Ancient news stories

The Amazon river basin experiences seasonal floods, making permanent settlement difficult. Despite this, Bolivia’s ancient Casarabe culture managed to flourish centuries before the arrival of the Spanish. Lidar technology reveals the surprisingly complex infrastructure and urban planning that united Casarabe settlements.

Archaeologists from The University of Manchester have started a dig at a 5,000-year-old tomb linked to King Arthur, hoping to answer some of the mysteries surrounding the enigmatic site in the process.

Researchers have discovered never-before-seen types of crystal hidden in tiny grains of perfectly preserved meteorite dust. The dust was left behind by a massive space rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, nine years ago.

New genetic research from remote islands in the Pacific offers fresh insights into the ancestry and culture of the world’s earliest seafarers, including family structure, social customs, and the ancestral populations of the people living there today.

Image from: Image:Oceania ISO 3166-1.svg (Wiki Commons)

The Cosquer cave near Marseille astonished the diver who discovered it with its ancient depictions of sea and land animals. Now it has been painstakingly recreated in the French port for all to enjoy

Formation of solid iron core 550m years ago restored magnetic field and protected surface.

Fossil hunters have traced the rise of the dinosaurs back to the freezing winters the beasts endured while roaming around the far north

New archaeological research into grave goods and skeletal material from the oldest grave field in the Netherlands shows that male-female roles 7,000 years ago were less traditional than was thought.

The extinct animal is not as closely related to Australian roos as once thought.

A bronze sculpture of a snake with a human head, along with a large number of other artifacts including finds made of bronze, jade and gold, have been discovered in a series of pits at the archaeological site Sanxingdui in Sichuan, China.

Ancient DNA, including that of wolves preserved in permafrost for tens of thousands of years, is shedding some light on how wild wolves became some of our best non-human friends.

Archaeologists spend a lot of time examining the remains of distant pasts, which includes the study of rock paintings. This is largely visual work – but sometimes we can “hear” the ancient past using acoustic methods.

A fifty-thousand-year-old bone flute changes perceptions of an ancestor and explains why music is a powerful force.

Using light-capturing proteins in living microbes, scientists have reconstructed what life was like for some of Earth’s earliest organisms. These efforts could help us recognize signs of life on other planets, whose atmospheres may more closely resemble our pre-oxygen planet.

A first-of-its-kind study published in the journal Icarus investigates this phenomenon on Mars. Looking at the planet, researchers have discovered hundreds of craters that likely resulted from the impacts of a binary system, where one asteroid orbits another, like the moon orbits Earth.

Image from ESA & MPS for OSIRIS Team (Wiki Commons)