Ancient news stories

Until now, the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens eating land snails dated to roughly 49,000 years ago in Africa and 36,000 years ago in Europe. But tens of thousands of years earlier, people at a southern African rock shelter roasted these slimy, chewy — and nutritious — creepers that can grow as big as an adult’s hand, researchers report in the April 15 Quaternary Science Reviews.

Native American people integrated horses into their communities much earlier than European colonial records suggest, according to an innovative study that combined archaeological and genetic analysis with Indigenous oral traditions.

Sixty thousand years ago, give or take a few millennia, bands of Neanderthals thrived in a valley in central Spain, doing everything they needed to survive generation after generation. But about 45 miles north of what is now the city of Madrid, researchers have discovered a site that makes a strong case for a totally unheard-of Neanderthal behavior.

The first DNA recovered from members of the medieval Swahili civilisation has revealed that Africans and Asians were intermingling along the East African coast more than a thousand years ago, a study has revealed.

An ultramassive black hole about 30bn times the mass of the Sun has been discovered by astronomers in the UK.

A 2022 attempt at creating a sweeping family tree for the human race, and at least three others, reached back 2 million years, long before Homo sapiens are believed to have originated in Africa 200,000 years ago.

A paper published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences undertakes a spatial analysis of the faunal remains and lithic tools for the Neanderthal occupation of level F at the Navalmaíllo Rock Shelter site (Pinilla del Valle, Madrid), which is about 76,000 years old.

Bones found on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen suggest the ancient marine reptiles known as ichthyosaurs roamed Earth’s oceans for much longer than we thought.

Scientists in Australia have unearthed 3.48 billion-year-old rock fragments that may be the earliest evidence of a meteorite crashing into Earth.

Over the years, several theories have been put forward about Stonehenge’s meaning and function. Today, however, archaeologists have a rather clear picture of this monument as a “place for the ancestors,” located within a complex ancient landscape which included several other elements. See the study here.

A spectacular series of relief paintings on the ceiling of an ancient Egyptian temple depict 12 signs of the zodiac, and you might be surprised to recognize some of them.

Our planet hides its scars well. It’s a shame, actually, as evidence of previous asteroid strikes might help us better plan for the next catastrophic impact. In fact, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center chief scientist, James Garvin, thinks we might have been misreading traces of some of the more serious asteroid strikes that have occurred within the past million years

Our understanding of their origins and history on the plateau is patchy. DNA sampling from ancient humans has been limited to a thin slice of the southwestern plateau in the Himalayas. Now a study has filled this gap by sequencing the genomes of 89 ancient humans dating back to 5100 BP.

Vestiges of a moon-forming cataclysm could have kick-started plate tectonics on Earth. See research here.

Two murals of two-faced men holding unusual treasures — including a goblet that hummingbirds are drinking from, a detail that may allude to sacrifice and “cosmic realms” — were recently discovered at the 1,400-year-old archaeological site of Pañamarca in coastal Peru.

A dinosaur that roamed east Asia more than 160m years ago has been named a contender for the animal with the longest neck ever known.