Ancient news stories

They may be vine-smothered ruins today, but the lost cities of the ancient tropics still have a lot to teach us about how to live alongside nature.

On a clear day, the view from the ruins of Göbekli Tepe stretches across southern Turkey all the way to the Syrian border some 50 kilometres away. At 11,600 years old, this mountaintop archaeological site has been described as the world’s oldest temple — so ancient, in fact, that its T-shaped pillars and circular enclosures pre-date pottery in the Middle East.

Caves, often their deepest reaches, were humanity’s first art galleries, where early artists produced star maps, hunting scenes and friezes of ice age animals.

Image from: Iakubivskyi (Wiki Commons)

Astronomers say they’ve put to bed the mystery of why one of the most familiar stars in the night sky suddenly dimmed just over a year ago.

An underwater archaeologist from The University of Texas at Arlington is part of a research team studying 9,000-year-old stone tool artifacts discovered in Lake Huron that originated from an obsidian quarry more than 2,000 miles away in central Oregon.

New insights into the peopling of Siberia and human migration into the Americas have been found in what might seem like an unlikely place: gut bugs.

Archaeologists believe fingerprints left on a piece of Neolithic pottery belonged to two young men.

Installation of new pathway and lift has been criticised by archaeologists and called ‘a scandal’.

Archaeologists recently discovered Israel’s oldest known seal impression, a device that stamps a pattern onto soft material such as clay or wax in order to seal an object.

Knowledge of medicinal plants is at risk of disappearing as human languages become extinct, a new study has warned.

When we think of Antarctic exploration, the narrative is overwhelmingly white. Now, a new paper by New Zealander researchers suggests that the indigenous people of mainland New Zealand – Māori – have a significantly longer history with Earth’s southernmost continent.

Coxcatlan Cave in Mexico’s Tehuacan Valley is a time capsule like no other. Its dusty floor is a history book, its pages detailing thousands of years of food and technology of the land’s inhabitants.

Scientists are proposing a new theory of human evolution. A groundbreaking new analysis of data suggests that key evolutionary changes in prehistory were driven by cyclical changes in tropical climate.

An international study led by UNSW researchers has mapped one of the most intact and complete dog genomes ever generated.

Archaeological finds suggest that people developed numbers tens of thousands of years ago. Scholars are now exploring the first detailed hypotheses about this life-changing invention.