Anyone who wants to build a house on the waterfront at Meria, at the northern tip of Corsica, has to let archaeologists look underneath first. The rule comes from the island’s regional archaeology service (the DRAC of Corsica). It has just paid off. Working on the plot, a team from Inrap, France’s national institute for […]

On the road into the stadium at Olympia, at the foot of Mount Cronius, ancient Greek athletes passed a stone platform with steps cut through it. A row of bronze statues of Zeus, the god the Games were held to honour, stood beside it. None of them celebrated a victory. Each had been paid for […]

About 13,800 years ago, Magdalenian hunters in northern Spain were still visiting the cave of Altamira, famous today for its painted bison. (The cave’s entrance would collapse around 13,000 years ago.) On the other side of the world, a different group of hunters was setting up camp on a ridge above the Tanana River, in […]

Until now, the biggest fruiting bodies known among the ascomycetes, the largest group of fungi (it includes morels and truffles), stood between 20 and 30 centimeters (8 to 12 inches) tall, about the length of a school ruler. Researchers at the Kunming Institute of Botany, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have now found […]

There’s a temperature nothing in the universe has ever touched. It’s called absolute zero, equal to -273.15°C (-459.67°F), the point at which the particles that make up matter would lose all their kinetic energy and simply stop moving. In 1848, the British physicist William Thomson — better known as Lord Kelvin — proposed making that […]

The site is provisionally dated to a six-century stretch, from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD, offering a window into funerary rites practiced by a population that neither buried nor cremated its dead — long before that same principle produced the famous Towers of Silence. The find comes from Odirmon, a site […]

In 2016, paleontologist David DeMar Jr. was crawling across a rocky outcrop in northeastern Montana, hunting for fish fossils, when he spotted a dark, reddish-brown nodule about half the size of a golf ball. He picked it up and looked at it through his hand lens. On its surface was something he didn’t expect: a […]

Two skeletons from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi had something strange going on in their mouths. Not cavities. Not the usual wear from a tough diet. Deep, rounded grooves cut into the teeth — a pattern no archaeologist had documented before, and one nobody could explain. The answer, published in Science Advances, pushes the known […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

The archaeological research in the ancient sanctuary of Apollo in Gortyna, the famed Cretan city whose epigraphic legislation marked a milestone in the history of Greek law, has concluded its summer season with a series of findings that consolidate the importance of the site as a first-class religious center during the formation of the polis. […]

For decades, paleontologists have used the presence of stones inside the skeletons of dinosaurs as an indicator that the animal was herbivorous. These stones, known as gastroliths, have been found in numerous species and were assumed to serve to grind plant material in the stomach, just like many birds do today. However, this relationship has […]

A ritual well with unique characteristics has emerged in the archaeological area of the ancient Etruscan city of Kainua, near Marzabotto, in a discovery that the scientific community is already describing as extraordinary. Located within the sacred precinct dedicated to the deity Uni, the well has brought to light a collection of exceptionally crafted objects […]

Megaliths —those enormous stone blocks that have stood for millennia— continue to fascinate archaeologists and the general public. A recent compilation of books published between 2025 and 2026 shows that, although research has advanced by leaps and bounds thanks to new technologies, some fundamental questions remain without definitive answers. Who built these monuments? Why did […]

Excavations by the University of Catania at the Tava Tepe site, located in western Azerbaijan, have uncovered an archaeological complex that upends established notions about Late Bronze Age communities in the Caucasus region. What was initially interpreted as an isolated domestic structure, dated to around 1300–1000 BCE, has turned out to be the last link […]

The Minister of Culture and Tourism of Turkey, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, has announced the discovery in the ancient city of Sardis, in the province of Manisa, of a male marble sculpture approximately 2,500 years old, a piece that, due to its monumental dimensions and unusual state of preservation, stands out as an exceptional find for […]

The Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, under the Greek Ministry of Culture, has completed an official inspection at a point along the shoreline of the island of Andros following a report from a private individual who alerted authorities to the presence of archaeological remains on the seabed. The technical team, composed of an archaeologist, a conservator, […]