It’s easy to look at the pyramids or the giant stone statues of Easter Island and wonder how ancient civilizations built them. Now, anthropologists have put forward a new theory of how the Rapa Nui people pulled off their impressive hat trick.
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Aarchaeologists excavating a new site in Pompeii have uncovered a new victim of the disaster, who has quite a story to tell. The skeleton was found with its head crushed beneath a huge stone block that was thrown by the force of the volcanic cloud.
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Using infrared imaging technology a team at the British Museum has uncovered tattoos on two ancient Egyptian mummies, revealing the oldest ever discovered examples of figurative tattoos, which date back to Egypt's Predynastic period between 3351 and 3017 BCE.
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Groundbreaking DNA research has shone new light on the early origins of Britain's early settlers, reconstructing in unprecedented detail the face of Cheddar Man, the nation's oldest near-complete skeleton, revealing that he had much darker features than was previously assumed.
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The ruins of a gigantic Mayan city have been discovered under the blanket of the Guatemalan jungle, by bouncing lasers through the trees to reveal thousands of previously-unknown structures in a process the research team calls "digital deforestation."
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The origin story for modern humans basically goes that Homo Sapiens first arose several hundred thousand years ago in Ethiopia, before migrating out of Africa about 100,000 years ago. Now, a jawbone discovered in a cave in Israel pushes back the date of our African exodus by at least 50,000 years.
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Here at New Atlas we cover a wide variety of topics, so it's always interesting to arrive at the end of another year and see what most struck a chord with readers over the past 12 months. Read on to see what captured the imagination of you, our readers, in 2017.
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French researchers and the ScanPyramids project have joined forces to develop a new robot exploration platform. The current focus is on developing a two robot platform capable of looking into and mapping inaccessible areas of ancient buildings without blowing through doors and walls to do so.
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A new radiocarbon dating study by Oxford University researchers on a bone attributed to St Nicholas has been dated to around the 4th century CE bringing us closer to uncovering the authentic remains of the original Santa Claus.
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A weapon as legendary as the dagger of King Tutankhamun needs an epic backstory, and last year X-ray analysis showed that the iron in the blade came from meteorites. Now a study has found that the artifact was far from alone as all iron tools dating back to the Bronze Age have otherworldly origins.
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