Ancient news stories

Do bones and teeth found in Sussex share characteristics with Neanderthal fossils from northern Spain?

In many popular accounts of human prehistory, civilization emerged in a linear fashion. A new book—The Dawn of Everything, challenges this narrative. Rather than being nomadic hunter-gatherers, they argue human societies during the Paleolithic were, in fact, quite diverse.

A team of Canadian astronomers, including experts from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science, have used the James Webb Telescope (JWST) to identify the most distant globular clusters ever discovered – dense groups of millions of stars that may be relics containing the first and oldest stars in the universe.

A river longer than England’s Thames flows beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, draining an area the size of France and Germany combined, new research reveals.

The study, led by Archaeologist Tuija Kirkinen, was aimed at investigating how these highly degraded plant- and animal-based materials could be traced through soil analysis.

Nearly third of patients on largest trial using psychedelic compound went into rapid remission.

Analyses of more than one thousand ancient genomes dating as far back as 45,000 years ago have found historic signals showing genetic adaptation was more common than previously thought.

The Americas were the last continent to be inhabited by humans. An increasing body of archaeological and genomic evidence has hinted to a complex settlement process. This is especially true for South America, where unexpected ancestral signals have raised perplexing scenarios for the early migrations into different regions of the continent.

Archaeologists and volunteers have discovered a stone bearing a mysterious inscription and carved birds that the Picts of Scotland crafted more than a millennium ago.

Did Vikings find their way to a remote part of Oklahoma? Some in a small community believe so, thanks to controversial runic carvings found in the area.

Making love, not war, might have put the Neanderthals on a path to extinction.

There are few animals as frightening and as fascinating as the snake. So why exactly have we obsessed over them for 70,000 years?

A snail preserved in amber with an intact fringe of tiny delicate bristles along its shell is helping biologists better understand why one of the world’s slimiest animals might evolve such a groovin’ hairstyle.

Russian archaeologists have unearthed an intricately detailed silver medallion of the Greek goddess Aphrodite in the 2,100-year-old grave of a young woman, possibly a priestess, on the northeastern coast of the Black Sea.

A recently released set of topography maps provides new evidence for an ancient northern ocean on Mars. The maps offer the strongest case yet that the planet once experienced sea-level rise consistent with an extended warm and wet climate, not the harsh, frozen landscape that exists today.

It’s Milky Way season. If you ever wanted to see the arc of our galaxy stretching across the night sky, get yourself to a dark sky destination away from light pollution in the next couple of weeks, and you’ll get a great view as soon as it gets dark.