Ancient news stories

We know that true polar wander (TPW) can occasionally tilt whole planets and moons relative to their axes, but it’s not entirely clear just how often this has happened to Earth. Now a new study presents evidence of one such tilting event that occurred around 84 million years ago – when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

Nearly half of our DNA has been written off as junk, the discards of evolution…

Archaeological discoveries are shattering scholars’ long-held beliefs about how the earliest humans organised their societies – and hint at possibilities for our own.

An ancient object thought to be the world’s oldest map of the stars is to go on display at the British Museum.

A comprehensive study of the Taurid meteor stream released last week confirms a central understanding of astronomer Dr. Bill Napier and the Comet Research Group, which was incorporated into the YDI hypothesis from the start in 2007

A widely accepted theory of Native American origins coming from Japan has been attacked in a new scientific study, which shows that the genetics and skeletal biology “simply does not match-up”.

Exactly how and when people settled in North America is a topic of much fascination for experts, and now a new analysis of ancient documents is shedding light on some lesser known details of this long-contested timeline.

The researchers are sure now they’ve sent the robot to a location that provides the best possible opportunity to find signs of ancient life.

The oldest known footprints of pre-humans were found on the Mediterranean island of Crete and are at least six million years old, says an international team of researchers…

The close of the Eocene roughly 33 million years ago marks a time of great change on Earth. In a slow reversal of what we’re seeing today, temperatures dropped and glaciers stretched their icy fingers towards the equator.

In our mythologies, there’s often a singular moment when we became “human”. Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge and gained awareness of good and evil. Prometheus created men from clay and gave them fire. But in the modern origin story, evolution, there’s no defining moment of creation. Instead, humans emerged gradually, generation by generation, from earlier species.

Dating from 120,000 to 90,000 years ago, the bone tools were found in association with carnivore remains that showed signs of skinning for furs and pelts.

A pair of space scientists, one with the University of Antioquia, the other the University of Salento, has found evidence of a swarm of large asteroids hidden in the Taurid complex.

New research led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has re-examined a key Acheulean site at the margins of the monsoon zone in the Thar Desert, Rajasthan, revealing the presence of Acheulean populations until about 177,000 years ago, shortly before the earliest expansions of Homo sapiens across Asia.

For the vast majority of animals on Earth, breath is synonymous with life. Yet for the first 2 billion years of our planet’s existence, oxygen was in scarce supply.