Ancient news stories

New genetic research from remote islands in the Pacific offers fresh insights into the ancestry and culture of the world’s earliest seafarers, including family structure, social customs, and the ancestral populations of the people living there today.

Image from: Image:Oceania ISO 3166-1.svg (Wiki Commons)

The Cosquer cave near Marseille astonished the diver who discovered it with its ancient depictions of sea and land animals. Now it has been painstakingly recreated in the French port for all to enjoy

Formation of solid iron core 550m years ago restored magnetic field and protected surface.

Fossil hunters have traced the rise of the dinosaurs back to the freezing winters the beasts endured while roaming around the far north

New archaeological research into grave goods and skeletal material from the oldest grave field in the Netherlands shows that male-female roles 7,000 years ago were less traditional than was thought.

The extinct animal is not as closely related to Australian roos as once thought.

A bronze sculpture of a snake with a human head, along with a large number of other artifacts including finds made of bronze, jade and gold, have been discovered in a series of pits at the archaeological site Sanxingdui in Sichuan, China.

Ancient DNA, including that of wolves preserved in permafrost for tens of thousands of years, is shedding some light on how wild wolves became some of our best non-human friends.

Archaeologists spend a lot of time examining the remains of distant pasts, which includes the study of rock paintings. This is largely visual work – but sometimes we can “hear” the ancient past using acoustic methods.

A fifty-thousand-year-old bone flute changes perceptions of an ancestor and explains why music is a powerful force.

Using light-capturing proteins in living microbes, scientists have reconstructed what life was like for some of Earth’s earliest organisms. These efforts could help us recognize signs of life on other planets, whose atmospheres may more closely resemble our pre-oxygen planet.

A first-of-its-kind study published in the journal Icarus investigates this phenomenon on Mars. Looking at the planet, researchers have discovered hundreds of craters that likely resulted from the impacts of a binary system, where one asteroid orbits another, like the moon orbits Earth.

Image from ESA & MPS for OSIRIS Team (Wiki Commons)

We know that the Earth has had at least five major ice ages. The first one happened about 2 billion years ago and lasted about 300 million years. The most recent one started about 2.6 million years ago, and in fact, we are still technically in it.

Researchers have developed a way to detect the presence of rock art in remote, hard-to-reach areas in Australia’s rugged landscapes using Machine Learning (ML) methods.

Fossils of early human ancestors from a South African cave are 3.4 million to 3.6 million years old — making them a million years older than previously suspected and shaking up the way researchers understand human origins and evolution.