Ancient news stories

The oldest known primate fossils were dated to just after the extinction event 66 million years ago—suggesting some primate ancestors lived even longer ago.

Egypt announced a new archaeological discovery in the Bahariya Oasis with archaeological buildings dating back to the fifth and seventh centuries, where monks settled down.

A gigantic, 5,000-year-old complex of long barrows and stone-lined tombs has been unearthed in Poland, after archaeologists investigated lines in crops in a field that they’d seen in a satellite photograph.

In universities and research labs across the world, scientists are actively rewriting whole chapters of human history, big and small. And they’re doing it using a very new piece of evidence: ancient DNA.

A new study from the University of Kent’s School of Anthropology and Conservation has found that Oldowan and Acheulean stone tool technologies are likely to be tens of thousands of years older than current evidence suggests.

The class of marine animals known as cephalopoda – which today includes squids, octopuses, and cuttlefishes – could have been around on Earth 30 million years earlier than previously thought, according to new research.

In the study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, the researchers examined the genomes of more than 400 modern humans to investigate the interbreeding events between ancient humans and modern human populations who arrived at Island Southeast Asia 50,000–60,000 years ago.

Image from Wiki Commons 

The further back in time you go, the sparser the archaeological record grows. Many materials used by humans – wood, leather, fabric – simply don’t last and are swallowed by Earth under the implacable march of time.

About 8500 years ago, hunter-gatherers living beside Eagle Lake in Wisconsin hammered out a conical, 10-centimeter-long projectile point made of pure copper.

As the fire dwindles in the hearth, a family picks through the remains of their feast, turning over the bones for any remaining flesh. It is about 3000BC in Skara Brae, a small neolithic settlement on the west coast of Orkney’s Mainland, Scotland.

As the Arctic warms much faster than everywhere else on the planet in response to climate change, the findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may not only be a glimpse of the past but a snapshot of our potential future.

Our solar system’s first known interstellar visitor is neither a comet nor asteroid as first suspected and looks nothing like a cigar. A new study says the mystery object is likely a remnant of a Pluto-like world and shaped like a cookie.

If we want to predict our planet’s future under climate change, we must better understand what has happened on Earth before, even hundreds of thousands of years in the past.

Six-millennia-old skeleton of child also unearthed during dig in Judean Desert by Israeli archeologists

It’s a longstanding mystery: how Mars lost the water that flowed across its surface billions of years ago.

Four stars in the night sky have been formally recognised by their Australian Aboriginal names.