Ancient news stories

Some chapters of human history are more poignant to revisit than others…But other chapters, like those describing the loss of our ancient ancestors, are harder to recover as time passes. A chance finding of bones in a cave is revealing clues of a much older tragic mystery.

The discovery, published September 11 in the journal Cell Genomics, could shed light on the still-enigmatic reasons for the species’ extinction and suggests that late Neanderthals had more population structure than previously thought.

Archaeologists investigating caves in Malaysia ahead of their flooding for a hydroelectric reservoir have discovered more than a dozen prehistoric burials they think are up to 16,000 years old.

An international team of geneticists has found evidence that this famous cautionary tale never actually happened. The study was published in Nature.

The plot has thickened on the mystery of the altar stone of Stonehenge, weeks after geologists sensationally revealed that the huge neolithic rock had been transported hundreds of miles to Wiltshire from the very north of Scotland.

In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the group describes how they used ecological niche modeling and a geographic information system to identify the locations of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens living in parts of Southeast Europe and Southwest Asia and the places where they most likely interacted.

Fragments of the protein collagen have been found preserved in dinosaur fossils 80 million to 195 million years old. But this shouldn’t be possible…A new study in ACS Central Science has described the protective chemistry responsible for collagen’s extraordinary longevity.

An interdisciplinary research team from the University of Cologne’s Institute of Geophysics and Meteorology and the Department of Prehistoric Archaeology has developed a new model, the “Our Way Model.”…the results have been published in an article titled “Reconstruction of human dispersal during Aurignacian on pan-European scale” in Nature Communications.

The largest moon in the solar system was struck by an ancient asteroid 20 times bigger than the rock that clattered into Earth and ended the reign of the dinosaurs 66m years ago, research suggests. See the study here.

Scientists are getting very close to bringing a few iconic species, like woolly mammoths and dodos, back from extinction. That may not be a good thing.

Yet the scars of our past aren’t always easy to distinguish from more mundane tides that advance cosmic evolution, leaving researchers to speculate which patterns are evidence of cataclysmic events and which are typical signs of ageing. This research was submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available on the preprint server arXiv.

New geoarchaeological research shows that metalworking in ancient Egypt led to significant contamination in a nearby port.

A new study led by the University of South Florida has shed light on the human colonization of the western Mediterranean, revealing that humans settled there much earlier than previously believed. This research, detailed in a recent issue of the journal, Communications Earth & Environment, challenges long-held assumptions and narrows the gap between the settlement timelines of islands throughout the Mediterranean region.

Since the end of the last Ice Age, growth of the human population has been far from uniform, marked instead by periods of rapid expansion followed by sharp declines. The reasons behind these fluctuations remain only partially understood. See the study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

The significance of ancient human fossils found in Africa is undeniable. But new research questions whether African fossil sites tell the whole story. See the study here.

In the deep human past, highly skilled seafarers made daring crossings from Asia to the Pacific Islands. It was a migration of global importance that shaped the distribution of our species — Homo sapiens — across the planet.