Ancient news stories

Two thousand years before the Inca empire dominated the Andes, a lesser-known society known as the Chavín Phenomenon shared common art, architecture, and materials throughout modern-day Peru…one of their most powerful tools wasn’t farming. It was access to altered states of consciousness. That’s according to a new study that uncovered the earliest-known direct evidence of the use of psychoactive plants in the Peruvian Andes

“The duration of the Marinoan glaciation (4 to 15 million years) currently has 11 million years of uncertainty”, write the authors of the new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers initially believed the unnamed meteorite hit Earth 1.17 billion years ago, creating the Stac Fada Member rock layer in northwestern Scotland. However, a new study has determined that the meteorite actually hit 990 million years ago — around 200 million years later than previously thought.

An interest in understanding the role that the Milky Way played in Egyptian culture and religion has led University of Portsmouth Associate Professor of Astrophysics, Dr. Or Graur to uncover what he thinks may be the ancient Egyptian visual depiction of the Milky Way. Combining astronomy with Egyptology…his findings are now published in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage.

The Picuris Pueblo, a sovereign nation in New Mexico, has oral histories and cultural traditions that link the tribe to the region of Chaco Canyon, one of the ancient centers of Pueblo culture and society. “We’ve been telling our stories as long as time immemorial,” said Picuris Lt. Gov. Craig Quanchello. But he said those traditions were often “overlooked and erased.” The findings, published Thursday in the journal Nature.

For decades, scientists believed Vesta, one of the largest objects in our solar system’s asteroid belt, wasn’t just an asteroid and eventually concluded it was more like a planet with a crust, mantle and core. Now, Michigan State University has contributed to research that flips this notion on its head. The paper was published in Nature Astronomy.

Platypus and echidnas are the only surviving members of the monotreme family. This includes the only mammals to lay eggs rather than giving birth to live young. For this reason, they are considered relics of early mammal evolution. The new study was published in the Proccedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

A recent study conducted by Dr. Ana Paula Motta and her colleagues, in collaboration with the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, has identified a new mid-to-late Holocene rock art style in Australia’s northeastern Kimberley region. The findings are published in the journal Australian Archaeology.

In a new study, researchers analyzed the remains of three ancient fireplaces found at an archaeological site in modern-day Ukraine, all of which are associated with human occupations at the site during the LGM. The study was published in Geoarchaeology.

The universe has been growing since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. But cosmologists can’t agree on how fast it is expanding. A new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests a radical new idea that might resolve this astronomical problem – perhaps the universe is spinning very slowly.

Archaeologists in Peru said Thursday they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas.

Water is critical to life on our planet, but the conventional theory of how it ended up being so abundant on Earth might be completely wrong. The new research is published in the planetary science journal Icarus.

Following a recent study, Dr. Przemysław Bobrowski and his colleagues published new radiocarbon dates on Holocene (11,700 years ago to the present) sites located in the Tsakhiurtyn Hundi (Flint Valley) region of Mongolia. The work has been published in the journal Radiocarbon

The event that refilled the Mediterranean basin 5m years ago is thought to have been the largest flood in Earth’s history, with water surging through the present-day strait of Gibraltar 1,000 times faster than the Amazon River, filling the basin in just a couple of years. The findings have been published in Scientific Reports.

A study led by Prof. Amos Frumkin from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem sheds new light on one of humanity’s most significant turning points: the Neolithic Revolution. Published in the Journal of Soils and Sediments, the study presents compelling evidence that catastrophic wildfires and soil erosion—driven by natural climate shifts—may have sparked the first widespread transition from hunting and gathering to farming in the southern Levant over 8,000 years ago.

Researchers reexamining fossils identified telltale marks made by human ancestors cutting meat from bones. The discovery pushes back the date hominins started living in Europe by 200,000 years. The research was published in Nature Communications.