Ancient news stories

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.

Mammoth teeth dating from 200,000 years ago are to be tested in the hope DNA samples can be found to reveal more about the creatures.

On a sun-blasted hillside in southeast Turkey, the world’s oldest known religious sanctuary is slowly giving up its secrets.

The Wallacean islands have always been separated from Asia and Oceania by deep-sea waters. Yet, these tropical islands were a corridor for modern humans migrating into the Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea landmass (Sahul) and have been home to modern human groups for at least 47,000 years.

A new member of a category of star so rare we can count the known number of them on our fingers and toes has just been discovered in the Milky Way.

“In the history of our species, a number of civilians have practiced or allowed human sacrifice including the sacrifice of children,” he said.

“The Carthaginians, the Mesopotamians, the Incas, the Aztecs,” he listed.

“Will we be recorded as such as society that accepts the sacrifice of innocence?”

Image from Wiki Commons

A 65,000-year-old tool – a kind of ancient Swiss Army knife – found across southern Africa has provided scientists with proof that the ancestors of modern homo sapiens were communicating with each other.

An ancient Roman route found in Pembrokeshire could be the real “golden road” of the Preseli hills.

Close human contact only started about 3,500 years ago and birds were initially venerated, find archaeologists.

Depictions of mermaids decorate the posts of the bed. The bed also displays an image of a bird holding a snake in its mouth, a symbol of the ancient Greek god Apollo.

Archaeologists have uncovered a roughly 1,300-year-old sculpture representing the head of a Mayan maize god in ruins in southeastern Mexico.

If archaeology has shown us anything, it’s the sobering impermanence of our lives.

Scientists have discovered the world’s biggest clone in Australia: A massive network of seagrass meadows that covers more than 77 square miles (200 square kilometers). The network of meadows is actually one single plant that has been continually cloning itself for almost 4,500 years.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Italy and one in the U.S. has found that a unique Bronze Age cremation site in modern Italy holds the remains of up to 172 people who were left to the elements.

Scientists in Chile believe that a conifer with a four-metre-thick trunk known as the Great-Grandfather could be the world’s oldest living tree, beating the current record-holder by more than 600 years.

Egyptian archaeologists have revealed another massive haul of priceless artifacts from the Saqqara Necropolis, a bountiful site near Cairo that likely still holds untold secrets.