Ancient news stories

It was a young miner, digging through the northern Canadian permafrost in the seemingly aptly named Eureka Creek, who sounded the alarm when his front-end loader struck something unexpected in the Klondike gold fields

Archaeologist Mate Parica was examining satellite images of Croatia’s coastline when he spotted something unusual.

Scientists have unearthed an Inca-era tomb under a home in the heart of Peru’s capital, Lima, a burial believed to hold remains wrapped in cloth alongside ceramics and fine ornaments.

An unpublished report obtained has outlined the cultural and archaeological significance of Kokatha Aboriginal sites that were discovered in a military testing range in South Australia.

Image from: en.wikipedia (Wiki Commons)

With some 7,000 islands and cays and a 7,000-year history of human habitation, the Caribbean Sea is practically synonymous with maritime travel.

“It remains untested how old the artifacts are—they could be 200 years old, 2,000 years old or 20,000 years old—it is completely unknown at this stage,”

The Sun shone 20% less brightly on early Earth, and yet fossil evidence shows that our planet had warm shallow seas where stromatolites – microbial mats – thrived.

What Alida Bailleul saw through the microscope made no sense. She was examining thin sections of fossilised skull from a young hadrosaur, a duck-billed, plant-eating beast that roamed what is now Montana 75m years ago, when she spotted features that made her draw a breath.

The ancient Maya enjoyed filling their teeth with gemstones. A new study reveals how the procedure was done and how it didn’t kill them.

The varied surface of asteroid Psyche suggests a dynamic history, which could include metallic eruptions, asteroid-shaking impacts, and a lost rocky mantle.

Items found during an archaeological dig near Stornoway have revealed people lived there thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

Image from: Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa) (Wiki Commons)

All brown bears today have some polar bear ancestry due to genetic mixing more than 100,000 years ago.

Embryonic and fossil evidence proves that the human middle ear evolved from the spiracle of fishes. However, the origin of the vertebrate spiracle has long been an unsolved mystery in vertebrate evolution.

Mastering fire cleared the way into whole new worlds for early humans – from accessing more nutrients through cooking (fueling an increase in brain size), to making the dark hours useful, and surviving migrations into harsher climates.