Ancient news stories

Little is known about what was happening shortly after the Big Bang, but now researchers are hoping to shed fresh light on the matter by harnessing the far side of the moon.

New genetic analyses of ancient human skeletons from western Remote Oceania are shedding light on the complex history of settlement in this vast Pacific region over the past 3,000 years. The new study has been published in the journal Cell.

One of the most puzzling aspects of these ancient depictions is how they have managed to survive in such good condition for so long. The region has an extreme subtropical monsoon climate, with scorching summer heat, heavy monsoon rain and frequent typhoons. The answer, according to a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, could be that the paint contains a binder made of lime mortar mixed with blood.

The rocks contained something never before found on Mars – a mineral that, here on Earth, can constitute literal treasure. The mineral was corundum, the crystalline material that forms rubies and sapphires…Now, the researchers have published their full analysis in Geophysical Research Letters – and performed laboratory comparisons that revealed striking similarities between the Martian signal and those of precious gems on Earth.

Some cynodonts may have been giving birth to live young much sooner in evolutionary history than previously assumed. A new Frontiers in Mammal Science study has offered the first compelling evidence that cynodonts may have been viviparous—a reproductive mode characterized by live birth.

In a hidden cave on a small island off the coast of Sweden, a tragedy has lain buried for thousands of years. There, buried under the ancient sediment, archaeologists have found the bones of a young woman and a fetus, estimated to be around 32 to 34 weeks of gestation.

Deep in the Vârghiș Gorges, tucked away in the dark recesses of a cave, researchers have found the first evidence that Neanderthals used bone tools in Romania. A new study published on this in the Journal of Quaternary Science.

There was something notable about Mohenjo-daro, the largest city of the Indus civilization that settled across parts of Pakistan and India between 2600-1900 BCE: it flipped the normal rules of history in one specific way. The research has been published in Antiquity.

A once-anonymous Maya scientist now has a name. Sak Tahn Waax, or “White-Chested Fox,” is credited as the author of a calendrical formula painted in Maya glyphs on the wall of a ruin in Guatemala, researchers report July 14 in Antiquity

A chance find of rare rock crystal tools a century ago paved the way for a better understanding of Neanderthals today.

Now, a new LIDAR survey suggests that civilization was even larger than archaeologists imagined, hinting at a people that built as many as 30,000 earthworks and had a peak population of up to 3 million people around 200 CE. The findings have been published in Nature.

Built from stones weighing between 2 and 25 tonnes (2 to 28 tons), the structure of Stonehenge demonstrates a scale of construction hard to imagine before the invention of the wheel. The mystery deepens when you consider that the stones are not from the local bedrock. So why these stones, and how did they get there? Recent work I carried out with geochemist Anthony Clarke from Curtin University in Australia might have an answer to these two questions for Stonehenge’s most far-traveled stone—the Altar Stone.

Newly excavated bones from Gran Dolina cave in Spain reveal an ancient human relative practiced cannibalism on adults and children, but researchers still don’t know why.

At first glance, Earth’s biggest geological disasters seem to have little in common beyond their sheer scale. But for decades, scientists have wondered whether these seemingly unrelated events might actually follow a hidden rhythm stretching back hundreds of millions of years…Now, an analysis published in Evolving Earth revisits that evidence using updated geological timescales and statistical methods.

A new study published in Neuroscience Bulletin suggests that mescaline, a chemical found in certain cacti that can cause hallucinations, may alter how the brain responds to incoming sensory information.

A new skull-based analysis of Neanderthal brains suggests that these ancient hominins’ range of intelligence largely overlapped with our own. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.