Grotta delle Mura: an Ice Age baby tells the story of Italy 17,000 years ago
In a cave in Puglia, the exceptionally preserved remains of an infant who died around 17,000 years ago have yielded the oldest known genome from Italy. His teeth an…
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From 3 million years ago to the dawn of our era: archaeological discoveries, palaeogenetics, cave art and the great transformations of human societies.
From four teeth about two million years old, found in the Swartkrans cave in South Africa, a University of Copenhagen team has managed to sequence …
Read the article →On a small Chesapeake island crumbling into the bay, a geologist claims to have found stone tools 22,000 years old, far earlier than the accepted d…
Read the article →A study from Aarhus and Johannesburg re-reads the geometry of Late Pleistocene points and raises an unsettling question: were our ancestors already…
Read the article →Found in 1924, the Taung Child skull, the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus, may be older than long assumed. Francis Thackeray and Sue Dy…
Read the article →In a cave in Puglia, the exceptionally preserved remains of an infant who died around 17,000 years ago have yielded the oldest known genome from Italy. His teeth an…
Read →For decades, dense tropical rainforests were seen as impassable barriers for early humans. A 2025 study in Nature overturns that view: at the Bété I site, some twen…
Read →Re-examined by CT scan, the skull of a child buried around 140,000 years ago in Skhūl Cave, on Mount Carmel, reveals a puzzling anatomy: a modern-looking braincase set over an archaic-looking jaw. For some researchers, this mosaic points to early interbreeding with Neanderthals. Others caution that a mere assemblage of traits proves nothing, and that the DNA needed to settle the matter is missing.
Found in 1990 in Hubei, crushed and long filed by default among Homo erectus, the Yunxian 2 skull has now been digitally reconstructed. Despite its great age it shows advanced features that tie it to the Homo longi group and, in turn, to the enigmatic Denisovans. An international team draws from it a radically earlier timeline for the human lineages, at once praised and contested.
For years, the human bones scattered through the great enclosures of Göbekli Tepe fed the idea of a macabre skull cult. The discovery of the site's first two intact graves, described in a PLOS One study published in September 2026, overturns that story. The bodies had indeed been buried in the ground, and it was erosion of the slopes, not ritual, that spread the bones through the sanctuaries.
Some 2500 years ago, the trainee scribes of Babylon had to master hundreds of deities, with no religion class and no holy book. By studying the surviving school tablets, the assyriologist Shana Zaia reconstructs a curriculum in w…
Read →A Purdue University anthropologist has reopened a century-old case by re-examining 46 skulls from Abydos held at C…
Read →In September 2026, a University of Haifa team led by Hannah Farrell published in Quaternary Science Reviews the an…
Read →At the bottom of Lake Arendsee, in Saxony-Anhalt, divers have recovered pieces of wood worked 10,500 years ago by …
Read →About thirty metres down off the Turkish island of Kekova, divers have identified the wreck of a small cargo ship that sank some 4,400 to 4,700 years ago, when the Great Pyramid of Giza was being built. With no timber preserved, it was the shape of its jars that allowed it to be dated. Several of them still hold an intact residue, a chemical capsule of Bronze Age maritime trade.
In October 2026, the National Museum of the Eastern Carpathians announced the discovery of a female clay figurine roughly 6,500 years old, unearthed on the very first day of excavation at the Dâmbul Cetății site in Transylvania. Shaped from two separate masses of clay joined before firing, it cracked over the millennia along that very join, revealing its manufacturing method to the naked eye. A precious clue to the Cucuteni-Ariușd-Trypillia culture, one of Europe's first great civilisations.
In September 2026, a team led by Brazilian designer Cícero Moraes published in the journal Heritage a facial approximation of the oldest known Homo sapiens, some 300,000 years old, based on the Moroccan fossils from Jebel Irhoud. The result confirms a paradox first brought to light in 2017: a brain already close to modern size housed in a skull, and above all a face, with still very archaic proportions. The authors stress one point above all: this is a plausible approximation, never a faithful portrait.
For the first time, a hip bone, a femur and a tibia still joined together from a single Paranthropus robustus have been freed from the Swartkrans cave in South Africa. These bones of a young adult standing about one meter tall co…
Read →On a small island in the Limfjord, north of Aalborg, Danish archaeologists have uncovered an 8,400-year-old deer a…
Read →For fifteen years, the Denisovans were a people of ghosts, known from DNA but almost faceless. In October 2026, a …
Read →In a rock shelter in Catalonia, near Capellades, the Neanderthals left behind nearly six hundred wooden remains an…
Read →In Shanidar Cave, in Iraqi Kurdistan, the shoulder blade of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal bears a near circular hole. For the Cambridge archaeologists who found it, that perforation marks a wooden spear driven toward the heart, p…
Read →In a small cave in the Loire Valley, sealed by river floods for tens of thousands of years, researchers have ident…
Read →In south-eastern Türkiye, a small paved workshop sheltered by a canopy has yielded 42 fragments of malachite and c…
Read →For seventeen millennia, the paintings of Lascaux crossed time in darkness and silence. Opened to the public in 19…
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