Ancient news stories

Astronomers have reconstructed the 22m-year-long voyage of an asteroid that hurtled through the solar system and exploded over Botswana, showering meteorites across the Kalahari desert

Portraiture, perspective, impressionism, movement, mythology: cave artists could do the lot. And I have spent the past year on a virtual odyssey of their primordial wonders

A fingerprint left on a clay vessel made by a potter 5,000 years ago has been found in Orkney.

Radioactive dust deep beneath the ocean waves suggests that Earth is moving through a massive cloud left behind by an exploded star.

As early as 12,000 years ago, nearly three-quarters of land on Earth was inhabited and shaped by human societies, suggesting global biodiversity loss in recent years may have been driven primarily by an intensification of land use rather than by the destruction of previously untouched nature.

At night, believers would use the reflection from the moon that cascaded atop snow-capped peaks as a guide to make their way up the sacred Colque Punku glacier.

Image from: Hugo Pedel (Wiki Commons)

About 800,000 years ago in what is now Spain, cannibals devoured an early human child who became known as “The Boy of Gran Dolina.” But new analysis of these ancient remains has revealed a surprising twist: the child was a girl.

New find pries open an enduring question: why two ancient superpowers abruptly turned from diplomacy to brutality.

Image from: Tikal Central Acropolis (Wiki Commons)

In little more than a decade our understanding of the recent period of human evolution has been revolutionised. New excavations and the application of exciting scientific methods are yielding extraordinary insights to our ancient past and overturning previously-held truths.

Image from: Cro-Magnons Conquered Europe, but Left Neanderthals Alone (Wiki Commons)

Estatuas cave in northern Spain was a hive of activity 105,000 years ago. Artifacts show its Neanderthal inhabitants hafted stone tools, butchered red deer, and may have made fires.

A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, with colleagues from Goethe University, Frankfurt, has found the first evidence for ancient honey hunting, locked inside pottery fragments from prehistoric West Africa, dating back some 3,500 years ago

A new study verifies the age and origin of one of the oldest specimens of Homo erectus–a very successful early human who roamed the world for nearly 2 million years.

Historians hoping to preserve the ancient Octagon Earthworks in Newark, Ohio, as a UNESCO World Heritage site face a problem: the golf club that leases the property.

Image from: Eric Ewing (Wiki Commons)

Data extracted from the oldest surviving document recording Korean history shows a strong correlation between extreme weather events and war.

Some 100,000 years ago, an extended family of 36 Neanderthals walked along a beach, with the kids jumping and frolicking in the sand, scientists report after analyzing the beachgoers’ fossilized footprints in what is now southern Spain.

Archaeologists believe 4,000-year-old engravings on Saint-Bélec Slab resemble topological features.