Ancient news stories

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.

The evolution of the opposable thumb is often placed hand-in-hand with the rise of stone tools.

Archaeologists have discovered a fantastical-looking, 1,500-year-old house in Turkey that was decorated with illusory wall paintings and terracotta tiles on the floor with puppy prints and possible chicken decorations pressed into them.

Sometime toward the end of the last ice age, a group of humans armed with stone-tipped spears stalked their prey in the bitter cold of northeastern Siberia, tracking bison and woolly mammoths across a vast, grassy landscape.

The Sun has a lot of rhythm and goes through different cycles of activity. The most well-known cycle might be the Schwabe cycle, which has an 11-year cadence. But what about cycles with much longer time scales? How can scientists understand them?

A massive “cursus” monument, a site for ancient rituals, that was built around the same time as Stonehenge, has been discovered on the  Scottish Isle of Arran.

Multi-disciplinary researchers at The University of Manchester have helped develop a powerful physics-based tool to map the pace of language development and human innovation over thousands of years—even stretching into pre-history before records were kept.

We Homo sapiens didn’t use to be alone. Long ago, there was a lot more human diversity; Homo sapiens lived alongside an estimated eight now-extinct species of human about 300,000 years ago

Whichever way you look at it, the story of our species’ birthplace in Africa and dispersal across the planet is incredibly complicated.

Early Medieval Europe is frequently viewed as a time of cultural stagnation, often given the misnomer of the ‘Dark Ages’. However, analysis has revealed new ideas could spread rapidly as communities were interconnected, creating a surprisingly unified culture in Europe.

Researchers from the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University unraveled the function of flint tools known as “chopping tools,” found at the prehistoric site of Revadim, east of Ashdod.

Simon Fraser University researchers have found evidence that large ambush-predatory worms–some as long as two metres–roamed the ocean floor near Taiwan over 20 million years ago.