Prehistory news
From 3 million years ago to the dawn of our era: archaeological discoveries, palaeogenetics, cave art and the great transformations of human societies.
Using simple strips of adhesive tape, geologists have traced the origin of the Devil's Arrows, Britain's tallest stone row. The stones do not come …
Read the article →Four metres beneath a courtyard of the Hôtel-Dieu on the Île de la Cité, archaeologists have uncovered a Gaulish stone-and-timber wall some twenty …
Read the article →More than 1,200 geophysical measurements have revealed, along the north wall of Tutankhamun's burial chamber, a filled corridor and a possible room…
Read the article →Under two upturned bowls, in a house burned around 4500 BCE, archaeologists found emmer grains that had sprouted before being charred. Evidence of …
Read the article →Lying horizontally inside the wall of a room between Enclosures B and D, a human statue more than 12,000 years old has been uncovered at Göbekli Tepe. A very rare r…
Read →Roped up like mountaineers, Russian archaeologists found thirty-one unknown engraved surfaces along the Pegtymel in August 2026, Asia's only rock art site beyond th…
Read →Engineers ran a thousand numerical simulations on the walls of the Grat Be'al Gibri palace, built around 800 BCE in northern Ethiopia. The verdict: even in the worst case, this timber-laced masonry could have carried sixteen storeys.
The Marathousa 1 site in the Megalopolis basin, Greece, has yielded 430,000-year-old worked wood fragments -- the oldest portable wooden tools ever discovered, evidence of unsuspected technological sophistication in the Middle Pleistocene.
Against all expectations, the brain is one of the most commonly preserved organs in archaeological contexts. A Journal of Proteome Research study catalogues over 4,000 cases and explains the mechanisms at work.
In the Keshikchidagh reserve of western Azerbaijan, kurgan no. 4 in the Sariyokhush valley has yielded the remains of a Middle Bronze Age warrior buried with a diorite mace, a bronze dagger and eleven arrowheads.
Read →Ancient proteomics analysis of 23 teeth from Rising Star Cave reveals no trace of amelogenin Y. Does this mean all…
Read →A digitally reprocessed photograph reveals that Merneith, a figure of Egypt's First Dynasty, did indeed bear the r…
Read →At the Huaca Yolanda site in Peru's Chao Valley, a polychrome mural more than five metres long has been uncovered.…
Read →At Saqqarah, Egyptian archaeologists have uncovered the tomb of Sekhentio-Ptah, an Old Kingdom official bearing the title "keeper of the secrets of royal decrees", dated to the late Fifth or early Sixth Dynasty.
While packing up in Lower Silesia, Polish archaeologists discovered a Neolithic tumulus by chance: inside, a chieftain buried c. 2900 BCE with a necklace of 42 pierced teeth and two human skulls without bodies.
An Egyptian mission at Tell Abu Seifi has uncovered a 3,200-year-old inscription mentioning Horus as "Lord of the City of Mesen", identifying for the first time the location of this legendary Ramesside Egyptian city.
A study published in Science Advances reveals that hunter-gatherers in Sulawesi, Indonesia, were consuming betel nut 25,000 years ago. Arecoline residues detected in their teeth push back the known origins of psychoactive substan…
Read →A Danish study of pottery from Hama, Syria, shows that 4,500 years ago Near Eastern communities were already using…
Read →A comparative genomics study in Science Advances reveals that the Jomon, a prehistoric culture of the Japanese arc…
Read →A palaeogenomics study of 1,237 ancient individuals shows that genetic variants associated with light pigmentation…
Read →The tomb of royal scribe Nisemro, created under Thutmose III, was continuously reused for seven centuries by at least twelve distinct individuals -- an exceptional example of funerary reuse in ancient Egypt.
Read →The discovery of 225 faience funerary figurines bearing pharaoh Sheshonq III's titulary formally identifies his to…
Read →A conjurer named Djedi decapitates and revives animals before pharaoh Khufu: the Westcar Papyrus contains the firs…
Read →A study published in MicrobiologyOpen reveals that honey recovered from ancient Egyptian tombs retains remarkable …
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