Ancient news stories

The most distant star ever seen has been captured by the Hubble space telescope in images that appear to give a remarkable glimpse into the ancient universe.

Helium-3, a rare isotope of helium gas, is leaking out of Earth’s core, a new study reports. Because almost all helium-3 is from the Big Bang, the gas leak adds evidence that Earth formed inside a solar nebula, which has long been debated.

Researchers have uncovered giant “mysterious” jars in India that may have been used for ancient human burial practices.

The Milky Way is older than astronomers thought, or part of it is. A newly-published study shows that part of the disk is two billion years older than we thought.

That’s according to researchers in Japan, who detailed their findings in two new papers presented at the 53rd annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, March 7 to 11, 2022.

The ancient tomb holds the remains of five people, including those of a woman and toddler who were buried with an array of grave goods, such as a crescent moon-shaped pendant, bronze mirror and gold earrings.

Long before the Incas rose to power in Peru and began to celebrate their sun god, a little known civilization was building the earliest known astronomical observatory in the Americas.

One of the most interesting things going on in Australian archaeology is the idea that Aboriginal food production systems may have involved domestication of some plant species. Was there some level of food production going on in Aboriginal groups that goes well beyond hunter-gathering?

“They’ve lived for so long; just think what they’ve seen.” Forester Nick Baimbridge is gazing fondly at a majestic oak that has stood for more than a thousand years. On this wintry afternoon, birds sing from lichen-covered branches and a deer runs through the undergrowth.

One of the great mysteries of late medieval history is why did the Norse, who had established successful settlements in southern Greenland in 985, abandon them in the early 15th century?

Peruvian historian and US archaeologist say the pre-Columbian town was called Huayna Picchu by the Inca people.

Archaeologists in Scotland shed “genuine tears” upon discovering a stone covered with geometric carvings that the Picts, the Indigenous people of the region, designed about 1,500 years ago.

The sprawling ruins of Çatalhöyük – a vast, ancient human settlement in what we now know as Turkey – are much like a precursor to the modern metropolis of today. Yet, over the course of 9,000 years, times have certainly changed.

When the dinosaur-destroying asteroid collided with Earth 66 million years ago, massive amounts of sulfur — volumes more than were previously thought — were thrown high above land into the stratosphere, a new study finds.

A genomic study of Native peoples in the San Francisco Bay Area finds that eight present-day members of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe share ancestry with 12 individuals who lived in the region several hundred to 2,000 years ago…the study challenges the notion that the Ohlone migrated to the area between A.D. 500-1,000…

While the Conservative party’s proposed dash for wind power is good news for the climate it could be bad news for archaeology, with rapid offshore windfarm development sealing off access to some of the best-preserved and most complete evidence of early human communities in the world.