Ancient news stories

An enigmatic stone and turf structure on Bodmin Moor that was previously thought to be a medieval animal pen has been found to be 4,000 years older – and unique in Europe.

The Ice Age campsite of Gönnersdorf on the banks of the Rhine has revealed a groundbreaking discovery that sheds new light on early fishing practices. The work is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Emerging evidence suggests that plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth’s crust, may have begun much earlier than previously thought — and may be a big reason that our planet harbors life.

Ancient DNA taken from the Pompeii victims of Mount Vesuvius’ eruption nearly 2,000 years ago reveals that some people’s relationships were not what they seemed, according to a new study…”These findings challenge traditional gender and familial assumptions.”

Combining these Indigenous accounts with other sources of research has led them to conclude that the art speaks of ritual specialists negotiating spiritual realms, the transformation of bodies, and the intertwining of human and non-human worlds—rather than a more literal record of the environment they lived in and the species they encountered.

In a study, “Late Pleistocene exploitation of Ephedra in a funerary context in Morocco,” published in Scientific Reports, researchers detail their findings in an excavation of a cave occupied by modern humans for over 100,000 years.

A skeleton buried in a fetal position is actually made of bones from at least five people who lived across a span of 2,500 years…A study published Oct. 23 in the journal Antiquity… sheds light on the meaning of the composite burial via multiple techniques, including skeletal analysis, radiocarbon dating and ancient-DNA sequencing.

A recent preliminary study by Ph.D. student Leonie Hoff of the University of Oxford, published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, provides insight into how ancient fingerprints left on terracotta figurines reveal the age and sex of their makers.

According to the researchers, several symbols engraved on stone “cylinder seals” were developed into signs used in “proto-cuneiform,” an early version of the cuneiform script used in southern Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq. The researchers reported their findings in a study published Tuesday (Nov. 5) in the journal Antiquity.

The devastation of a giant meteorite impact on early Earth may have allowed life to flourish, new research suggests. The study was published Oct. 21 in the journal PNAS.

The region is known as one of the earliest places people practiced animal husbandry. The new study adds insight into how this developed. The study, published in Nature, spans nearly 6,000 years of genetic data in the region.

Prehistoric Polynesian seafarers were highly skilled and undertook some of the longest and most technically demanding voyages in prehistory—but did they ever sail into very high latitudes with landfall in Antarctica, as some scholars have argued? An international team of archaeologists and paleoecologists seeking an answer to this question…Their study is published in the journal Archaeology in Oceania.

A small 4,400-year-old town in the Khaybar Oasis of Saudi Arabia hints that Bronze Age people in this region were slow to urbanize, unlike their contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, finds a new study published Wednesday (Oct. 30) in the journal PLOS One.

Scientists have been trying to figure out where kissing came from for a long time. New research suggests that the answer is to be found in the behaviour of ancient ape ancestors of humans…

A study published in L’Anthropologie by Professor Ella Been from Ono Academic College and Dr. Omry Barzilai from the University of Haifa sheds new light on the burial practices of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals in the Levant region during the Middle Paleolithic (MP).

The city contains up to 6,674 structures, including pyramids like the ones at Chichén Itzá and Tikal, according to a study published Tuesday (Oct. 29) in the journal Antiquity. The researchers used previously created lidar (light detection and ranging) maps, which are created by shooting laser pulses at the ground, to reveal the potentially 1,500-year-old site.