Ancient news stories

Were the Amazons of ancient Greek mythology — fierce female warriors said to have roamed a vast area around the Black Sea known as Scythia — real?

Bronze age graves, neolithic pottery and the vestiges of a mysterious C-shaped enclosure that might have been a prehistoric industrial area are among the finds unearthed by archaeologists who have carried out preliminary work on the site of the proposed new road tunnel at Stonehenge.

Archaeologists have discovered dozens of terracotta figurines that are over 2,000 years old, including ones that depict gods, goddesses, men, women, cavalry and animals.

It is thought the dead were given gold foil amulets shaped like tongues so that they could speak before the court of the god Osiris in the afterlife.

A recent discovery has uncovered evidence of what may be the earliest-known use of symbols. The symbols were found on a bone fragment in the Ramle region in central Israel and are believed to be approximately 120,000 years old.

The oldest evidence of land fungus may be a wee microfossil that’s 635 million years old, found in a cave in southern China.

Prehistoric teeth unearthed at a site in Jersey reveal signs of interbreeding between Neanderthals and our own species, scientists say.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS IN EGYPT are preparing to open a 3,000-year-old burial shaft at the Saqqara necropolis, south of Cairo, in the coming week.

A striking 600-year-old Aztec sculpture depicting a golden eagle has been uncovered in an ancient temple in Mexico, archaeologists with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) announced Monday (Jan. 25).

Large parts of the Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago, evidenced by prehistoric engravings in the desert of giraffes, crocodiles and a stone-age cave painting of humans swimming.

The evolution of the opposable thumb is often placed hand-in-hand with the rise of stone tools.

Archaeologists have discovered a fantastical-looking, 1,500-year-old house in Turkey that was decorated with illusory wall paintings and terracotta tiles on the floor with puppy prints and possible chicken decorations pressed into them.

Sometime toward the end of the last ice age, a group of humans armed with stone-tipped spears stalked their prey in the bitter cold of northeastern Siberia, tracking bison and woolly mammoths across a vast, grassy landscape.

The Sun has a lot of rhythm and goes through different cycles of activity. The most well-known cycle might be the Schwabe cycle, which has an 11-year cadence. But what about cycles with much longer time scales? How can scientists understand them?

A massive “cursus” monument, a site for ancient rituals, that was built around the same time as Stonehenge, has been discovered on the  Scottish Isle of Arran.

Multi-disciplinary researchers at The University of Manchester have helped develop a powerful physics-based tool to map the pace of language development and human innovation over thousands of years—even stretching into pre-history before records were kept.