Ancient news stories

Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) have uncovered new insights into the physiology of our earliest animal ancestors by studying the contents of the last meal consumed by the Ediacara biota, the world’s oldest large organisms dating back 575 million years.

Scientists who watched nerve cells connect inside the eyes of growing squid have uncovered a remarkable secret — the cephalopods’ brains independently evolved to develop in the same way ours do.

Like in all land-dwelling vertebrates, tooth enamel mineralizes gradually in microscopically thin layers in humans too, represented by the striae of Retzius. The speed with which a human develops can be read from these Retzius lines. Physiological changes, such as birth, weaning or illness, for example, leave distinctive traces.

Children as young as two years old went out of their way to help dogs get toys and tasty treats that were placed beyond their reach, despite never having met the animals before, scientists found.

Researchers reporting in Current Biology on January 12 describe genomes from ten individuals up to 7,500 years old that help to fill the gap and show gene flow from people moving in the opposite direction from North America to North Asia.

Scientists have discovered a new way to identify the average ages when men and women reproduced throughout human evolutionary history. By studying DNA mutations in modern humans, they discovered a window that let them peek 250,000 years back in time.

The Swedish geneticist on winning the Nobel prize, his laureate father and early man’s sensitive side.

The hottest West Coast tech 16,000 years ago was a “projectile point” for hunting game. Though tiny, the artifact tells an outsize tale.

The ancient Greek historian Strabo referred to the presence of an important shrine located on the west coast of the Peloponnese some 2,000 years ago. Remains of such an Archaic temple have now been uncovered at the Kleidi site near Samikon, which presumably once formed part of the sanctuary of Poseidon.

A deep dive into “bog bodies” reveals that this practice started in southern Scandinavia during the Neolithic and spread throughout Northern Europe.

A trio of researchers from the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the University of Arizona, and Colgate University has found examples of Mesoamerican structures aligned for use as a 260-day calendar, built thousands of years ago along Mexico’s gulf coast.

In giant clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies, innumerable stars wander among the galaxies like lost souls, emitting a ghostly haze of light. These stars are not gravitationally tied to any one galaxy in a cluster.

Analysis of stone tools attributed to the Ahmarian, the first Upper Paleolithic culture of the Near East (dated approximately 40,000 to 45,000 years ago) shows that small, elongated, symmetrical objects (bladelets) were mass-produced on-site.

Researchers believe that ancient stone tools discovered in Brazil are the work of capuchin monkeys, not early humans, the art and design website Artnet reported, citing an academic article.

Mysterious “halos” of rock surrounding cracks in a Martian crater may be made of water-rich opal gemstones, a new study suggests.