On October 11, 1968, America returned to space with its most ambitious manned mission to date. Born in the aftermath of a fiery tragedy, Apollo 7, this first flight not only made possible Neil Armstrong's one small step, it also made history by being the stage for the first mutiny in space.
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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.
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A cybernetic pioneer in the form of a fully functional "Byte Shop"-style Apple I computer is going on the block at RR Auction. One of the most significant early personal computers of the 1970s, the restored original Apple I board with its components and accessories is estimated to fetch US$300,000.
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The further back in time you go, the patchier our understanding of life on Earth gets. Now, British scientists have used a different method known as a molecular clock to plot out a rough timeline of all life on Earth, tracing the first organisms back to about 4.5 billion years ago.
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Two worms frozen in the Siberian permafrost for around 40,000 years have now been thawed and revived, making them the oldest living creatures on the planet and the first multicellular organisms to have survived such long-term cryobiosis.
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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.
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The International Chronostratigraphic Chart has officially been revised. That means our current point in Earth’s geological timeline has been updated so that we’re now living in the Meghalayan age, which began 4,200 years ago with a two-century drought that destroyed several civilizations.
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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.
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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.
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If you feel like you’ve had some drawn-out breakups, think of the supercontinent of Pangaea, which took tens of millions of years to split up. Now a unique fossil skull might readjust the timeline, with a strange creature turning up on a different continent to its previously-discovered relatives.
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