Ancient news stories

Greece’s Culture Ministry said Tuesday that the structure is a “unique and extremely interesting find” from Crete’s Minoan civilization, famous for its sumptuous palaces, flamboyant art and enigmatic writing system.

A mysterious Bronze Age wooden circle known as “Seahenge” on England’s east coast was built more than 4,000 years ago in an effort to bring back warmer weather during an extreme cold spell, a new study suggests.

Thin dusting of water ice appears to form overnight in summit craters and evaporate after sunrise, scientists say

In the East Siberian Arctic (>70 °N), there is not only evidence of significant woolly mammoth populations, but also how humans interacted with them, the focus of new research in Quaternary Science Reviews.

A new dating technique is used to more accurately estimate time differences between Paleolithic-age hearth fires. In a paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes how their new dating technique works, its accuracy range, and what their findings reveal about Neanderthals living in a river valley in what is now Spain approximately 50,000 years ago.

Neanderthal genes seen in modern humans may have entered our DNA through an interval of interbreeding starting about 47,000 years ago that lasted nearly 7,000 years, new research finds.

Earth’s largest remaining tract of tropical rainforest is kept alive by a complex water cycle that we’re only just beginning to understand. Yet our activities are changing it before we can see the full picture, a new report finds.

New research led by geologists at Western Australia’s Curtin University provides evidence that fresh water emerged on Earth about 4 billion years ago – half a billion years earlier than previously thought. The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Archaeologists have fully mapped a series of ancient rock art in Venezuela and Colombia, including the world’s largest monumental engraving, using photography and drone footage. The study was published on Tuesday (June 4) in the journal Antiquity.

Researchers have explored how the River Nile evolved over the past 11,500 years and how changes in its geography could have helped shape the fortunes of ancient Egyptian civilisation. The research is published in Nature Geoscience.

Image by: Marc Ryckaert (MJJR – Wiki Commons)

An uncle and nephew buried in two of the richest burial mounds, along with evidence of first-cousin inbreeding, point strongly toward matrilineal dynasties of elite power, according to the study, which was published Monday (June 3) in the journal Nature Human Behaviour

New research published in the journal Science Advances might explain the Earth-shaking processes that led to the end-Cambrian mass extinction.

Despite decades of study, this Ice Age mystery remains unsolved. Researchers simply don’t have sufficient evidence at this point to rule out one scenario or the other—or indeed other explanations that have been proposed (e.g. disease, an impact event from a comet, or a combination of factors)… A new work published in Frontiers in Mammal Science set out to address this information deficit.

A new study from Tel Aviv University identified the earliest appearance worldwide of special stone tools, used 400,000 years ago to process fallow deer. The paper was published in Archaeologies.

The rich human occupation  of Mediterranean island Cyprus has been pushed back thousands of years by new research led by Cypriot and Australian archaeologists. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA shows the first human occupation on Cyprus between 14,257 and 13,182 years ago.

French archaeologists have uncovered nine large graves containing the remains of horses from up to 2,000 years ago, in a find described as “extraordinary”.