A cubic meter of lunar soil might be one of our best bets for finding physical proof that another advanced civilization once existed somewhere in the Milky Way, according to a new paper to be published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
The post Could Scoop of Moon Dust Reveal Alien Technology? appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Nine centuries ago, people gathered at what is today recognized as the Etowah Indian Mounds site, located roughly 40 miles northwest of Atlanta, Georgia, for enormous community feasts. They ate, drank, and eventually discarded broken pottery into pits that would become part of the foundations of the ancient city’s first monumental mound.
Now, traces hidden inside two pieces of that discarded pottery have revealed something archaeologists never expected to find so far from the tropics: ancient cacao DNA.
Researchers say the discovery provides the first direct evidence that cacao, the plant used to make chocolate, reached the Mississippian civilization of the eastern United States roughly 800 to 900 years ago.
Because cacao cannot grow naturally in Georgia, its presence also points to surprisingly extensive networks capable of moving exotic goods across long stretches of pre-Columbian North America. The findings were published in PLOS One.
“This study presents the first evidence that cacao consumption was part of the Mississippian world at roughly the same time as it appeared at Chaco,” researchers write. “This discovery at Etowah asks us to broaden our understanding of the networks that distributed cacao throughout the Americas before European colonization.”
Chocolate has a deep history in the Americas. Archaeological evidence indicates cacao was being consumed in South America at least 5,000 years ago and later became culturally important throughout Central America.
More surprising was a 2009 discovery indicating that people at Chaco Canyon in modern New Mexico drank cacao between roughly 1050 and 1350 CE. Since cacao only grows in tropical climates, the finding meant long-distance exchange networks had carried the plant hundreds of miles northward.
Whether cacao traveled even farther into what is now the eastern United States remained unclear.
However, Etowah offered an intriguing place to look. Located in modern Georgia, the Indigenous city eventually became one of the most important centers of Mississippian civilization. The pottery examined in the new study came from feasting deposits dating to the 11th and 12th centuries, early in Etowah’s history.
Researchers had previously analyzed residues from 31 Etowah pottery fragments. Twenty-one contained at least two chemical compounds associated with caffeinated beverages, while three contained all four compounds the scientists examined.
Yaupon holly, a native plant used to produce the caffeinated beverage historically known as Black Drink, contains several of the same chemical biomarkers as cacao. Researchers, therefore, concluded that the Etowah vessels most likely contained yaupon rather than cacao.
However, this time, scientists went looking for cacao itself.
Researchers subjected samples from three pottery fragments to ancient DNA analysis, producing more than 502 million useful paired sequences before using successive filters to identify genetic material specific to Theobroma cacao.
Two pottery samples cleared the researchers’ threshold for identifying cacao.
Importantly, the genetic material also displayed telltale characteristics of ancient DNA. The fragments averaged only 84 base pairs long, consistent with the degradation expected after centuries of decay. The researchers also employed strict contamination controls and bioinformatic filtering to distinguish cacao from other organisms present in the samples.
The evidence does not establish exactly how cacao reached Georgia. Preliminary genetic comparisons linked one sample most closely to Amelonado cacao and another to Curaray, both of which also showed similarities to Marañon cacao. Those lineages originated in the Amazon basin, including parts of modern Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil, but also spread into Central America long before cacao appeared at Etowah.
Cacao may have traveled from Central America through long-distance exchange networks or passed indirectly through communities in the American Southwest before reaching the Eastern Woodlands. However, too few genetic markers survived to pinpoint its immediate source, and researchers say no direct archaeological evidence currently establishes either route.
Perhaps more intriguing is where researchers found the cacao.
The pottery came from pits packed with animal bones, ceramics, and organic material interpreted as the remains of communal feasting associated with the construction of Etowah’s first platform mound. Researchers suggest cacao was more than an exotic luxury and could have played a role in ceremonies intended to reinforce social bonds during the city’s formative period.
The discovery also raises the possibility that previously detected chemical residues at other Mississippian sites, including Cahokia, could contain cacao that was mistaken for locally available yaupon. Confirming that possibility will require additional ancient DNA testing.
“These results ask us to reopen lines of research long closed, especially regarding contacts between the impressive civilizations of Central and South America and the great Mississippian civilization of the Eastern Woodlands,” researchers write. “More broadly, our results suggest that it is time to explore the possibility that cacao was distributed more widely in the precontact Americas than we have understood.”
Study: King, A., Powis, T.G., Argout, X., Vignes, H., Utge, J., Rhoné, B., et al. “Cacao in the Mississippian World: Archaeogenomic evidence for T. cacao consumption at the Etowah Site, Georgia.” PLOS One 21(8):(2026).
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
Italian archaeologists have discovered a previously unidentified, nearly 4,000-year-old “Tomb of the Giants,” or “Giant’s Tomb,” at Carrarzu Iddia in central-western Sardinia.
The researchers behind the historic discovery said the new structure is part of a larger group of ancient, ‘enigmatic’ burial complexes on the island known as Giant’s Tombs erected by the Nuragic civilization as collective burial sites beginning around 1800 B.C. due to their megalithic structure.
According to Finestre sull’Arte, the newly discovered Giant’s Tomb had been covered by thick vegetation, helping it to remain hidden for nearly four millennia. However, surveyors from Sardinia’s two Superintendencies of Archaeology, Fine Arts, and Landscape were already involved in the restoration and excavation of the nuraghe located at the same site when they made the unexpected discovery.
Located at an elevation of approximately 800 yards, the newly identified Giant’s Tomb is located on the southern slope of Crastu Littu. The Italian team suspects the site “is of particular interest” due to its strategic location.
For example, the Giant’s Tomb offers a sweeping view of the Macomer plain. The location also includes a clear vantage point to observe the highlands of Abbasanta and Paulilatino, and an unobstructed view as far as the hills of the Nuoro area and the Gulf of Oristano. The team said this view likely conveys the site’s importance within the wider settlement network of Nuragic Sardinia.
After identifying and surveying the new Giant’s Tomb’s location, the two project leaders worked with the landowners to clear away the dense overgrowth and earthen debris that had kept it hidden. Ironically, once the site was fully revealed, the team noted that the covering had likely helped to maintain and preserve its excellent condition over the nearly 4,000 years since its construction.
The most prominent features identified on the vast site were two large stone platforms, called protonuraghi, a sacred well, a residential settlement, and an extensive burial ground. A closer examination confirmed that the Giant’s Tomb, which is made from trachyte blocks, retained the expected architectural elements found in similar collective burial sites.
One identifying feature is the site’s exedra preceding its entrance. According to the Italian team, this architectural component is one of the most representative aspects of previously identified Giant’s Tombs, distinguishing this “monumental” construction type clearly within that of protohistoric Sardinia
Unfortunately, the excavation revealed that some portions of the ancient site had not survived the intervening four millennia completely intact. The authorities suspect that past illegal excavations that have affected many ancient sites could be part of the cause.
Luckily, previous illegal invasions of the site did not remove everything of historical value. For example, the team found ceramic materials inside the structure that document human occupation of the site, in some cases dating back to the earliest stages of the Nuragic civilization.
Alongside the site’s more familiar features, the team also identified an internal feature they described as ‘rare’ for a Giant’s Tomb: a second level near the entrance. Future studies of this unusual feature may offer insights into this society’s funerary practices and its construction techniques, which the team notes are still poorly understood.
The Italian team also noted the site’s greater significance when within the larger archaeological context of Carrarzu Iddia, noting that the area has yielded traces of human use and occupation covering the times before, during, and after the Roman era.
When discussing the site’s historical significance, the Italian team pointed to the value of so many extraordinary structures and monuments concentrated within one specific area. This overlap allows researchers to chronologically date the new Giant’s Tomb and place its significance within the wider context of the Island’s inhabitants.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org
A team of Mexican and Slovenian archaeologists has reported the discovery of a Maya city in the northern reaches of Mexico’s Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, a dense forested landscape already known for its extraordinary concentration of ancient settlements. The site has been named Minanbé, an expression in Yucatec Maya that the researchers translate as “there is […]
The post Minanbé: Archaeologists Find an Intact Maya City Deep in the Calakmul Reserve appeared first on Curiosmos.
Beneath the seemingly unbroken canopy of the southwestern Amazon rainforest lies evidence of one of the largest monumental landscapes ever discovered in the ancient Americas.
According to new research published in Nature, what archaeologists once believed were scattered ceremonial sites are instead part of an enormous precolonial civilization that may have changed vast stretches of the Amazon nearly 2,000 years ago.
Using airborne LiDAR capable of penetrating forest cover, an international team of researchers says they have identified hundreds of previously unknown earthworks, estimating that more than 20,000, and perhaps as many as 30,000, remain spread across southwestern Amazonia.
The findings dramatically expand the known scale of the so-called Aquiry civilization and suggest that millions may have inhabited the region during its peak nearly 2,000 years ago, forcing a reconsideration of how densely populated and intensively managed the ancient Amazon may have been.
“We also propose that the total human population of the area in 100–300 AD was 1.25–3 million people,” researchers write. “If similar results are found elsewhere in Amazonia, the total precolonial population density and its effect on the current Amazonian soil and forest structure, biodiversity, and even some modeling of the global climate should be re-evaluated.”
The study represents one of the most ambitious archaeological surveys ever conducted in the Amazon. Researchers flew more than 2,700 miles across the forests of Brazil’s Acre and Amazonas states using airborne LiDAR, a laser-mapping technology able to see through gaps in the dense treetops to produce detailed maps of the landscape below. Those maps revealed hundreds of geometric earthworks that had remained hidden for centuries.
The newly discovered structures include squares, circles, rectangles, and multilateral enclosures connected by roads and clustered into monumental complexes.
Some feature ditches up to 43 feet wide and more than 16 feet deep, with towering earthen embankments rising alongside them. Although a handful of these earthworks had previously been identified in deforested areas using satellite imagery, LiDAR revealed that those earlier surveys had dramatically underestimated just how many remained obscured beneath the forest.
One of the study’s most striking findings was that LiDAR scanning uncovered roughly five times more earthworks than satellite imagery had detected across the same landscapes.
In one survey block, researchers had previously identified only 30 structures using conventional imagery. Meanwhile, LiDAR revealed 156. Assuming similar results across the wider region suggests that between roughly 24,000 and 30,000 earthworks may exist within the estimated boundaries of the Aquiry civilization.
Those numbers alone would rank the region among the most monument-rich archaeological landscapes in the world.
For decades, archaeologists have debated whether much of Amazonia could have maintained large, complex societies before European contact. Prevailing interpretations portrayed much of the rainforest as environmentally limiting, capable of sustaining only relatively small and dispersed populations. However, more recent discoveries, including ancient cities in Bolivia and Ecuador, have steadily challenged that assumption.
Now, these latest findings suggest the region may have supported an even larger and more sophisticated society than researchers once imagined.
Rather than representing isolated ceremonial sites scattered through an otherwise untouched forest, the researchers argue the earthworks belonged to a civilization extending about 71,000 square miles, representing about three times larger than previous estimates of the Aquiry cultural area.
Many of the geometric enclosures appear not to have been permanent settlements themselves. Instead, researchers believe they served as ceremonial, political, and public gathering places where dispersed communities periodically assembled.
Similar patterns of temporary gathering centers are known from the Inca Empire, where populations converged for rituals, governance, and communal events despite living across broad landscapes.
Constructing these massive earthworks would have demanded sophisticated planning, organized labor, mathematical knowledge, and long-term social coordination. According to the study, some of these ceremonial centers remained in use for nearly 1,500 years, indicating remarkable cultural continuity across generations.
Estimating how many people actually lived within this landscape presented a separate challenge.
Rather than simply multiplying earthworks by a fixed population estimate, the researchers combined several independent lines of evidence. They examined radiocarbon dates to determine how many sites were occupied simultaneously, compared the earthworks with later mound villages built in the same region, incorporated ethnographic information from Indigenous communities, and evaluated the labor required to construct and maintain the monumental enclosures.
Their study indicates the civilization reached its greatest extent between approximately A.D. 100 and 300. During that period, somewhere between one-quarter and roughly 60 percent of the known ceremonial centers may have been active simultaneously.
Assuming each ceremonial center served communities of roughly 300 people, the researchers estimate the region’s population reached between about 1.25 and 3 million people during its peak. After accounting for earthworks that LiDAR may have missed beneath dense forest, they conclude the total could have been as high as 3.8 million.
Those estimates substantially exceed many previous reconstructions of southwestern Amazonia and imply population densities rivaling or exceeding some later historical agricultural societies.
Equally significant is what these discoveries reveal about how ancient Amazonians altered their environment.
The study points to fertile soils rich in nutrients, evidence of extensive cultivation of maize, squash, manioc, beans, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and chili peppers, as well as widespread management of Brazil nut groves and numerous economically important palm species.
Rather than exhausting the rainforest, researchers contend these communities actively managed forests, soils, and waterways throughout centuries, creating ecological legacies that remain visible today in the composition and biodiversity of Amazonian forests.
Present-day ecological studies have increasingly shown that many Amazonian forests long regarded as pristine wilderness actually bear the imprint of thousands of years of Indigenous landscape management. If similar densities of monumental earthworks are identified elsewhere across Amazonia, researchers argue that assumptions about precolonial population sizes, biodiversity patterns, soil formation, and even climate models may need substantial revision.
The work additionally underscores the key role of LiDAR in modern archaeology. Over the past decade, the technology has revealed hidden Maya cities beneath Central American jungles, extensive urban complexes in the Bolivian Amazon, and extensive settlements in Ecuador’s Upano Valley.
Nevertheless, researchers caution that important questions remain unanswered. The southeastern limits of the Aquiry civilization are still poorly understood because large portions of Rondônia have yet to receive comparable archaeological investigation. Dense vegetation also continues to obscure portions of the landscape, meaning many earthworks almost certainly remain undiscovered even after LiDAR surveys.
“These ancient achievements constitute an important legacy that is still observable in the soil, and the composition and biodiversity of the contemporary tropical forest,” researchers write. “This legacy should be fully considered in future studies of Amazonia, including climate modeling and sustainable land-use planning.”
The recent study, “Over 20,000 precolonial earthworks in the Southwest Amazonia,” by Martti Pärssinen et al., appeared in Nature.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
Every ancient language that has ever been deciphered needed an anchor. Usually that’s a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, or a known relative to compare it to. Linear A, the writing system of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization on the Greek island of Crete, has neither.
Linear A is described as a “language isolate” because it has no confirmed link to any known language, living or dead. As such, it has posed a significant challenge for linguists over the past century.
Etruscan, a language of Italy that was used before the rise of the Roman Empire, has fared only slightly better. A partial vocabulary has been collected from short funerary inscriptions, but its grammar and deeper meaning still elude linguists.
© PHAS via Getty
In 1925, while exploring the remote jungles of the Amazon on a quest to uncover a fabled lost city, British explorer Percy Fawcett and his small expedition party vanished without a trace.
Fawcett, a noted geographer, artillery officer, cartographer, surveyor, and archaeologist, set off into the rainforest accompanied only by his son, Jack Fawcett, and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimell. Their goal was to locate an ancient lost city rumored to exist in the heart of the Amazon that Fawcett and others called “The Lost City of Z.”
While Fawcett and his expedition crew’s fate remains unknown, new advancements in modern archaeological science, propelled by technologies that include unmanned aerial vehicles and LiDAR, are now revealing what could be the archaeological reality behind part of what the ill-fated British explorer sought.
“The reward is that we’re finally finding the ‘lost civilisation’ that explorers like Percy Fawcett were searching for a century ago,” says José Iriarte, a professor of archaeology at the University of Exeter, writing in a piece featured at The Conversation, though adding that such discoveries are now being made “by cajoling a drone rather than battering through jungle.”
For a time, archaeologists presumed that the Amazon rainforest was a vast wilderness that, while abundant in resources, would have been capable of supporting only small, scattered communities.
With the aid of modern technologies, those past ideas have gradually changed as new archaeological evidence continues to push researchers toward rethinking past assumptions. Among these technologies is advanced laser-mapping technology known as LiDAR (light detection and ranging), which archaeologists have put to great use in the last several decades to aid in uncovering evidence of surface features that were once either inaccessible or otherwise invisible during ground-based surveys.
Something else that LiDAR excels at is penetrating the dense forest of areas like the Amazon, enabling researchers to get unprecedented aerial views of the surface below the canopy, along with any structures that may have been left there by humans from long ago. The result has been evidence of sprawling ancient societies hidden beneath the cover of thick jungle, revealing the Amazon as a region that once supported large populations that existed in sophisticated, interconnected landscapes.
A particularly striking example of such discoveries involves the Llanos de Moxos region of northern Bolivia, where recent LiDAR surveys have revealed the presence of a sprawling archaeological site long hidden by dense jungle. Archaeologists believe the ancient settlement is linked to what is called the Casarabe culture, which would have thrived in the area sometime between A.D. 500 and 1400.
“The Casarabe organized into a hierarchy of four different sizes of settlements,” writes Professor Iriarte in his recent piece at The Conversation. “The biggest ones—the primary settlements—were as large as 3km² or 300 hectares.”
“That’s enough space for over 400 football pitches,” Iriarte notes, “suggesting that they could have accommodated substantial numbers of people.”
Viewed from the ground, an observer who braved this dense region of Bolivian jungle might only see thick patches of forest separated by grassland savannahs.
That all changes when viewing LiDAR imagery obtained during aerial surveys, however. Through the sensitive detection capabilities afforded by laser pulses that can easily penetrate the dense vegetation, a lost world emerges—one the likes of which Percy Fawcett and other early explorers once only dreamed of rediscovering.
Researchers have now successfully identified a vast network of settlements at Llanos de Moxos, connected by raised causeways, canals, reservoirs, and engineered agricultural systems that cover an area of close to 20,000 square kilometers.
These complexes upend past thinking about the presence of isolated settlements in the region, and instead appear to show sites covering areas as large as three square kilometers, featuring monumental civic and ceremonial architecture, towering conical pyramids that ascend to heights of 20 meters, and the presence of massive U-shaped structures, which archaeologists believe had likely served as ceremonial structures that once hosted gatherings.
Another surprising feature is the scale of the structures archaeologists have uncovered, which they say rivals some of the most well-known monuments like those of the ancient Tiwanaku civilization in the Andes.
Yet, unlike many densely packed ancient cities, the Casarabe landscape also differs in several ways: the unique variety of urbanism it reflects is suggestive of dispersed populations whose connected infrastructure also brought them together through ancient shared water management systems.
“It was clearly all planned and coordinated,” Iriarte explains, adding that the ancient builders at Llanos de Moxos engaged in precocious designs that were intended “not only as living spaces but for integrating the population across the region.” Similar architectural planning has been observed at other ancient sites around the world, which include those assembled by the ancient Maya of Central America, as well as the builders of Angkor across the world in Cambodia.
Beyond just architecture and clues to the way of life of these ancient societies, researchers are also gaining new insights into the agricultural practices of the early Amazonian world.
For many decades, scientists presumed that a major limiting factor on the region’s ability to sustain larger populations hinged on the presence of factors that included poor soils, seasonal flooding, droughts, and tropical diseases. However, mounting evidence suggests that the indigenous societies of the region were far from hindered by the landscape, and instead managed to transform and manage farmland at scales previously unimagined.
Along with sophisticated agricultural systems, ancient Amazonians were also capable of engineering remarkably fertile soils, known as Amazonian Dark Earths, which Iriarte says “combined charcoal, bone and waste materials with the existing poor-quality soil to make it fertile enough for widespread farming.”
“Amazonia had reclaimed vast expanses of seasonally flooded savannahs over several thousand years to create raised and drained field systems,” he adds, also noting the construction of extensive drainage networks and the cultivation of diverse crops such as maize. Rather than merely adapting to the rainforest, the ancient inhabitants of the Amazon actively reshaped it.
Thanks to similar LiDAR surveys that have recently been undertaken in nearby countries, including Ecuador’s Upano Valley, where thousands of structures linked by roads and organized according to highly structured settlement plans have been detected, the recent findings at Llanos de Moxos are one of the latest additions to a broader revolution in archaeology made possible through such exciting Amazonian discoveries.
In addition to Bolivia and Ecuador, researchers have also documented ceremonial earthworks, geometric enclosures, and sprawling ancient settlements in Colombia, Peru, and Brazil in recent years, all of which are challenging decades of past assumptions about ancient life in the Amazon.
Despite the recent advancements in our understanding, many questions remain unanswered. Among the questions archaeologists have are those related to how these ancient societies were governed, as well as what factors led to their decline, a fall which was precipitated by unknown factors that occurred before European arrival.
Possible contributing factors may include shifts in ancient climates, as well as environmental pressures. It is also possible that political changes or conflicts that emerged between neighboring societies may have played a role, which could have contributed to disruptions in trade networks that may have further weakened these once thriving societies.
Despite the remaining mysteries about these enigmatic cultures, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: the Amazon was far from being the unclaimed tropical wilderness many long believed it to be. In many ways, the fascination with lost cities and ancient civilizations that drove explorers like Percy Fawcett—and which led to his untimely fate—had more basis in reality than many historians, archaeologists, and explorers probably guessed.
As ongoing LiDAR surveys continue to expand across previously unexplored regions, archaeologists believe thousands more structures may still await discovery, suggesting that some of the Amazon’s greatest archaeological secrets remain hidden, but no longer kept entirely from view.
“What lies beneath the Amazon is not just a hidden past,” Iriarte says. “It is a reminder that even the most seemingly untouched landscapes can carry deep histories, waiting—sometimes just beneath our feet—to be revealed.”
Professor José Iriarte’s complete article appeared at The Conversation on June 8, 2026.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
Using the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, a 42-element radio interferometer at Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Hat Creek, California, astronomers probed 3I/ATLAS for artificial radio transmissions but found only human-made interference.
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Mexican officials have announced what experts are calling the most significant archaeological find of the last ten years: a pristine, 1,400-year-old Zapotec tomb discovered in the state of Oaxaca. Located in San Pablo Huitzo, the ancient mausoleum has stunned researchers with its exceptional state of preservation and, most notably, a monumental sculpture of an owl, […]
The post ‘Discovery of the Decade’: 1,400-Year-Old Zapotec Tomb Found in Mexico appeared first on Curiosmos.
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