Ancient news stories

The return of humans to the British Isles after the end of the last ice sheet, which covered much of the northern hemisphere, happened around 15,200 years ago—nearly 500 years earlier than previous estimates. The work is published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Astronomers have gotten a rare glimpse at four baby planets as they’re growing up, and it reveals something surprising: These toddler worlds are getting lighter as they age…The study, published Jan. 7 in the journal Nature, enables astronomers to trace the chaotic processes that sculpt planetary systems over billions of years.

Mars is absolutely dripping with evidence that the red planet was once a striking blue, complete with glistening lakes, snaking rivers, and vast oceans. Now, scientists have calculated the ‘sea level’ during the wettest time known in Martian history. The research was published in the journal npj Space Exploration.

An international research team has announced the most complete fossil yet of Homo habilis (aka ‘the handy man’) – one of the earliest known members of our genus. The study was published in The Anatomical Record.

The gaseous cocoons surrounding “little red dots” hint at their true nature, a new James Webb telescope study hints. The researchers published their findings Wednesday (Jan. 14) in the journal Nature.

Scientists found a massive underwater wall off the coast of France that might help explain the origin of the legend of Ys. Their findings were published in Hal Open Science, on the 9th Dec 2025, in a paper titled: Submerged Stone Structures in the Far West of Europe During the Mesolithic/Neolithic Transition (Sein Island, Brittany, France).

Image by Évariste-Vital Luminais (Wiki Commons)

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Scientists have revealed the most complete skeleton yet of our 2 million-year-old ancestor Homo habilis. The complete analysis of the remains has been described in a paper published Tuesday (Jan. 13) in the journal The Anatomical Record.

Early, ancestral members of the human lineage may have left Africa earlier than widely thought, a new study of fossil teeth suggests. The new study was published Dec. 3 in the journal PLOS One.

Swiss author Erich von Däniken passed away at the age of 90. Erich von Daniken’s family announced that the author died on January 10, 2026, in a hospital in Interlaken, Switzerland.

“Could it be that God was an extra-terrestrial? What do we mean when we say that heaven is in the clouds? From Jesus Christ to Elvis Presley, every culture tells us of high-flying bird men who zoom around the world creating magnificent works of art and choosing willing followers to share in the eternal glory from beyond the stars. Can all these related phenomena merely be dismissed as coincidence?”

Erich von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods

The hunting of large whales goes back much further in time than previously thought. New research…reveals that Indigenous communities in southern Brazil were hunting large cetaceans 5,000 years ago, around a thousand years before the earliest documented evidence from Arctic and North Pacific societies. The research was published in Nature Communications.

Stone Age people in Macedonia created goddess figurines whose bottom half was a house.

The fossilized backbones of what appeared to be woolly mammoths have turned out to come from an entirely different and unexpected animal. The research was published in the Journal of Quaternary Science.

A collection of bones from Casablanca holds important new clues to the origins of modern humans and Neanderthals. The research, published Wednesday (Jan. 7) in the journal Nature.

Five quartz arrowheads found in a South African cave were laced with a slow-acting tumbleweed poison that would have tired prey during long hunts. The study was published Wednesday (Jan. 7) in the journal Science Advances.

Could Homo sapiens and an archaic and now-extinct species of early human have lived alongside each other on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi more than 65,000 years ago? The results of a new study, led by Griffith University and published in PLOS ONE, reveal, for the first time, a deep sequence of archaeological deposits extending to at least eight meters below the current ground surface—layers that preserve traces of human activity far older than the arrival of our own species on Sulawesi.

Betelgeuse is one of the weirdest stars in the sky, but astronomers can now explain one of its most enduring mysteries. A small companion star has been confirmed, revealed by the wake it leaves as it plows through the red giant’s atmosphere. The study has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, and is currently available on the preprint server arXiv.