Archaeology & Anthropology

For centuries the Scythians have been more legend than people: the mounted nomads Herodotus wrote about, remembered for their gold, their horses, and the towering burial mounds they left across the…

The ceiling of a rock shelter at Awunbarna, in western Arnhem Land, carries a painted serpent more than six meters long. It has a crocodile-like head, bared teeth and a long extended tongue. Paul…

For more than a century, the Maya arrived to us as a civilization without authors. Their astronomers charted Venus across generations and their scribes carved dynasties into stone, yet the people who…

For a long time, Shimao was a puzzle sitting in plain sight. Rising in what is now northern Shaanxi Province about 4,000 years ago, it sprawled across roughly four square kilometers behind massive…

Picture a kangaroo the weight of the biggest reds alive today, but built wrong for the part: too stocky, too muscular, and by most reckoning barely able to hop. Protemnodon tumbuna seems to have…

At 854 metres up in the southern Norwegian mountains, Lake Tesse holds a puzzle that has nothing to do with how the fish got caught and everything to do with how they got there at all. When the ice…

Some 5,500 years ago, on the banks of a river that feeds Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, small bands of hunter-gatherers began burying their dead in unusual numbers, and the dead were unusually…

Snakes are a paradox of the fossil record. There are more than 4,000 species alive today, slithering through deserts, rivers, treetops and soil on every continent but Antarctica, one of evolution's…