Ancient news stories

High above one of western Britain’s loveliest valleys, the silence is broken by the sound of gentle digging, scraping and brushing, along with bursts of excited chatter as another ancient feature is revealed or a curious visitor stops by to find out what is going on.

As the first dinosaurs were finding their feet around 230 million years ago, the ancestors of modern mammals were also emerging. Somewhere along the way they developed a remarkable ability: to generate their own warmth.

The ancient North American city of Cahokia had as its focal point a feature now known as Monks Mound, a giant earthwork surrounded on its north, south, east and west by large rectangular open areas.

Mummies are found all over the world and reveal the practices of long-lost peoples.

The mountain fortress of Rabana-Merquly in modern Iraqi Kurdistan was one of the major regional centers of the Parthian Empire, which extended over parts of Iran and Mesopotamia approximately 2,000 years ago.

A dormant black hole nine times the mass of the Sun has been found outside the Milky Way for the first time, in what researchers have called a “very exciting discovery”.

Groundwater that was recently discovered deep underground in a mine in South Africa is estimated to be 1.2 billion years old. Researchers suspect that the  groundwater is some of the oldest on the planet, and its chemical interactions with the surrounding rock could offer new insights about energy production and storage in Earth’s crust.

A team of researchers with affiliations to multiple institutions in the U.S. has found that the metal content of Fermi bubble high-velocity clouds does not match with material in the Milky Way’s galactic center, suggesting that at least some of the material comes from somewhere else.

Researchers have peered back through 800 years of history to conclude that Mayapan – the capital of culture and politics for the Maya people of the Yucatán Peninsula in the 13th and 14th century CE – may well have been undone by drought.

The death of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to become ascendant. But the history of mammals stretches far deeper than that. The first mammals go back about 325 million years, when the ancestral mammal lineage split from the reptile line.

Remains recovered from a cave in the Chinese province of Yunnan more than 10 years ago have finally given up their secrets, with a DNA analysis revealing not just who left them, but ultimately where their ancestors would go.

Some say King Arthur slew a giant there. Others say he knelt in prayer and his knee print indentations are forever etched into the stone. Archaeologists set out to find out what really happened at Arthur’s Stone, a 5,000-year-old Neolithic chambered tomb in Herefordshire, England, near the border of Wales.

The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates that among the 23 specimens analyzed and potentially representing early Homo from southern Africa between 2.5 and 1.4 million years, a maximum of seven of them actually represent Homo, while the others more likely belong to Australopithecus or Paranthropus.

Over 50,000 years ago, giant carnivorous storks would have competed with ancient hominins for food on a tropical island.

Predatory dinosaurs with big skulls tend to have tiny arms. Researchers propose there might be a direct link between those traits.