Ancient news stories

The two species regularly interbred by about 45,000 years ago.

Paleolithic cuisine was anything but lean and green, according to a recent study on the diets of our Pleistocene ancestors. For a good 2 million years, Homo sapiens ditched the salad and dined heavily on meat, putting them at the top of the food chain.

In an experiment to understand better how ancient artifacts are altered by the sediment in which they are buried for thousands of years, Australian archaeological scientists buried bones, stones, charcoal and other items in bat guano, cooked it, and analyzed how this affected the different items.

Human cultures can see the world through very different lenses, but the way we sort stars in the night sky is surprisingly universal.

Fossilized pollen and leaves reveal that the meteorite that caused the extinction of nonavian dinosaurs also reshaped South America’s plant communities to yield the planet’s largest rain forest

The more we look into the harsh extremes of Chile’s Atacama Desert, the more we find. Phenomena both mystifying and wonderful, occasionally bordering on alien.

Archaeologist Stephen Sherlock, an independent scholar, has found evidence of Neolithic people extracting salt from seawater 5,800 years ago at Street House, Loftus, making it the oldest salt production facility ever discovered in Britain.

Ostrich eggshells and crystals gathered more than 100,000 years ago shed light on the cultural evolution of early humans.

Space scientists have discovered extra-terrestrial particles which point to a medium-sized asteroid impact in Antarctica 430,000 years ago.

Rock art of human figures created over thousands of years in Australia’s Arnhem Land has been put through a transformative machine learning study to analyse style changes over the years.

The extent of Australasian influence into the ancient bloodlines of early South American cultures looks to be even greater than scientists thought, according to new research.

The extinct human lineage nicknamed “the hobbit” may not be a distant relative of modern humans as previously thought. Instead, hobbits may be members of the mysterious close relatives of modern humans known as Denisovans, and may have interbred with ancestors of modern humans on the islands of Southeast Asia, researchers say.

Earth has experienced five major mass extinction events over the past 500 million years. Massive volcanic eruptions have been identified as the major driver of the environmental changes that precipitated at least three of these extinction events.

A six-year-old boy has found a fossil dating back millions of years in his garden after receiving a fossil-hunting kit for Christmas

The Basques are a unique population in Western Europe; their language is not related to any Indo-European language. Furthermore, genetically speaking, they have been considered to have distinct features. However, until now there was no conclusive study to explain the origin of their singularity.