Are you a morning person? You might have Neanderthals to thank for that! In a revelatory study, scientists have unearthed a fascinating genetic link between modern humans and our Neanderthal...
David Burney / The Conversation Unique, prehistoric rock art drawings have been discovered in the Andriamamelo Cave in western Madagascar. I was part of a team that discovered and described these...
New artificial intelligence software is now able to decipher difficult-to-read texts on cuneiform tablets, almost in an instant. Instead of photos, the AI system uses 3D models of the tablets,...
Prehistoric men hunted; prehistoric women gathered. At least this is the standard narrative written by and about men to the exclusion of women. The idea of “Man the Hunter” runs deep within...
By Eva-Maria Geigl & Thierry Grange/The Conversation How did our species, Homo sapiens , arrive in Western Europe? Published in Nature Ecology & Evolution , our new study analyses two skull...
New York University Historians and archaeologists have, over centuries, explored the mysteries behind the Great Sphinx of Giza: What did it originally look like? What was it designed to represent?...
Durham University An international research team has unveiled an ancient landscape hidden beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet for over 14 million years. This vast, pristine expanse—spanning 32,000...
How much can the written records of ancient civilizations tell us about the animals they lived alongside? Our latest research , based on the venomous snakes described in an ancient Egyptian papyrus,...
Matthew Robert Bennett & Sally Christine Reynolds /The Conversation When and how humans first settled in the Americas is a subject of considerable controversy. In the 20th century, archaeologists...
By Glaire Anderson / The Conversation Gamers the world over will be familiar with the incredibly detailed historic cityscapes the Assassin’s Creed franchise has produced so far. Following earlier...
For thousands of years, people have been describing unexplainable gleaming objects in the sky. Some aerial phenomena like comets, meteor showers, bolides , auroras or even earthquake lightning – all...
Christian-Georges Schwentzel /The Conversation Orgies conjure in our imagination the world of Greek and Roman Antiquity, thanks to more or less titillating films portraying debauched emperors, or...
Patrick D. Nunn /The Conversation Can you imagine a scientist who could neither read nor write, who spoke their wisdom in riddles, in tales of fantastic beings flying through the sky, fighting each...
Keith Ruiter & Harriet Evans Tang / The Conversation Is your pet part of the family? That’s nothing new. Archaeological evidence exists to suggest that the Vikings held their own animals in high...
Ancient Greece was in many ways a brutal society. It was almost perpetually at war, slavery was routine, and women could only expect a low status in society. However, there is one important sense in...
The earliest people who lived in North America shared the landscape with huge animals. On any day these hunter-gatherers might encounter a giant, snarling saber-toothed cat ready to pounce, or a...