Ancient news stories

Together, amino acids form proteins that play many vital roles in organisms. This new study was designed to help establish why a specific group of 20 ‘canonical’ amino acids is used again and again to build proteins when there are so many more of these amino acids to pick from.

Tiny traces of protein lingering in the bones and teeth of ancient humans could soon transform scientists’ efforts to unravel the secrets of the evolution of our species.

Researchers have discovered evidence of horse riding by studying the remains of human skeletons found in burial mounds called kurgans, which were between 4,500 and 5,000 years old.

A pair of studies offer the most detailed look yet at groups of hunter-gatherers living before, during and after the last ice age.

The oldest known fossils of pollen-laden insects are of earwig-like ground-dwellers that lived in what is now Russia about 280 million years ago, researchers report. Their finding pushes back the fossil record of insects transporting pollen from one plant to another, a key aspect of modern-day pollination, by about 120 million years.

Hunter-gatherers took shelter from the ice age in Southwestern Europe, but were replaced on the Italian Peninsula according to two new studies, published in Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution today.

Researchers modeling eastern Neanderthal migration from Europe have found the area south of the Caspian Sea in northern Iran to be the most likely route, suggesting there could be significant yet-to-be-discovered archaeological sites hidden in less explored areas along the way. See study here.

The asteroid Ryugu, which orbits the sun between Earth and Mars, contains many of the building blocks for life, a new analysis finds.

An unusual whale feeding technique only recorded for the first time in 2011 may have been around for at least two thousand years, according to researchers from Flinders University in Australia.

The study was published in Marine Mammal Science.

A study by an international and interdisciplinary team headed by University of Freiburg archaeologist Dr. Ralph Araque Gonzalez from the Faculty of Humanities has proven that steel tools were already in use in Europe around 2,900 years ago.

A newly discovered Moai statue on Easter Island has been found buried in a dried up lake bed.

Dinosaur fossils featuring arms with a suspect bend at the elbow and wrist could hint at the presence of an unpreserved tendon that underpins all modern avian flight.

The study was published in Zoological Letters.

The Arctic today is a hostile place for most primates. But a series of fossils found since the 1970s suggest that wasn’t always the case. See study here.

Over five hundred years ago, in the Guatemalan highlands of the Midwest, the Maya people traded goods with far less intervention from their rulers than previously believed by many archaeologists.

A circular depression that holds a vineyard in a French winery is actually an old impact crater, new research finds. The new research did not give an estimate of the crater’s age. However, the winery website estimates that the crater impact occurred around 10,000 years ago.