Ancient news stories

More than 2,000 years after it was probably hung from the door of a mud-brick house in northern Spain to bring luck, a flat, lifesize bronze hand engraved with dozens of strange symbols could help scholars trace the development of one of the world’s most mysterious languages.

Research published in September 2021 claimed that these footprints are “definitive evidence of human occupation of North America” during the last ice age, dating back to between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago. Now, a new study disputes the evidence of such an early age.

Tracking down the oldest traces of life on Earth isn’t easy. Smoosh a bunch of microbes between layers of rock and let them ripen for billions of years; what you end up with is going to resemble rock more than an ancient life form.

After examining carp remains, researchers claim people who lived 780,000 years ago liked their fish well done

An uncharted region of space known as the “zone of avoidance” lurks behind the Milky Way’s center – and astronomers just found an enormous, multi-galaxy structure there.

Researcher and GRS Radioisotopes technician Jorge Rivera, from the University of Seville, has participated in an incredible discovery that is unique in Europe.

Their findings conclude that a faint white dwarf located just 90 light-years from Earth, as well as the remains of its orbiting planetary system, are over ten billion years old. Led by the University of Warwick, the study was published on November 5 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet, the inscription on the luxury item reads: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

Before life on Earth exploded in diversity some 540 million years ago, the first primitive animal skeletons were already starting to form.

An international team of scientists, including researchers at the University of Adelaide, have gathered new evidence about the energetic core of an active galaxy millions of lights years away by detecting neutrino particles emitted by it.

The analysis of these rocks revealed a great deal about the Moon’s composition, formation, and geological history. In particular, scientists concluded that the rocks were formed from volcanic eruptions more than 3 billion years ago.

Do bones and teeth found in Sussex share characteristics with Neanderthal fossils from northern Spain?

In many popular accounts of human prehistory, civilization emerged in a linear fashion. A new book—The Dawn of Everything, challenges this narrative. Rather than being nomadic hunter-gatherers, they argue human societies during the Paleolithic were, in fact, quite diverse.

A team of Canadian astronomers, including experts from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science, have used the James Webb Telescope (JWST) to identify the most distant globular clusters ever discovered – dense groups of millions of stars that may be relics containing the first and oldest stars in the universe.

A river longer than England’s Thames flows beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, draining an area the size of France and Germany combined, new research reveals.

The study, led by Archaeologist Tuija Kirkinen, was aimed at investigating how these highly degraded plant- and animal-based materials could be traced through soil analysis.