Humans news stories

Some say King Arthur slew a giant there. Others say he knelt in prayer and his knee print indentations are forever etched into the stone. Archaeologists set out to find out what really happened at Arthur’s Stone, a 5,000-year-old Neolithic chambered tomb in Herefordshire, England, near the border of Wales.

The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates that among the 23 specimens analyzed and potentially representing early Homo from southern Africa between 2.5 and 1.4 million years, a maximum of seven of them actually represent Homo, while the others more likely belong to Australopithecus or Paranthropus.

Over 50,000 years ago, giant carnivorous storks would have competed with ancient hominins for food on a tropical island.

Neanderthals and Denisovans in our genes, sentient mollusks, and speaking cats and bats. We are not what we thought we were. Nor were other human species, we have been discovering over the last 20 years.

A jawbone fragment discovered in northern Spain last month could be the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor found to date in Europe, Spanish paleontologists said on Friday.

In a former gold mine a mile underground, inside a titanium tank filled with a rare liquified gas, scientists have begun the search for what so far has been unfindable: dark matter.

The image is said to be the deepest, most detailed infrared view of the Universe to date, containing the light from galaxies that has taken many billions of years to reach us.

The identity of an unknown god described in inscriptions from the ancient city of Palmyra, located in modern-day Syria, has long baffled scientists. But now, a researcher declares that she has cracked the case.

In the Stone Age, pendants with potent symbolism were made from animal teeth and bones, adorning clothes or accessories and serving as rattles. Human bones were also used as a raw material for pendants, as demonstrated by a study where burial finds dating back more than 8,200 years were re-examined after 80 years.

The 2,000-year-old Roman shipwreck that carried the Antikythera Mechanism — a precise mechanical model of the sun, moon and planets — is giving up new treasures, including a marble head thought to depict the Greek and Roman demigod Hercules.

A team of specialists and students led by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Jodi Magness recently returned to Israel’s Lower Galilee to continue unearthing nearly 1,600-year-old mosaics in an ancient Jewish synagogue at Huqoq.

Researchers have created cloned mice from freeze dried skin cells in a world first that aims to help conservationists revive populations of endangered species.

The Amazon river basin experiences seasonal floods, making permanent settlement difficult. Despite this, Bolivia’s ancient Casarabe culture managed to flourish centuries before the arrival of the Spanish. Lidar technology reveals the surprisingly complex infrastructure and urban planning that united Casarabe settlements.

Archaeologists from The University of Manchester have started a dig at a 5,000-year-old tomb linked to King Arthur, hoping to answer some of the mysteries surrounding the enigmatic site in the process.

It’s 10 years to the day since evidence of the Higgs boson – the elusive particle associated with an invisible mass-giving field – was announced. But for Prof Daniela Bortoletto the memories are as fresh as ever.