Humans news stories

A circular depression that holds a vineyard in a French winery is actually an old impact crater, new research finds. The new research did not give an estimate of the crater’s age. However, the winery website estimates that the crater impact occurred around 10,000 years ago.

The new findings suggest that magnetoreception could be much more common in the animal kingdom than we ever knew. If researchers are right, it might be an astonishingly ancient trait shared by virtually all living things, albeit with differing strengths. The study was published in Nature.

Archaeologists have discovered the grave of two Bronze Age brothers who lived during 15th century BC in Israel – and incredibly, one of them appears to have had an early form of brain surgery before he died.

The endless excavations of yesteryear are no longer the best solution. Big digs aren’t the big idea they once were: mapping the human archaeological record is now moving upward, into the sky.

An ancient three-dimensional star-shaped ‘thing’ still baffles scientists more than a century after its discovery.

Over thousands of years, Indigenous communities have cultivated relationships with and accumulated knowledge on psychedelics such as psilocybin mushrooms, the Amazonian botanical brew ayahuasca, and the West African shrub iboga.

Egyptian officials have released photos of an ancient scroll, the 52-foot-long (16 meters) Book of the Dead papyrus recently discovered in Saqqara. The 10 images show ancient illustrations of gods and scenes from the afterlife, as well as text on the document, which is more than 2,000 years old.

The Milky Way is churning out far more stars than previously thought, according to a new estimate of its star formation rate.

It is as if the human body has its own version of a marijuana seedling inside, constantly producing small amounts of endocannabinoids.

Homo sapiens who reached Europe around 54,000 years ago introduced bows and arrows to that continent, a new study suggests.

The theory behind these evolutionary trade-offs is called balancing selection. A University at Buffalo-led study published in eLife explores this phenomenon by analyzing thousands of modern human genomes alongside ancient hominin groups, such as Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes.

A new analysis of Earth’s innards suggests the presence of an inner core within the inner core – a dense ball of iron at the very center of our planet.

In a new study conducted by an international team of scientists, researchers identified compounds in the lion’s mane mushroom (Hericium erinaceus) – an edible fungus species also known as yamabushitake or hou tou gu – that could boost nerve growth and enhance memory.

The results from the first randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to systematically investigate the effects of psilocybin in cluster headache has been published in the scientific journal Headache. The initial study provides useful information for creating bigger and more conclusive studies in the future.

The cryptic language of the Book of Revelation — famous for its exotic imagery, including a red beast with seven heads and a symbolic female figure likened to the evils of Babylon — is deliberately similar to language used in ancient Roman “curse tablets,” according to new research.

While excavating two large buildings in the ruins of the palace in the city of Yueyang, the researchers from the Institute of Archaeology at the China Academy of Social Sciences were surprised to make the discovery.