Ancient news stories

Teeth and skull fragments found in the maze-like recesses of a South African cave fuel debate on how Homo naledi lived—and whether it disposed of its dead.

Image from Animalparty (Wiki Commons)

Traditionally, scientists believed the Iberian hinterland to be a no-man’s land, avoided by Homo sapiens until about 19,000 years ago when the ice sheets of the Last Glacial Maximum—the period when ice sheets were at their greatest extent—retreated. However, recent research has been telling a different story.

The connection between human and dog runs deep. Early signs of domestication date back to 33,000 years ago… The pairing makes for a striking case in coevolution — no other species has been so thoroughly integrated into human society. Dogs are our sentinels and shepherds, hunting partners and cancer detectors. And more importantly, to those of us who have had dogs in our lives, they are our dearest friends.

A new ancestor of modern humans with the potential to rip up the family tree has been tentatively named.

Nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the Chilean coast are covered with oblong fragments of desert glass that researchers who recently studied them say came from a comet’s explosion over the Atacama Desert about 12,000 years ago.

Archaeologists have discovered a wooden Maya canoe in southern Mexico, believed to be over 1,000 years old.

The species lived in Africa about 500,000 years ago, during the Middle Pleistocene age, and was the direct ancestor of modern humans, according to scientists. The name bodoensis derives from a skull found in Bodo D’ar in the Awash River valley of Ethiopia.

Stick a turtle’s beak on a baby hippo. Then twist its front legs so they stick out to either side, but keep its back legs straight. And give it tusks. Presto, you have something that looks a little bit like a prototype mammal-like animal that walked the planet hundreds of millions of years ago.

Ancient Central American people may have designed their cities around  an early iteration of the Maya calendar.

Archaeologists in Iraq revealed Sunday their discovery of a large-scale wine factory from the rule of the Assyrian kings 2,700 years ago, along with stunning monumental rock-carved royal reliefs.

Mammoths and other giant creatures of the Ice Age such as woolly rhinos survived longer than scientists thought, coexisting with humans for tens of thousands of years before they vanished for good. That’s according to the results of an ambitious 10-year research project that analyzed DNA from hundreds of soil samples across the Arctic.

Nobody knows who she was, just that she was different: a teenage girl from over 50,000 years ago of such strange uniqueness she looked to be a ‘hybrid’ ancestor to modern humans that scientists had never seen before.

The ancient Egyptians were carrying out sophisticated mummifications of their dead 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to new evidence which could lead to a rewriting of the history books.

A longitudinal study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry investigated the effects of medicinal cannabis among clinically depressed and/or anxious patients.

Traces of ancient life were locked inside a 2.5 billion-year-old ruby from Greenland, according to a new study.