Ancient news stories

When NASA’s Dawn mission arrived at Ceres in 2015, scientists and the general public got their first detailed look at this strange and beautiful planetoid. New research can be found in a paper summarising their findings, which was published on August 20th in Science Advances.

The near-Earth asteroid Bennu contains stardust that is older than the solar system and clues about its violent history, three new studies of the asteroid’s sample materials show.

Many key crops, such as wheat, barley, and legumes, have been traced to the Fertile Crescent and the harvesting of wild grains by a people known as the Natufians, roughly 10,000 years ago. Now, a new study by an interdisciplinary research team shows that, by at least 9,200 years ago, people as far north and east as southern Uzbekistan were harvesting wild barley using sickle blades as well.

The research, published in PLOS One, proposes that the beginnings of urban civilisation in ancient Mesopotamia were driven by the dynamic relationships between rivers, tides and sediments at the head of the Persian Gulf.

Our new study, published in the journal Australian Archaeology, is the first archaeological research undertaken on the Great Papuan Plateau. The findings continue to undermine the historical Eurocentric idea that early Indigenous societies in this region were static and unchanging.

New data from the James Webb telescope suggests that Bennu and Ryugu — two asteroids recently visited by sample-return missions — are both fragments of a single massive “parent”. See the findings in a new study, published Aug. 18 in The Planetary Science Journal.

The mystery of the Petralona Cave skull centers around two intriguing unknowns. First, while it is clearly of the Homo genus, it is distinctly different from both Neanderthals and current modern humans. Next, dating the skull has remained difficult to narrow down, with previous estimates spanning about 170,000 to 700,000 years in age. See the study, “New U-series dates on the Petralona cranium, a key fossil in European human evolution,” published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

The research takes a new look at a species known as Denisovans. These ancient relatives of humans lived from what is today Russia south to Oceania and west to the Tibetan Plateau.The researchers published their results in the journal Science.

Isotopes shows animal began life in Wales, adding weight to theory cattle used in hauling stones across country

The people of the ancient Incan empire kept careful records of their economics, religion, demographics and history. Those records took the form of knotted cords called khipus.

In the study, “Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80 ka ago?,” published in PLOS ONE, researchers designed a traceological search to identify weapon heads in the oldest layers of the Obi-Rakhmat rock shelter.

Evidence from Kenya shows that key stone tools in the development of early humans were made by transporting materials over long distances 600,000 years earlier than previously thought…Geochemical analysis of 401 Oldowan tools from Kenya was published in the journal Science Advances.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has snapped black and white images of a rock on the Martian surface that looks remarkably like a piece of coral.

After using lasers to map the Maya Lowlands, researchers have updated their estimates of the total Maya population during the Late Classic Period (A.D. 600 to 900). The new research was published online July 7 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Archaeologists have found ancient human stone tools dating to more than 1 million years ago on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The tools are 5 times older than the previous earliest evidence of humans on the island. The findings are presented in a paper published today in Nature.

Analysis of ocean sediments has surfaced geochemical clues in line with the possibility that an encounter with a disintegrating comet 12,800 years ago in the Northern Hemisphere triggered rapid cooling of Earth’s air and ocean. Christopher Moore of the University of South Carolina, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the journal PLOS One on August 6, 2025.