Ancient news stories

Proteins dating back more than one million years have been extracted from some fossils, and could help to answer some difficult questions about archaic humans.

DNA coaxed from 120,000-year-old Neanderthal fossils suggests that early Neanderthals from Western Europe and later Neanderthals from Siberia were closely related.

Lima, Peru’s capital, is running dangerously low on water, but archaeology may provide an answer in the form of a system of water storage developed by the area’s indigenous people 1,400 years ago.

Doubts have swirled around disputed archaeological ‘discoveries’ of this La Ciudad Blanca, but one fact is finally clear: this rich environment, mythical or not, harbours a unique ecosystem of animal life.

Small pieces of charred tubers found at the Klasies River site in South Africa date back 120,000 years, making them the earliest-known evidence of H. sapiens cooking carbs.

A crucial realization was that the birds in the geoglyphs are not naturally found near the locations of the lines. Hermits, for example, live on the eastern slope of the Andes and in the north near Ecuador.

The results open new ways to study both how chromosomes behave during cell division and how they have changed during human evolution.

The big finding — that ancient hyenas lived in the North American Arctic — is based on two tiny teeth, which archaeologists found in Canada’s northern Yukon Territory.

The size of the first population of people needed to arrive, survive, and thrive in what is now Australia is revealed in two studies published today.

An enormous stone sphinx representing the pharaoh Ramses II has spent nearly a century in the Egypt Gallery of the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

The estimated levels of THC in these samples were higher than wild cannabis would normally produce, suggesting intentional cultivation of the plant for its psychoactive powers.

Geometric decorations surround the animals on the sandstone engraving, a telltale sign that whoever made them was part of the Azilian industry.

A grape variety still used in wine production in France today can be traced back 900 years to just one ancestral plant, scientists have discovered.

An ancient, cosmopolitan lineage of plants is shaking up scientists’ understanding of how quickly species evolve in temperate ecosystems and why.