Neanderthals left plenty of traces in the western Pyrenees, the mountain range that separates Spain from France. Stone tools, butchered animal bones, the leftovers of their camps. What nobody had ever found in Navarre, the region of northern Spain whose capital is Pamplona, was a single bone of the people themselves. On Monday that changed, [β¦]
On a patch of bare rock in western Malta, roughly 80 by 100 metres (260 by 330 feet), dozens of parallel grooves cross, overlap and merge into one another. The spot, MisraΔ§ GΔ§ar il-Kbir, is popularly known as Clapham Junction, after the busy railway junction in London. It is far from the only place like [β¦]
The shoulder blade is such a wide and flat bone that in some areas it becomes almost translucent when held up to the light. That is why it is rare to find it whole, even in modern burials, and why it so surprised archaeologists from the University of Cambridge that from Shanidar Cave, in Iraqi [β¦]
About 13,800 years ago, Magdalenian hunters in northern Spain were still visiting the cave of Altamira, famous today for its painted bison. (The caveβs 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 [β¦]
In the German state of Brandenburg, barely a hundred meters (about 330 feet) from the border with Saxony-Anhalt, the Havel River curls around a low rise of land that locals call the Pilatsch. For generations, a local legend held that a knight named Pilatus lived there, ambushing boats on the river and locking captured boatmen [β¦]
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 β a pattern no archaeologist had documented before, and one nobody could explain. The answer, published in Science Advances, pushes the known [β¦]
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 Devilβs Arrows, near Boroughbridge, in North Yorkshire. High-resolution geological analysis of microscopic minerals has confirmed that the three surviving pillars β [β¦]
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 β and that Neolithic communities, watching the aftermath, [β¦]
Deep inside Ojo GuareΓ±a, 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 yearβs season, which wrapped up in late August 2026, pushed the excavated area of that layer β known as level 4D β to [β¦]
A team of archaeologists has discovered in northern Turkey a settlement of hunter-gatherers who lived in the KoskarlΔ± 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 [β¦]
Megaliths βthose enormous stone blocks that have stood for millenniaβ 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 [β¦]
The death, which radiocarbon dating places between 3932 and 3653 B.C., surprised an individual at approximately forty weeks of gestation in the rock shelter of Ripari AltΓ, at 1,100 meters above sea level, within the current Dolomiti Bellunesi National Park. The archaeological context points to the final phases of the Neolithic, a period in which [β¦]
The archaeological excavations currently being carried out at Kapellenberg, near Hofheim am Taunus in Germany, have provided new evidence during this summer campaign regarding the possible location of the central tomb of a large burial mound dating back approximately 6,000 years, as confirmed by the leaders of the research project directed by Professor Detlef Gronenborn [β¦]
In the heart of the granite massif of the Landes de Lanvaux, in the French department of Morbihan, lies the Neolithic cemetery of CoΓ«by, discovered in 1986. This site, preserved for centuries by the dense forest cover that shielded it from intensive agriculture, contains around 95 megalithic monuments from different periods, from the Neolithic to [β¦]
Excavations carried out during 2025 in the Hohle Fels cave, located in the UNESCO World Heritage area of the Swabian Jura in southwest Germany, have yielded two new discoveries of extraordinary importance for understanding Paleolithic art. These are two representations of birds carved in mammoth ivory that are 40,000 years old and, due to their [β¦]
The publication in the journal PNAS Nexus of new evidence from Malta has shaken the foundations of what was believed about the maritime capabilities of the last hunter-gatherers in Europe. The discovery that the central Mediterranean islands were colonized before the invention of agriculture directly contradicts decades of established conceptions, which placed the development of [β¦]
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