Ancient news stories

A team of researchers led by archeologist Juan Gibaja of the Spanish National Research Council has described a quintet of canoes dredged up from a Neolithic lakeshore village near Rome, Italy, that reveal the sophisticated boat-building techniques of seafaring communities in the region. The study has been published in PLOS ONE.

Brazilian archaeologists have discovered a vast number of 2,000-year-old rock carvings that depict human footprints, celestial-body-like figures, and representations of animals, such as deer and wild pigs.

A major report on the remains of a stilt village that was engulfed in flames almost 3,000 years ago reveals in unprecedented detail the daily lives of England’s prehistoric fenlanders.

A new study has cataloged human brains that have been found on the archaeological record around the world and discovered that this remarkable organ resists decomposition far more than we thought – even when the rest of the body’s soft tissues have completely melted away.

A project to identify and map rock art sites in a long section of the River Murray in South Australia has resulted in an immediate call for greater understanding and protection of the region’s ancient Aboriginal heritage.

Archaeologists in France have excavated a Neolithic site containing 63 burials and hundreds of structures and artifacts from a human occupation spanning roughly 4,000 years.

According to the results of a genomics study published last year, modern humanity’s ancestors were reduced to a breeding population of barely 1,300 individuals in a devastating bottleneck that brought us to the very brink of annihilation. Now, a new study has found that a mass migration of humans out of Africa occurred at the same time.

Sometimes, it takes the smallest thing to undertake a mammoth task. That’s what researchers behind the attempts to de-extinct the woolly mammoth are hoping as they announced what they believe to be a step forward in their efforts.

Sound waves fossilized in the maps of galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest. This research was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

A groundbreaking announcement for the recovery of lost ancient literature was recently made. Using a non-invasive method that harnesses machine learning, an international trio of scholars retrieved 15 columns of ancient Greek text from within a carbonized papyrus from Herculaneum, a seaside Roman town eight kilometers southeast of Naples, Italy.

Findings from the team, published in The Journal of Coastal and Island Archaeology, place human occupation of Curaçao, an island in the southern Caribbean, as far back as 5735–5600 BCE—up to 850 years earlier than previously thought.

A pair of planetary scientists… have found evidence that the exodus of hominins out of Africa approximately 1 million years ago may have been driven by the first major glaciation of the Pleistocene. See the study here.

Found in the graves of a Neolithic settlement in south-east Türkiye, they could represent the earliest convincing examples of body piercing. The study has been published in Antiquity.

Indigenous Australians have been using fire to shape the country’s northern ecosystems for at least 11,000 years, according to charcoal preserved in the sediment of a sinkhole. The study was published on 11 March in Nature Geoscience.

Researchers think a sacred language inscribed in cuneiform on the tablet suggest the Hittite king visited or lived where the tablet was found in Turkey.

A slow cosmic dance between Earth and Mars has a hidden effect on cycles in the deep ocean. According to a new analysis of the deep-sea geological record, the gravitational interaction between the two planets results in cyclic changes in deep ocean currents that recur every 2.4 million years.