Before 2025, paleontologists had confirmed exactly two footprints anywhere in the world made by an adult Tyrannosaurus rex — one in New Mexico, one in Montana. Isolated prints, each capturing a single instant, with no way to tell how the animal that made them actually moved. That changed with a discovery in the badlands of […]
For the first time, astronomers have pointed NASA’s two flagship space telescopes at the same patch of sky beyond Neptune and let them work as a team. Hubble handled the visible light. Webb handled the infrared. Together, they picked out 27 previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs — small, icy bodies that drift in the […]
A team from the University of York and Curtin University, in Australia, has settled one of the most persistent puzzles in British archaeology: the exact origin of the towering standing stones known as the Devil’s Arrows, near Boroughbridge, in North Yorkshire. High-resolution geological analysis of microscopic minerals has confirmed that the three surviving pillars — […]
Long before anyone built a kiln on purpose, the ground itself may have shown people how. A new study argues that a wave of prehistoric wildfires in the southern Levant, more than 9,000 years ago, scorched the region so thoroughly that it left behind naturally baked clay — and that Neolithic communities, watching the aftermath, […]
Picture a moonless night, far from any city. Look straight at the point in the sky opposite the Sun — the antisolar point, where the Sun would appear if you could see it through the Earth. There, faintly, you might make out an oval-shaped glow, 8 to 10 degrees across. For scale, that’s roughly the […]
At the foot of Mount Aragatsotn, in the Armenian highlands, sits the site of Aruch — a castle that was never just a castle. Between the 12th and 13th centuries, it housed a high-status residence, complete with stone-slab floors and cisterns. Over time, though, that elite space was carved up into smaller rooms, and holes […]
Deep inside Ojo Guareña, one of the largest cave systems in Europe, in the northern Spanish province of Burgos, archaeologists have spent eleven consecutive summers digging through a single Neanderthal layer. This year’s season, which wrapped up in late August 2026, pushed the excavated area of that layer — known as level 4D — to […]
For years, a small fragment of papyrus lay unnoticed in the collections of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo. No one had looked closely at it until, in early 2026, Belgian papyrologist Nathan Carlig of the University of Liège realized what he had in front of him: a previously unknown fragment of the […]
When the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette surveyed the necropolis at Saqqara in the mid-19th century, he catalogued hundreds of mastaba tombs and marked one more on his map that he never got around to excavating. It stayed there, noted but untouched, for more than 160 years. A joint Spanish-Egyptian mission has now finished what Mariette […]
On the Turkish coast of the Black Sea, there is a Roman city called Pompeiopolis. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with the Pompeii buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD. This one takes its name from Pompey the Great, the Roman general who founded it in 64 or 63 BC as one of […]
When we think about Roman society, the image that usually comes to mind is that of a world dominated by men: senators, magistrates, generals, and emperors. According to the traditional narrative, women occupied a secondary place, confined to the domestic sphere and excluded from public life. However, a recent study based on the analysis of […]
In 2006, geneticist Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, published the results of a study that had taken him a decade to complete. His team had collected and analyzed the mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome of 10,000 volunteers from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, with the aim of reconstructing the […]
A small object made of dark stone, carved with astonishing precision almost 3,500 years ago, has provided researchers with one of the clearest windows yet into the religion of ancient Crete. It is the inscription known as IO Za 2, engraved on a tiny libation table made of dark green serpentinite, measuring just 4.3 centimeters […]
Atop an ancient grain storage building, in a settlement of the local Yampara elite, archaeologists Sonia Alconini and Walter Sánchez-Canedo have uncovered an exceptional find: a set of six copper bells folded into a pyramidal shape, deposited as a ritual offering more than five centuries ago, during the expansion of the Inca Empire through the […]
More than two thousand years ago, in the middle of the Iron Age, the Celts built a large fortified settlement on two peninsulas that extended into the Rhine River, near what is now the Swiss city of Schaffhausen. This place, known as the oppidum of Altenburg-Rheinau, is considered by archaeologists to be a true commercial […]
In Ancient Greece, there was an expression to describe someone who had lived through a terrifying experience: it was said of him that he had gone down to the cave of Trophonius. It was not an empty metaphor. In Lebadea, a city in Boeotia located about 120 kilometers northwest of Athens, there existed for more […]
For more than seven decades, phosphorus has represented one of the great paradoxes in the study of the origin of life. This element, indispensable for the existence of living beings as we know them, forms the structural backbone of DNA and RNA, allows cells to store and transfer energy through the molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP), […]
The waters surrounding Elba Island have once again yielded evidence of its millennia-old past. A dolium from the Roman era and a presumed shipwreck, still under study, have been located on the seabed of the Tuscan Archipelago during the underwater heritage monitoring operations that the ABAP Soprintendenza for the provinces of Pisa and Livorno has […]
Excavations carried out during the past month of July in the monumental complex of Guadalupe (Extremadura, Spain) have brought to light the foundation remains of the former Hospedería of the Catholic Monarchs (Guesthouse of the Catholic Monarchs), a lost historic building that has nothing to do with the current Hospedería del Real Monasterio that operates […]
A team of archaeologists has discovered in northern Turkey a settlement of hunter-gatherers who lived in the Koskarlı cave approximately 14,000 years ago. The remains found during the first excavation campaign, conducted in 2024, confirm that the site was inhabited by human groups during the Epipaleolithic period, a transitional stage between the Upper Paleolithic and […]
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