Ever since a British forest guide first stumbled on Roopkund Lake in northern India in 1942, experts have struggled to understand how hundreds of human skeletons ended up in this small, shallow glacial lake, which sits in a valley more than 16,000 feet above sea level. Over the ...read more
Archaeologists in the Orkney Islands, off the northeastern coast of Scotland, have uncovered the ruins of what they think is a Viking drinking hall used by elite warriors, possibly including a powerful 12th-century chieftain named Sigurd. Orkney’s link to the Vikings can clearly ...read more
A female warrior long assumed to be a Viking may actually be a Slavic warrior woman who migrated to Denmark from present-day Poland over 1,000 years ago, says a researcher in Germany. The discovery comes amid debate about the role and prevalence of female warriors in the Viking ...read more
Archaeologists digging near the Swedish village of Gamla Uppsala have unearthed two rare boat burials from the Viking Age. Inside one of them, which was found intact, were the remains of a man, a horse and a dog, as well as several weapons and a comb. Though boat burials date ...read more
The mouth-watering smokiness of a rack of pork ribs. The juicy gluttony of a medium-rare bacon cheeseburger. The simple pleasure of a salami sandwich on rye. One thing is clear—humans love meat. But why do we eat so much more meat than our primate cousins and why are we wired to ...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
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
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
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
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
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
A secret passage to the underworld may have just been discovered, at least according to the mysterious ancient civilization that built it. Archaeologists have confirmed the existence of a hidden tunnel leading to a chamber deep underneath the Pyramid of the Moon, the massive ...read more
Researchers in Texas have discovered what they believe are spear points used by human hunters some 15,500 years ago, making them the oldest weapons ever found in North America. The newly discovered spear points pre-date the earliest known weapons made by the Clovis people, whom ...read more
Off the Bulgarian coast, just over a mile beneath the surface of the Black Sea, archaeologists have discovered what they believe is the world’s oldest intact shipwreck. Measuring some 75 feet (23 meters) long, the ship is thought to be an ancient Greek trading vessel. With its ...read more
A massive Viking ship has been found in Norway less than two feet below the Earth’s surface. Archaeologists at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) made the discovery using radar designed to permeate the ground without actually excavating any artifacts. ...read more
Archaeologists have discovered an elaborate, perfectly preserved shrine in the wall of a house in Pompeii, the ancient Roman city on Italy’s western coast that was destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago by the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius. As many as 30,000 people are believed ...read more
Sure, the story of King Arthur drawing Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake is pretty cool. But have you heard about the eight-year-old girl who pulled a sword that’s at least 1,000 years old out of a Swedish lake? The Swedish news site The Local reports that Saga Vanecek was ...read more
Every fall, grocery stores line their shelves with pumpkin spice-flavored products that range from traditional pumpkin pies to the more questionable pumpkin spice candy corn. The flavor is a mixture of nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and cloves—all spices that humans have enjoyed in ...read more
