Ancient news stories

On Friday, April 13, 2029, Earth will experience a dramatic close encounter with the asteroid 99942 Apophis

New research published today in Nature makes the intriguing suggestion that the Polynesians who erected those mysterious stone figures on islands thousands of miles apart were actually descended from the same group of explorers.

Modern roads and developments share more similarities with ancient urban centers than we often realize – which is certainly the case with the sprawling Teotihuacan settlement, once located around 40 kilometers (25 miles) northeast of Mexico City.

In the 12th century, Chinese and Japanese astronomers spotted a new light in the sky shining as brightly as Saturn.

In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3,600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE), the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant.

Researchers have rewritten Japanese history after uncovering a third, and previously unknown, group of ancestors that migrated to Japan around 2,000 years ago, of modern-day Japanese populations.

In new research our international team have discovered ancient hand and footprints high on the Tibetan plateau made by children.

A new simulation of the universe is a map and a time machine rolled up into one.

A new study suggests that all living snakes evolved from a handful of species that survived the giant asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs and most other living things at the end of the Cretaceous

Like a bowl of spaghetti noodles spilled across the floor of the North Sea, a vast array of hidden tunnel valleys wind and meander across what was once an ice-covered landscape.

The fossilized web of a 385-million-year-old root network has scientists reimagining what the world’s first forests might once have looked like.

Understanding the environmental conditions under which early humans dispersed out of Africa is important for understanding the factors that affected human evolution.

Inside some of our most magnificent trees, miniature worlds are at risk of extinction. The race is on to accelerate trees’ ageing process, so these intricate communities aren’t lost forever

Right now, a spacecraft is carrying a very special delivery to Earth after a years-long voyage to a cosmic destination that can shed light on how life might have first emerged on our planet and how we can protect it from future cosmic hazards.

Image from: asteroidmission.org (Wiki Commons)

Neanderthals living in the Swabian Jura more than 45,000 years ago used sophisticated techniques with many different production strategies to make stone tools.

A billion years have vanished from the geological record – and over 152 years after this was first discovered, scientists can’t agree on why.