Ancient news stories

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.

We Homo sapiens didn’t use to be alone. Long ago, there was a lot more human diversity; Homo sapiens lived alongside an estimated eight now-extinct species of human about 300,000 years ago

Whichever way you look at it, the story of our species’ birthplace in Africa and dispersal across the planet is incredibly complicated.

Early Medieval Europe is frequently viewed as a time of cultural stagnation, often given the misnomer of the ‘Dark Ages’. However, analysis has revealed new ideas could spread rapidly as communities were interconnected, creating a surprisingly unified culture in Europe.

Researchers from the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University unraveled the function of flint tools known as “chopping tools,” found at the prehistoric site of Revadim, east of Ashdod.

Simon Fraser University researchers have found evidence that large ambush-predatory worms–some as long as two metres–roamed the ocean floor near Taiwan over 20 million years ago.

From cowrie shells to native resources and animals, currency in some shape or form has long been a part of human history.

Ancient fragments of Earth’s crust acted as ‘seeds’ for new crust to grow from.

The Anthropocene marks relentless and increasingly grave environmental degradation as the Earth faces tipping points for climate change, biodiversity and survival. To address these ills, scientists say we can learn valuable lessons from the past.

A funerary temple belonging to Queen Nearit has been discovered in the ancient Egyptian burial ground Saqqara next to the pyramid of her husband, pharaoh Teti, who ruled Egypt from around 2323 B.C. to 2291 B.C.

A convoy of Spaniards and allies was ritually sacrificed in 1520 at Tecoaque – ‘the place where they ate them’ – before Hernán Cortés wreaked revenge.

The gravitational waves we’ve detected so far have been like tsunamis in the spacetime sea, but it’s believed that gentle ripples should also pervade the universe. Now, a 13-year survey of light from pulsars scattered across the galaxy may have revealed the first hints of these background signals.

Image from: https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA24036 (Wiki Commons)

Scientists have identified the presence of a non-tobacco plant in ancient Maya drug containers for the first time.

Roughly 8,200 years ago, the island of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov in Lake Onega in the Republic of Karelia, Russia, housed a large burial ground where men, women and children of varying ages were buried.

Palaeoproteomics, a new technology that studies the proteins of ancient remains, is shaking up history. Not only can we now peer further back in time, but the technique is also letting us see our past in a new way.

Image from: MAKY.OREL (Wiki Commons)