We bring you all the latest historical news and archaeological discoveries relating to ancient human history. Read more history news from around the world here at Ancient Origins.
After a year of work, archaeologists in the United Kingdom have completed their scientific tests to determine the age of a giant figure cut into the chalk of a hill. This figure, known as the Cerne...
In separate discoveries that occurred in 2019 and 2020, searchers found seven ancient gold pendants buried in a field near the Norwegian municipality of Råde in Østfold County. The first four gold...
The Jurassic was a geological epoch that is dated from 201.3 million years ago (from the end of the Triassic period) to 145 million years ago (till the Cretaceous period begins) that has a long...
A construction crew performing restoration work on historic walls in the Central Italian city of Isernia discovered something ancient and remarkable. It was a buried, sculpted marble head that had...
Archaeologists in Italy are studying the remains of a Roman soldier who was thrust face-first into the sand at Herculaneum when Mount Vesuvius erupted on October 24th 79 AD. The presence of this...
A perfectly preserved butterfly specimen was discovered pressed between the pages of a 390-year-old book found on the endless Cambridge University Library shelves. The find has generated much...
Angkor Wat was the enormous capital city of the Khmer Empire , located in modern day Cambodia . Now, a new study has attempted to understand the Khmer exodus, whereby the ancient mega-city of almost...
There has long been speculation about the true cause of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death on the island of St. Helena on May 5, 1821. As we mark the 200th anniversary of this event, a biochemist from De...
The Hittites established one of the earliest great empires in human history. Between 1750 BC and 1200 BC, the Hittite empire was a regional superpower in the Middle East, stretching across modern-day...
Archaeologists have unearthed the skeleton of a 5-year-old, blonde-haired girl, buried in the late 13th or early 14th century beneath a chapel floor in the Real Alcázar in the Virgen de la Antigua in...
St Albans Cathedral in Hertfordshire is the oldest site of continuous Christian worship in Britain and work to restore its rare medieval shrine has just been completed. But the addition of a new...
Archaeologists from Germany and Italy have found convincing proof that people in Late Bronze Age Europe used metal scraps or fragments as a form of money . As excavations throughout Central Europe...
A landmark study of ancient DNA has shed new light on the genetic characteristics of people who built the great Bronze Age Aegean civilizations. A team of researchers from Greece and Switzerland...
A team of researchers in England have analyzed the teeth of eight crewmen recovered from King Henry VIII’s sunken ghost ship, the Mary Rose. Not only have the crew been dubbed a “multicultural” bunch...
Archaeologists in Israel exploring in an ancient building have found rare coins and pottery. But standing sentinel at this dig is a unique lamp that dates back to the Second Temple period, the...
It has been told and retold and accepted as an unproven truth that early human beings arrived on uninhabited islands and forced other species to make way for them, eventually driving them to...
Standing right beside the question “are we alone in the universe” is “when and by whom was America first populated.” Now that question might finally be answered as a team of researchers propose a...
78,000 years ago someone buried a young child in a cave. Now, researchers say that child’s grave in Kenya is the earliest known example of a deliberate human burial by modern humans in Africa. The...
When the first human migrants arrived in Australia tens of thousands of years ago, they spread out across the land following a series of heavily traveled pathways that scientists have identified as...
A recent exploration of burial sites in Thessaloniki, Greece, has revealed that dozens of the burials are of children and infants. These poor young souls were not victims of a bloody war or tyrannous...
For over 100 years human remains recovered from the famous Bjerringhøj Viking Age burial in Denmark have been missing. But now, a collection of Viking bones and textiles that were recovered from “a...
During excavations along the shore of the Ob River near Novosibirsk in southwestern Siberia, a tiny, sculpted object was unearthed that has archaeologists and historians puzzled. The object was a...
After 500 years, the ancient hand on a colossal bronze statue of Emperor Constantine is reunited with its middle bronze finger. In 2010, Aurélia Azéma, a French Ph.D. student researching ancient...
More than one hundred handprints made by children 1,200 years ago on the walls of a cave in Mexico may have been part of a mysterious coming-of-age ritual of the ancient Maya. Reuters reports that...
