In the depths of the Baltic Sea lies a groundbreaking discovery, Europe’s oldest megastructure, hidden away for thousands of years. This enigmatic stone wall, uncovered by Jacob Geersen and his team, challenges our understanding of prehistoric human capabilities and opens a new chapter in the history of early European architecture. In 2021, Jacob Geersen, a ...
For millions of years, giant animals or megafauna, like giant kangaroos in Australia, roamed the lands that are now Australia and New Guinea. Many were like much larger versions of modern animals. There was a four-meter goanna called Megalania (Varanus priscus), for example, which likely ambushed its prey. This beast disappeared around 40,000 years ago, ...
In 2022, archaeologists in Italy discovered 24 perfectly preserved bronze statues while excavating hot springs in San Casciano de Bagni. This is a small town in the Tuscan hills outside Sienna. These statues were buried by mud for over two millennia in this site, which used to be a sacred place for both Etruscans and ...
The Australian continent is now geologically stable. But volcanic rocks, lava flows, and a contemporary landscape dotted with extinct volcanoes show this wasn’t always the case. Between 40 and 20 million years ago — during the Eocene to Miocene epochs — there was widespread volcano activity across eastern Australia. In places such as western Victoria ...
More than 380 million years ago, a sleek, air-breathing predatory fish patrolled the rivers of central Australia. Today, the sediments of those rivers are outcrops of red sandstone in the remote outback. Our new paper, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, describes the fossils of this fish, which we have named Harajicadectes zhumini. Known ...
The idea that two different human species, Homo sapiens (us) and Neanderthals, co-existed in western Eurasia 50-40,000 years ago has long captured the imagination of academics and the public alike. It is therefore not surprising that this time period — the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition — has been a focus of research for many archaeologists, physical ...
Giant creatures are usually associated with dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, or mystical beasts. But if you go back though the human lineage, you’ll find a very distant relative that stood three meters tall and weighed around 250 kilograms. This was Gigantopithecus blacki, the mightiest of all the apes and one of the biggest unresolved mysteries in ...
Rock art is one of the most intriguing records of the human past — it directly represents how our ancestors viewed their world. This provides a fundamentally different perspective compared to other archaeological items, such as stone artifacts. Despite this beguiling potential, rock art research can be highly challenging. Different researchers can have contrasting interpretations ...
Baleen whales are the titans of the ocean, the largest animals to have ever lived. The record holder is the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), which can reach lengths of up to 30 metres. That’s longer than a basketball court. However, throughout their evolutionary history, most baleen whales were relatively much smaller, around five meters in ...
In June, evolution researchers, led by palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger, published sensational claims about an extinct human species called Homo naledi online and in the Netflix documentary Unknown: Cave of Bones. They argued the small-brained H. naledi buried their dead in Rising Star Cave in South Africa more than 240,000 years ago, and may also have ...
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