Ancient news stories

What If Neanderthals Created The World’s First Musical Instrument?
29th June 2022 historyofyesterday.com | Ancient, Humans

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

Ancient microbes may help us find extraterrestrial life forms
29th June 2022 phys.org | Ancient, Animal Life, Earth

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.

Behold the Weird Physics of Double-Impact Asteroids
28th June 2022 | wired.co.uk | Ancient, Space

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)

 

How many ice ages has the Earth had, and could humans live through one?
28th June 2022 theconversation.com | Ancient, Animal Life, Earth, Humans

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.

Machine-learning model can detect hidden Aussie rock art
28th June 2022 phys.org | Ancient, Humans, Tech

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.

Early human fossils found in cave are a million years older than expected
28th June 2022 edition.cnn.com | Ancient, Humans

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.

Earliest evidence of wildfire found in Wales
27th June 2022 | bbc.co.uk | Ancient, Earth

The oldest evidence of wildfire has been identified in South Wales.It takes the form of some truly ancient, charred remnants trapped in some truly ancient mudstone.

Secret passageways used by ancient Andean culture may have been used in rituals involving psychedelics
27th June 2022 | livescience.com | Ancient, Humans

Hidden passageways used by ancient Andean culture opened for the first time in 3,000 years.

Gold miner in Canada finds mummified 35,000-year-old woolly mammoth
27th June 2022 | theguardian.com | Ancient, Animal Life, Humans

It was a young miner, digging through the northern Canadian permafrost in the seemingly aptly named Eureka Creek, who sounded the alarm when his front-end loader struck something unexpected in the Klondike gold fields

Archaeologist discovers 6,000 year-old island settlement off Croatian coast
27th June 2022 | reuters.com | Ancient, Humans

Archaeologist Mate Parica was examining satellite images of Croatia’s coastline when he spotted something unusual.

Inca-era tomb unearthed beneath home in Peru’s capital
24th June 2022 | theguardian.com | Ancient, Humans

Scientists have unearthed an Inca-era tomb under a home in the heart of Peru’s capital, Lima, a burial believed to hold remains wrapped in cloth alongside ceramics and fine ornaments.

The significance of these very rare Aboriginal shelters has been revealed
24th June 2022 | sbs.com.au | Ancient, Humans

An unpublished report obtained has outlined the cultural and archaeological significance of Kokatha Aboriginal sites that were discovered in a military testing range in South Australia.

Image from: en.wikipedia (Wiki Commons)

Indigenous communities used the Caribbean Sea as an aquatic highway
23rd June 2022 phys.org | Ancient, Humans

With some 7,000 islands and cays and a 7,000-year history of human habitation, the Caribbean Sea is practically synonymous with maritime travel.

Australia’s first marine Aboriginal archaeological site questioned
22nd June 2022 phys.org | Ancient, Humans

“It remains untested how old the artifacts are—they could be 200 years old, 2,000 years old or 20,000 years old—it is completely unknown at this stage,”

Canterbury area was home to Neanderthal ancestors study suggests
22nd June 2022 | bbc.co.uk | Ancient, Humans

Kent was home to some of Britain’s earliest humans, according to the latest research. Homo heidelbergensis, an ancestor of Neanderthals, occupied the area around what is now Canterbury between 560,000 and 620,000 years ago.

 

Terrawatch: saltier oceans could have prevented Earth from freezing
22nd June 2022 | theguardian.com | Ancient, Animal Life, Earth

The Sun shone 20% less brightly on early Earth, and yet fossil evidence shows that our planet had warm shallow seas where stromatolites – microbial mats – thrived.

News stories covering history, archaeology, ancient Egypt, and mysteries of the past.