Ancient news stories

They say what goes around comes around, but it’s unlikely the saying was supposed to ever refer to meteorites. And yet here we are. Scientists are seeking to confirm that a black rock discovered in Morocco in 2018 departed Earth’s pull for outer space, only to return to it like a prodigal child.

New research suggests humans lived in South America at the same time as now extinct giant sloths, bolstering evidence that people arrived in the Americas earlier than once thought.

Much of the moon’s surface is 200 million years older than previously estimated, a new analysis suggests.

By marrying the existing expanding Universe theory with a fringe explanation called the tired light hypothesis, Gupta has found the Big Bang could have taken place an astonishing 26.7 billion years ago. That’s twice as old as current models predict. This research was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The volcano beneath Italy erupted 40,000 years ago and had catastrophic impact on Earth’s climate — around the same time that the Neanderthals began their slow march to extinction.

Scientists think they’ve uncovered evidence of the oldest glaciers ever found, in ancient rocks speckled with oxygen isotopes lying beneath the world’s largest gold deposits in South Africa. The study was published in Geochemical Perspectives Letters, with further results presented at the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society’s Goldschmidt Conference.

Ancient stars born during the Cosmic Dawn have been identified in the center of the Milky Way. As part of a survey to uncover some of the oldest known stars in the Universe, scientists conducted a comprehensive search for these ancient but elusive stars. Their findings have been presented at the UK’s annual National Astronomy Meeting.

Since its discovery in 2008, the skeleton of a high-ranking individual buried inside a tomb in the Iberian Peninsula between 3,200 and 2,200 years ago was thought to be the remains of a man. However, a new analysis reveals that this person was actually a woman.

The researchers, from UCL Archaeology South-East, discovered 800 stone artefacts thought to be over 300,000 years old, buried in sediments which filled a sinkhole and ancient river channel, outlined in their research, published in Internet Archaeology.

A large formation of granite discovered below the lunar surface likely was formed from the cooling of molten lava that fed a volcano or volcanoes that erupted early in the moon’s history—as long as 3.5 billion years ago.

Events appear to unfold five times slower when the universe was a tenth of its present age, in effect, predicted by Einstein.

Most land plants living today have spiral patterns involving the famous Fibonacci sequence of numbers. Because the spirals are so common, scientists have thought the patterns must have evolved in some of the earliest land plants. But the leaves of the ancient plant… were arranged in spirals that can’t be described by Fibonacci numbers, researchers report in the June 16 Science.

A groundbreaking study conducted by a multidisciplinary team that includes a computational archaeologist, artist, and computer programmer has revealed new insights into ancient rock engravings and the techniques used by ancient engravers. See the research here.

A prehistoric site with as many as 25 monumental pits has been discovered in Bedfordshire to the astonishment of archaeologists. Found in Linmere, they date from the Mesolithic period, 12,000 to 6,000 years ago…The pits could offer extraordinary new insights.

Stone tools bear microscopic evidence of ancient plant technology, according to a study published June 30, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

A little more than 650 light-years from Earth, an old, red star lies dying. A fresh prognosis on Betelgeuse’s condition based on its pulsations gives the celebrated supergiant just a few decades before it collapses in a final flash of glory. This research is available on arXiv.