Beer is generally thought to be about 7,000 years old, but now archaeologists have found clues that could date beer-making to almost twice that age, meaning it predates agriculture and represents the oldest record of man-made alcohol.
Continue Reading
Archaeologists have uncovered what may be the oldest human-made drawings ever found. Discovered in a cave in South Africa, the cross-hatch pattern was drawn in red ochre and found to date back over 70,000 years, making the image more than 30,000 years older than the previous reigning champion.
Continue Reading
Early hominins were known to have cross-bred when they crossed paths, and now the most direct evidence of those meetings has been found. By sequencing the genome of a hominin bone from a Siberian cave, anthropologists have discovered the direct descendant of a Neanderthal and a Denisovan.
Continue Reading
Mummification is usually associated with the age of Pharaohs, but it didn't spring up overnight. Now an international team has found further evidence that deliberate mummification was taking place a millennium and a half earlier and across a much wider area of Egypt than previously believed.
Continue Reading
The story of how humans spread across the globe is constantly being rewritten. Dating back to about 13,000 years ago, the “Clovis culture” was long thought to be the earliest humans in North America. Now archaeologists have uncovered stone tools in Texas that could be as old as 20,000 years.
Continue Reading
Archaeologists have opened the giant black sarcophagus discovered in the city of Alexandria a few weeks ago. Three skeletons were found inside – as well as a fetid pool of sewage.
Continue Reading
Archaeologists have discovered the oldest direct evidence of bread ever found, dating back over 14,000 years. It predates farming, leading researchers to suggest that the realization that cereals can be cultivated might have helped humans transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
Continue Reading
Ötzi the 5,300-year old Iceman has taught us a lot about the Copper Age world he came from. The newest lesson comes from an analysis of his stomach contents, indicating an unexpectedly high-fat diet of meat interspersed with cereals and strangely, toxic bracken.
Continue Reading
A massive black granite sarcophagus has been discovered in Egypt. It was found in a tomb 5 meters below the surface alongside an alabaster sculpture of a male head. The find occurred in Alexandria, and is thought to be the largest sarcophagus ever discovered there.
Continue Reading
Archaeologists have discovered ancient tools and bones in China that, once again, shake up the timeline of the human origin story. The items are more than two million years old, indicating that early hominins had spread much further east earlier than previously thought.
Continue Reading
See the stories that matter in your inbox every morning