Ancient news stories

Close human contact only started about 3,500 years ago and birds were initially venerated, find archaeologists.

Depictions of mermaids decorate the posts of the bed. The bed also displays an image of a bird holding a snake in its mouth, a symbol of the ancient Greek god Apollo.

Archaeologists have uncovered a roughly 1,300-year-old sculpture representing the head of a Mayan maize god in ruins in southeastern Mexico.

If archaeology has shown us anything, it’s the sobering impermanence of our lives.

Scientists have discovered the world’s biggest clone in Australia: A massive network of seagrass meadows that covers more than 77 square miles (200 square kilometers). The network of meadows is actually one single plant that has been continually cloning itself for almost 4,500 years.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Italy and one in the U.S. has found that a unique Bronze Age cremation site in modern Italy holds the remains of up to 172 people who were left to the elements.

Scientists in Chile believe that a conifer with a four-metre-thick trunk known as the Great-Grandfather could be the world’s oldest living tree, beating the current record-holder by more than 600 years.

Egyptian archaeologists have revealed another massive haul of priceless artifacts from the Saqqara Necropolis, a bountiful site near Cairo that likely still holds untold secrets.

An international team of astronomers used a database combining observations from the best telescopes in the world, including the Subaru Telescope, to detect the signal from the active supermassive black holes of dying galaxies in the early Universe.

As waters and ice recede under warming conditions, the traces of people and civilizations long gone from the mortal realm emerge.

A new study reveals that humans arriving in what is now Australia likely ate it to extinction by stealing its eggs.

Two swarms of curious, diverse space rocks — called Trojan asteroids — continuously journey around the sun, one in front of the gas giant Jupiter and one behind. Jupiter and the sun’s gravity have combined to lock the Trojans into this immutable orbit.

The story of the Universe is fundamentally our story, too. We want to know where it all started. Current descriptions of the origin of the Universe rest on the two pillars of 20th-century physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics. There are many questions that call for intellectual humility, and the origin of the Universe is foremost among them.

The genome of a victim of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius over the ancient city of Pompeii has been sequenced for the first time, scientists have revealed, shedding new light on the health and diversity of those who lived in the Roman empire at the time of the disaster.

The sprawling ruins of Amazonian settlements once home to an Indigenous agriculturalist society with a penchant for cosmology have been uncovered in the Bolivian jungle, hidden beneath seemingly impenetrable vegetation.

Human sacrifice appears to be as old as humanity itself. Still, experts disagree on how and where the practice first originated.