pc: Haaretz( Assaf Peretz/Israel Antiquities Authority) Across the landscapes of the eastern Mediterranean, traces of Roman life continue to surface in unexpected places. A fragment of wall, a forgotten road, a buried coin hoard- each discovery adds another small piece to a much larger story. Occasionally, though, archaeologists uncover objects that seem strangely out of […]
The largest (left) and the smallest (right) skulls of Homo naledi found in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. All specimens of H. naledi have been shown to be female. All known skeletons of the ancient human relative Homo naledi discovered in a South African cave system appear to be female, according to […]
The earliest months of Neanderthal life have remained one of the least understood chapters of human evolution. Fossils from adults and older children have revealed the distinctive features that set these ancient relatives apart, yet remains from unborn babies are extraordinarily scarce. That has made it difficult to determine when the familiar Neanderthal body shape […]
For decades, Antarctica has been treated as a kind of frozen time capsule, a place where evidence of Earth’s deep past sits preserved, undisturbed, beneath layers of ice that have built up over millions of years. As per the study published in Nature Geoscience, scientists have now uncovered something remarkable within that buried record: an […]
For generations, the Giza Plateau has been examined from almost every angle imaginable. Excavations, historical records and modern surveying have steadily filled gaps in what is known about Egypt’s most famous archaeological landscape. Yet even after decades of work, the ground beneath the desert continues to hold unanswered questions. New technology is allowing specialists to […]
pc: Discover Magazine (Image Credit: Dr Stephen Chester) A tiny tooth can disappear between your fingertips without much effort. Yet some of the earliest clues to our own evolutionary story come from fossils no larger than that. In collections of ancient mammal remains from western North America, palaeontologists have spent decades piecing together fragments of […]
Long before written records described powerful kingdoms in Ireland, a large community had already taken shape in what is now County Armagh. Fresh archaeological research suggests that this landscape was far more than a collection of scattered prehistoric monuments. Instead, it appears to have been a carefully organised centre where people lived, worked, traded and […]
On the outskirts west of Jerusalem, a burial chamber was disturbed long before scientists reached it, its contents partly scattered and partly preserved by chance. What remained did not look remarkable at first glance: broken pottery, mixed human remains, and soil already altered by construction and looting. Yet within that disorder lay material that would […]
Some trees are remarkable simply because of how long they have been standing. The monkey puzzle tree, known scientifically as Araucaria araucana, belongs to a lineage so ancient that its ancestors shared the planet with dinosaurs, and individual trees alive today can trace their own root systems back nearly two thousand years. Native to the […]
A routine family outing along the Suffolk coast turned into an unexpected encounter with Britain’s distant prehistoric past when an 11-year-old boy noticed an unusual object lying close to the water’s edge. At first glance, it looked a little different from the countless stones scattered across the shoreline, yet its shape suggested it was something […]
