Ancient news stories

Imagine a cup of tea. Wrap a piece of string around the circumference of the cup, and measure the length of the string.

Prehistoric sites are full of stone tools that appear to have two life cycles: They’ve been crafted, used, and discarded before being picked up a second time and used again. A new study puts forward an interesting hypothesis as to why this is.

Evidence suggests surface minerals of outer main-belt asteroids, proposed to have sourced building blocks of Earth’s water and life, are only stable at low temperatures. These asteroids formed in distant orbits and may help explain Earth’s composition

Scientists have found the oldest known ancestor of octopuses – an approximately 330m-year-old fossil unearthed in Montana. The researchers concluded the ancient creature lived millions of years earlier than previously believed, meaning that octopuses originated before the era of dinosaurs.

New date of 58 million years undercuts idea that strike triggered recent 1000-year plunge in temperatures.

Scientists discovered traces of carbon—the element on which life on Earth is based—that appear to have come from the Cambrian Explosion.

Archaeologists have uncovered a Pictish symbol stone close to the location of one of the most significant carved stone monuments ever uncovered in Scotland.

The Venus of Willendorf, one of the world’s oldest pieces of artwork, was made of rock mined in Italy, more than 600 kilometres from her final resting place in Austria, according to new research.

Scientists discovered remnants of an Old Stone Age culture, less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Beijing, where ancient hominins used a reddish pigment called ochre and crafted tiny, blade-like tools from stone. The archaeological site, called Xiamabei, offers a rare glimpse into the life of Homo sapiens and now-extinct human relatives who inhabited the region some 40,000 years ago.

Archaeologists may have just uncovered evidence for the oldest known practice of mummification. Human remains interred 8,000 years ago in the Sado Valley in Portugal, during the Mesolithic, appear to have been deliberately treated for mummification prior to burial.

With its immense size, dagger-like teeth and sharp claws, Tyrannosaurus rex was a fearsome predator that once terrorised North America. Now researchers studying its fossils have suggested the beast may not have been the only tyrannosaurus species

A team of scientists will use advances in High Energy Physics (HIP) to scan the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza with cosmic-ray muons. They want to see deeper into the Great Pyramid than ever before and map its internal structure.

A new study explains how Stonehenge may have originally been used to keep track of a solar year (aka tropical year) of 365 and a quarter days, which has long been suggested by researchers but never fully understood.

An ancient skull uncovered at a 6,000-year-old megalithic monument in Spain still holds signs of what would have been a brutal ear surgery.

Researchers have created the largest-ever family tree – a genealogical network of human genetic diversity – that is a major step towards mapping the genetic relationships between all humans.

Archaeologists believe they may have found evidence of a 4,000-year-old prehistoric burial mound during the construction of new student flats.