Ancient news stories

Imagine early humans meticulously crafting stone tools for nearly 300,000 years, all while contending with recurring wildfires, droughts, and dramatic environmental shifts. A recent study, published in Nature Communications, brought to light remarkable evidence of enduring technological tradition from Kenya’s Turkana Basin.

Image by Rachid Hamatou (Wiki Commons)

New findings reveal the geological age, context, and anatomy of hominin fossils discovered at the Ledi-Geraru Research Project in Ethiopia.

Archaeologists in Iraq have unearthed the remains of a 5,000-year-old building that may have been a temple from the Uruk period, when the first cities in the world were taking off.

Ochre is an iron-rich mineral pigment that was used by many ancient civilizations for color, decoration and practical tasks such as preserving animal hides and tanning clothing. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

Researchers have long been attempting to piece together the trek of Neanderthals from Europe into Asia around the Middle and Upper Paleolithic time periods. This time marks the eventual disappearance of Neanderthals and the transition to a Homo-sapien-dominated world…The research is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

With today’s technology, we cannot bring back Neanderthals. But even if future advances allow it, should we?

Using plain old shiitake mushrooms (Lentinula edodes), scientists have built working memristors – circuitry elements that ‘remember’ their past electrical states – not from titanium dioxide or silicon, but the root-like (and somewhat neuron-like) part of a fungus called the mycelium.

Scientists are using DNA from sediments to learn more about Earth’s past, including new revelations about the woolly mammoth.

The fossilised lower leg bone (tibia) of an extinct, giant ‘sthenurine’ kangaroo was unearthed in the early 1900s alongside other bone fragments from the Mammoth Cave in southwestern Western Australia.

The clues have survived some 4.5 billion years, so it’s an astonishing find. The international team of researchers behind the discovery compares it to picking out a single grain in a bucket of sand. The research has been published in Nature Geosciences.

Archaeologists have discovered a 3,500-year-old military fortress with a zigzag-style wall in the north Sinai Desert of Egypt, not far from the Mediterranean coast. The fort is remarkably well preserved, and even has the remnants of ovens and a hunk of fossilized dough that the fortress’ soldiers never got a chance to eat.

A research team led by the University of Copenhagen has uncovered a remarkable Early Bronze Age ritual landscape at Murayghat in Jordan. The discovery can shed new light on how ancient communities responded to social and environmental change…Susanne Kerner has recently published the article “Dolmens, standing stones and ritual in Murayghat” in the journal Levant, which discusses the findings at Murayghat.

This discovery could force us to rethink what we know about prehistoric human societies. As the researchers write in their paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, building the megastructures would have demanded huge coordinative effort, requiring large numbers of people to work for many hours, far more effort than a family unit. According to estimates, the largest structure required over 5,000 person-hours of labor.

With help from citizen scientists, astronomers have found the most powerful and distant “odd radio circle” ever detected. Researchers detailed their findings in a paper published Oct. 2 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Similar structures have been found in other arid regions of the world, including the Middle East, but this is the first time such a concentration has been discovered in the area, and it raises the possibility that they predate those known to have been used by the Inkas. The results are published in the journal Antiquity

In the new study, published Monday (Oct. 6) in the journal La Revista de Arqueología Americana (The Journal of American Archaeology), the researchers suggest that Wari rulers used psychedelics mixed in beer to help grow their empire. They explain that the “afterglow” — the long-term effect of drinking the mix — would have lasted weeks and that communal feasts where it was drunk would have brought people together.