Ancient news stories

Researchers say the Australian lungfish, native to the Burnett and Mary Rivers, is the closest living fish relative to humans and other land dwellers.

Archaeologists have managed to get near-perfect notes out of a musical instrument that’s more than 17,000 years old.

Scotland’s remote St Kilda archipelago was inhabited as long as 2,000 years ago, according to archaeologists

Scientific research and indigenous oral traditions have long been separated. But increased interaction is bringing new insight into the past.

Experts hailed the discovery in 2015 as “stunning” — 47 teeth found in a cave in southern China dated back to 80,0000 to 120,000 years ago, challenging widely accepted ideas about human evolution.

Some useful human microorganisms have long, long histories.

Were the Amazons of ancient Greek mythology — fierce female warriors said to have roamed a vast area around the Black Sea known as Scythia — real?

Bronze age graves, neolithic pottery and the vestiges of a mysterious C-shaped enclosure that might have been a prehistoric industrial area are among the finds unearthed by archaeologists who have carried out preliminary work on the site of the proposed new road tunnel at Stonehenge.

Archaeologists have discovered dozens of terracotta figurines that are over 2,000 years old, including ones that depict gods, goddesses, men, women, cavalry and animals.

It is thought the dead were given gold foil amulets shaped like tongues so that they could speak before the court of the god Osiris in the afterlife.

A recent discovery has uncovered evidence of what may be the earliest-known use of symbols. The symbols were found on a bone fragment in the Ramle region in central Israel and are believed to be approximately 120,000 years old.

The oldest evidence of land fungus may be a wee microfossil that’s 635 million years old, found in a cave in southern China.

Prehistoric teeth unearthed at a site in Jersey reveal signs of interbreeding between Neanderthals and our own species, scientists say.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS IN EGYPT are preparing to open a 3,000-year-old burial shaft at the Saqqara necropolis, south of Cairo, in the coming week.

A striking 600-year-old Aztec sculpture depicting a golden eagle has been uncovered in an ancient temple in Mexico, archaeologists with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) announced Monday (Jan. 25).

Large parts of the Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago, evidenced by prehistoric engravings in the desert of giraffes, crocodiles and a stone-age cave painting of humans swimming.