Ancient news stories

The 2,000-year-old Roman shipwreck that carried the Antikythera Mechanism — a precise mechanical model of the sun, moon and planets — is giving up new treasures, including a marble head thought to depict the Greek and Roman demigod Hercules.

A team of specialists and students led by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Jodi Magness recently returned to Israel’s Lower Galilee to continue unearthing nearly 1,600-year-old mosaics in an ancient Jewish synagogue at Huqoq.

Researchers have created cloned mice from freeze dried skin cells in a world first that aims to help conservationists revive populations of endangered species.

The Amazon river basin experiences seasonal floods, making permanent settlement difficult. Despite this, Bolivia’s ancient Casarabe culture managed to flourish centuries before the arrival of the Spanish. Lidar technology reveals the surprisingly complex infrastructure and urban planning that united Casarabe settlements.

Archaeologists from The University of Manchester have started a dig at a 5,000-year-old tomb linked to King Arthur, hoping to answer some of the mysteries surrounding the enigmatic site in the process.

Researchers have discovered never-before-seen types of crystal hidden in tiny grains of perfectly preserved meteorite dust. The dust was left behind by a massive space rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, nine years ago.

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.