Ancient news stories

The excavation, taking place in the 3000-year-old funerary complex of Las Capellanías, in Cañaveral de León, Spain, uncovered a stela depicting a human figure with detailed face, hands and feet, a headdress, necklace, two swords and male genitals.

Stone Age people in Belgium were hunting with spear-throwers more than 30,000 years ago  — the earliest known evidence of such a weapon in Europe, a new study suggests.

A secret text has been discovered in Türkiye, scattered among tens of thousands of ancient clay tablets, which were written in the time of the Hittite Empire during the second millennium BCE.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team…has discovered the most distant barred spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way that has been observed to date. The research, published in Nature, was led by scientists at the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain.

A mysterious primate appeared in North America 30 million years ago, long after the continent’s native primates had died out and even longer before the next big influx of primates – humans – would arrive. The study was published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Several exoplanets at the edge of our galaxy could have formed continents — and advanced life — 5 billion years earlier than Earth, new research suggests.

On the shores of Lake Turkana in East Africa, about 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, pastoralists buried their dead in communal cemeteries that were marked by stone circles and pillars.

Published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, the new study analyzes two skull fragments dating back between 37,000 and 36,000 years to conclude that our ancestors came from Eastern Europe and migrated westwards.

Over the next six years, Euclid will survey a third of the heavens to get some clues about the nature of so-called dark matter and dark energy.

A new facial reconstruction depicts a Neanderthal whose skeleton was found by priests in a French cave.

According to the researchers, the pyramid is a mausoleum complex for a ruler from the Begazı Dandibay culture, a late Bronze Age culture that flourished during the last phase of the Andronovo period (2000–1150 BC).

Image by: Sanjay Rao (Wiki Commons)

A giant underground pyramid hidden beneath a hillside in Indonesia far outdates Stonehenge or the Giza Pyramids and may come to rival the oldest megalithic structures ever built by human hands. See the study here.

The study reveals that the genetic variant observed, which affects zinc regulation, could have signified an evolutionary advantage in our ancestors’ adaptation to the cold.

It is often thought of as something not of this world, a magical, mystical place. But the Festival of Neolithic Ideas at Stonehenge will take a more scientific look at the great circle and the landscape it sits within.

Some 4.5 billion years or so ago, scientists believe, something big smacked into Earth and knocked it ass over teakettle. The result was a bunch of debris hurled into space, swirling around until it formed the Moon. Of the big object, thought to be the size of Mars, and named Theia, nothing much was left. Or so we thought. See the research here.

In a 1981 Smithsonian Magazine article, geologist Farouk El-Baz theorizes that the ancient Egyptians didn’t create the sphinx from scratch, like the pyramids, but that desert winds formed the overall contours of the sphinx and the ancient stonemasons gave the rock a celestial facelift. Now, scientists from New York University have tested that theory…See the study here.