches back approximately half a million years, with important consequences for the evolution of memory. The study was published in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews.

To understand how societies might react to climate change, archaeologists look at social responses to extreme climate events in the past—and in some places, that included measures as drastic as human sacrifice. Mass ritual sacrifices along the desert coast of northern Peru have been linked to catastrophic flooding caused by El Niño, which made researchers wonder if such sacrifices were part of a rise in violence driven by resource scarcity. But a new survey of the Lambayeque Valley suggests that violence was extremely rare, even during periods of ecological upheaval.

Geologists say they are getting closer to solving mystery as tests suggest stone may have come from elsewhere in Scotland, northern England or even Ireland…But the prehistoric monument tends to yield its secrets reluctantly, and a new scientific report reveals that the origin of Stonehenge’s altar stone remains elusive. The study, Searching for the origin of the Stonehenge altar stone, is published in the Journal of the Geological Society

“This study is particularly insightful because it combines the analysis of plant remains with molecular traces in the human body,” says Caspari. The study has been published in the journal Science.

“DNA sequences do not tell us directly which language people spoke. But by combining ancient DNA with linguistic and archaeological evidence, we can begin to trace how languages spread and changed over thousands of years,” explains geneticist Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen. In two complementary papers published in Nature, Willerslev and team trace the spread of Germanic and Celtic languages across ancient Europe.

Models of early population migrations assume people moved to places with easy access to water. But this assumption has left us with a fascinating mystery in ancient Arabia. Despite evidence that monsoon rains once filled lakes and supported grasslands in the vast sandy interior, evidence of early human occupation is concentrated almost entirely around the desert margins. The findings are published in a paper in the journal Nature.

Scientists are getting astonishingly good at extracting ancient human DNA from mere dirt and dust, even when there are no physical remains left…No bones, no teeth, no fossils. A small scoop of sediment from a cave in Spain has now offered up ancient DNA from several individuals who lived roughly 22,000 years ago. The findings from the study, led by researchers at the University of Vienna in Austria, are published in Science Advances.

Usually, people associate archaeological studies with bones, pottery and primitive tools, but archaeologists often find other clues about how ancient people lived hidden throughout a site. A new study, published in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology, focuses on bits of charcoal and their spatial organization to get a glimpse of Neanderthal life in Abric Romaní, an ancient rock shelter near Barcelona.

Tucked away inside a limestone cave in southeastern France lies some of the oldest artwork in existence. Known as Chauvet Cave, the site is so historically important—and fragile—that its location is kept secret and the cave is locked behind a huge steel door. And now, researchers have devised a technique to safely investigate these artworks and understand the natural varnish that has protected them for centuries. Their findings are published in the journal ACS Omega.

Accordingly, the crux of this landmark study (published in the journal Science) is the evidence that the closest genetic ties are between the two most-separated islands: Hawaii and Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island), which are each over 3,000 kilometers (nearly 2,000 miles) from the nearest inhabited island and 7,000 kilometers from each other.

In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, physicists Rishav Roshan from the University of Southampton and Sudipta Show from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur used models and calculations to describe how this “sterile neutrino” could have allowed matter to exist.

More than 30,000 years ago, people associated with one of Europe’s major Paleolithic cultures (the Gravettian) were more interconnected than previously thought. An international research team led by the University of Vienna has uncovered new genetic evidence of long-distance connections between these populations. Published in Science Advances, the study combines genomic data from rare human remains with human DNA preserved in cave sediments.

A new fossil analysis from an international team of researchers, published in the Annals of Human Biology, pushes back the emergence of these proto-people by about 200,000 years.

These findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B,  provide new evidence for the complex technical and possibly symbolic behaviors of early Homo sapiens.