Ancient cultures have long considered opal a special gemstone because of its ability to capture so many different colors. Turns out, that’s not all it can capture: researchers in Australia have identified at least four members of a new dinosaur species whose bones were preserved ...read more
The Neolithic Revolution marked a major turning point in history. During it, many communities transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming and herding, providing them with a more stable food source and allowing their populations to grow. Now, researchers suggest the ...read more
Stonehenge may be the most famous stone circle in the world, but its northern neighbor, Avebury, is the largest. Avebury is so big that there are actually two Stonehenge-size circles tucked inside—one of which, archaeologists believe, was built to commemorate the place where a ...read more
Beneath the rocky floor of Callao Cave on Luzon island in the Philippines, researchers have uncovered a number of fossils from what they believe is a previously unknown ancient human species. Dubbed Homo luzonensis, the newly identified species inhabited Luzon more than 50,000 ...read more
We know that Neanderthals were carnivores, with a diet that consisted primarily—if not exclusively—of meat. But a new study by researchers in France suggests that around 120,000 years ago, when a period of sudden climate change wiped out many of the animals who made up their ...read more
Archaeologists in Poland have discovered a giant 60,000-year-old flint workshop that they believe was used by Neanderthals to make thousands of stone tools. So far, the researchers have recovered some 17,000 stone products from the site, believed to be the first large ...read more
Around 450 B.C., the Greek writer Herodotus traveled to Egypt. His later account of the trip, included in his famous work The Histories, focused on a distinctive river barge known as a “baris,” which he said the Egyptians used to ferry goods up and down the Nile River. Herodotus ...read more
People in Ireland stored their butter in bogs for at least 3,500 years, leaving behind well-preserved waxy globs with a very pungent odor. In a recent study, researchers dated 32 globs of bog butter at National Museum of Ireland from about 1700 B.C. to the 17th century. They ...read more
When an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex stood about 12 feet tall. But there were smaller tyrannosaurs that roamed the Earth before it. A newly discovered specimen has revised the timeline of when short tyrannosaurs became the ...read more
The human family tree is becoming messier than The Jerry Springer Show. We already know Homo sapiens and Neanderthals slept together. We also know both slept with the mysterious “Denisovan,” a human relative first identified in Siberia’s Denisova Cave in 2010. Now, researchers ...read more
Captain Matthew Flinders is famous for circumnavigating Australia and putting the continent on European maps for the first time. He’s also the subject of urban legends because of the fact that, for over 200 years, nobody has known exactly where his body is buried. But in January ...read more
At a fourth century Roman grave site in England, archaeologists have discovered that a third of the skeletons are decapitated—an unusually high percentage, even for the Roman Empire. “Low proportions of decapitated burials are a common component of Roman cemeteries,” said Andy ...read more
There are a lot of mysteries surrounding Viking graves, and a recent discovery has raised a new one: Why did Icelandic Vikings kill male horses in their prime and bury them with middle-aged men? And why, it seems, were these Vikings more inclined to eat female horses? ...read more
The Schiedam was a pirate ship for a period of time in between its life in the Dutch East India Company and its time in the English fleet. It wrecked in 1684 off the coast of Cornwall in England while transporting English munitions; and recently, two hand grenades still filled ...read more
1. The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It Just Surfaced Zora Neale Hurston's searing book about the final survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, Cudjo Lewis, could not find a publisher for nearly 90 years. READ MORE 2. Early Humans ...read more
From a 13,000-year-old brewery to a long-lost ancient city supposedly built by Trojan War captives, it was an eventful year for historical discoveries. As the year comes to a close, take a look back at some of the ways history made news this year. 1. A human ...read more
These boots were made for walking—and surviving the ravages of time. In London, archaeologists discovered the 500-year-old skeleton of a man lying face down in the mud of the River Thames, wearing thigh-high leather boots that were basically still intact. The boots date to the ...read more
According to ancient Greek texts and myths, a group of Trojan prisoners founded the city of Tenea after their devastating defeat by Greek hero Odysseus—and an enormous wooden horse—in the Trojan War. More than 3,000 years later, near a small village in southern Greece called ...read more
In an extremely rare early painting found in an ancient Israeli church, Jesus looks completely different from the long-haired, bearded Western image of him. Archaeologists from the University of Haifa in Israel discovered the previously unknown 1,500-year-old painting of Jesus ...read more
Ancient people of North America’s Clovis culture migrated to South America roughly 11,000 years ago, then mysteriously vanished, researchers have discovered. In a new study, researchers analyzed DNA from 49 people living over a span of 10,000 years in Belize, Brazil, the Central ...read more
Scientists discovered the ancient human skeleton known as the “Spirit Cave Mummy” back in 1940, hidden in a small rocky cave in the Great Basin Desert in northwest Nevada. But it wouldn’t be until the 1990s that radiocarbon dating techniques revealed the skeleton was some 10,600 ...read more
Could a large, cigar-shaped object floating through space be part of an alien spacecraft? Astronomers at Harvard University don’t rule it out in a recent paper. Scientists spotted the object in October 2017, at first thinking it was a comet or an asteroid, and later wondering if ...read more
Researchers in Egypt have discovered a 4,500-year-old ramp system used to haul alabaster stones out of a quarry, and news reports have suggested that it could provide clues as to how Egyptians built the pyramids. Yet while the ramp system is a significant technological discovery, ...read more
Duck-billed dinosaurs may have “tooted” different notes from their trumpet-like nasal passages depending on what species they were, new research suggests. Paleontologists made this discovery while studying an unnamed species of the duck-billed Parasaurolophus. This type of ...read more
