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Researchers have described a new Neanderthal from Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, deposited about 75,000 years ago, raising the minimum number of individuals placed in one small spot in the cave to…
Archaeologists working at Göbeklitepe in southeastern Türkiye report in the journal PLOS ONE that they have excavated the first two undisturbed graves found at the site. The burials, they say, could…
Tin is what makes bronze bronze, and it is the one ingredient the Shang should not have had. Copper turns up across northern China, and lead is more widespread still, but tin is scarce anywhere north…
About 500 iron bars weighing an estimated 1,035 kilograms, dug out of a gravel pit beside the Danube in Upper Austria, are the largest mass find of prehistoric iron bars so far known in Europe, Peter…
A medieval grave with plague DNA in it is easy to date and hard to place. Radiocarbon will usually say the person died somewhere inside a window of a century or more, which is precise enough for…
Two companion papers published in Nature on Sept. 9, 2026, describe fossils, stone tools and animal bones from Bianfu Cave in Yunnan Province, southwestern China. The authors attribute the material…
You took a few thousand steps today, and almost every one of them started the same way. The back of the heel touched down first, slightly ahead of the rest of the foot, and the load rolled forward…
Melon seeds are a problem on an archaeologist's table. They turn up at Chinese sites, small and flat and stubbornly anonymous: melons, cucumbers and their wild relatives all belong to the genus…
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…