Ancient news stories

Underneath the iconic and intricately carved Treasury building at the center of the renowned archaeological site Petra, excavators have stumbled upon a long-lost crypt holding 12 skeletons.

The trees, the researchers found, were able to do this despite sharp declines in population range and numbers, especially during ice ages. The results of the study are published in Nature Communications.

Ayahuasca lore celebrates serpents, jaguars, and panthers. But why do visions of these majestic jungle animals occur in the first place?

Palaeontologists report in the journal PLOS ONE that they have discovered the earliest evidence of predatory birds. At 68 million years old, the new species lived alongside T. rex and the other dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous period.

Humans seem to have been adapted to the last ice age in similar ways to wolves and bears, according to our recent study, challenging longstanding theories about how and where our ancestors lived during this glacial period.

Archaeologists have found the largest ever jade “dragon” made by the Neolithic Hongshan culture on record.

A new study published in the journal Science Advances by researchers at the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea shows that the patchwork of different ecosystems found in mountainous regions played a key role in the evolution of humans.

A new study published in the Quaternary Science Reviews has subjected the dirt dug from the cave to high-precision tests to find out what the environment was like tens of thousands of years ago.

Railroad construction through a farm on the Danish island of Falster has revealed a 5,000-year-old Neolithic site hiding an advanced technology—a stone paved root cellar. See the paper here.

A new study, led by Ph.D. candidate Vito Hernandez and Associate Professor Mike Morley from the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, has reconstructed the ground conditions in the cave between 52,000 and 10,000 years ago. The work appears in Quaternary Science Reviews.

Archaeological surveys led by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis suggest that coastal and underwater cave sites in southern Sicily contain important new clues about the path and fate of early human migrants to the island. See the study here.

Using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) telescope to survey large expanses of sky, a team of researchers led by the University of Maryland investigated a stream of space debris known to drift near Earth called the Taurid swarm.

A 2,800-year-old burial in Siberia that contains the remains of an elite individual, who was buried with at least one sacrificed human and 18 sacrificed horses, appears to belong to a culture closely related to the enigmatic Scythians, a new study finds.

The findings raise questions and shed light on snail consumption and the antiquity of culinary traditions in Tunisian societies. The findings are published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

If you want to pinpoint your place in the Universe, start with your cosmic address. You live on Earth->Solar System->Milky Way Galaxy->Local Cluster->Virgo Cluster->Virgo Supercluster->Laniakea.

A complex picture of how Neanderthals died out, and the role that modern humans played in their disappearance, is emerging.