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 […]