Ancient news stories

Columbian mammoths in Mexico are genetically different from those in the U.S. and Canada, surprise DNA study reveals. The research was published Aug. 28 in the journal Science.

Anthropologist Lee Berger and his team at the University of the Witwatersrand, working within the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, have published their most extensive evidence yet of deliberate burial by Homo Naledi, a small brained hominin that walked the Earth with several current modern human cousins over 240,000 years ago.

Data collected from the Perseverance rover last year has just delivered what might be the best evidence yet for microbial life on Mars. The research has been published in Nature.

Fomalhaut is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and is about 25 light-years away, making it a galaxy amenable to detailed observations. It’s also a young star, only about 440 million years old.

Knowledge about the first settlements of Homo sapiens in the interior of the Iberian Peninsula at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic has been significantly advanced with a new study led by Edgar Téllez, a researcher at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH). The findings are published in the journal Quaternary Science Advances.

In a new study, researchers from the University of Bern showed for the first time how the chemical composition of primordial Earth was complete three million years after it formed (ca. 4.5 billion years ago). Their results imply that the ingredients for life (water, carbon compounds, sulfur, etc.) were introduced later, likely by an impact.

The findings, which are published in Nature, have important implications for our understanding of how Mars evolved. Billions of years ago, the planet may have had a thicker atmosphere that allowed liquid water to flow on the surface.

Until now, the mainstream view has been that stars and galaxies appeared first and that black holes were created only when the earliest stars ran out of fuel and collapsed under their own gravity. But the latest observations by the space telescope, which reveal a gargantuan black hole with only a sparse halo of surrounding material dating back to the dawn of the cosmos, appear incompatible with this sequence of events

In a new study, published Aug. 28 in the journal Science, researchers analyzed “Marsquake” data collected by NASA’s InSight lander, which monitored tremors beneath the Martian surface from 2018 until 2022, when it met an untimely demise from dust blocking its solar panels. By looking at how these Marsquakes vibrated through the Red Planet’s unmoving mantle, the team discovered several never-before-seen blobs that were much denser than the surrounding material.

Archaeologists in Peru have discovered a multicoloured three-dimensional wall that could date back 4,000 years, in an unprecedented find that has shifted archaeological understanding about the first civilisations in the Americas.

This discovery, published in the journal PLOS One, offers new insights into the complexity of early Homo sapiens’ interaction with plant resources—not only as food but also for more sophisticated uses such as dyeing and medicine. Indeed, Isatis tinctoria L., has a long history of use in both dyeing and healing.

A new fossil find in the Republic of Georgia is expanding our understanding of the earliest humans to leave Africa. The discovery, announced July 31 by the Georgian National Agency for Cultural Heritage Preservation, sheds new light on the evolution of our genus, Homo, and “is expected to reveal the reasons for the migration of early hominins out of Africa,”…

Their findings, published this week (Aug. 25) in Nature Communications, show that migration of farming groups was the dominant factor, while cultural adoption by hunter-gatherers only played a minimal role.

Tiny stone artifacts discovered in Uzbekistan may be the oldest known arrowheads, a new study suggests.

The skull of a small child who lived and died many millennia ago represents the oldest direct evidence to date of the prolonged mingling between anatomically modern humans and our closely related cousins, the Neanderthals. The research has been published in L’Anthropologie.

Around 12,000 years ago, a man was shot by an arrow with an exotic stone tip in what is now Vietnam. He survived the initial injury but likely succumbed to infection, a new analysis of his remains suggests.