News
Palaeontologists were preparing to leave the Egyptian desert when they noticed teeth protruding from the ground — and uncovered the skull of a 30-million-year-old apex predator
15+ hour, 24+ min ago (381+ words) The 2020 field season in Egypt’s Fayum Depression was almost over when palaeontologist Bilal Salem saw teeth projecting from the desert floor. The fossil...
Flint tools, scorched soil and two pieces of spark-producing pyrite suggest humans were deliberately making fire in Britain 400,000 years ago — far earlier than firm evidence had previously shown
1+ day, 24+ min ago (856+ words) At a former clay pit in Suffolk, archaeologists found a small patch of ancient ground that had been heated repeatedly above 700°C. Heat-fractured flint...
When the Dutch ship Roggeveen anchored off Easter Island on Easter Sunday 1722, its crew counted between 2,000 and 3,000 islanders living beside 900 standing statues nobody could explain
2+ day, 4+ hour ago (575+ words) On Easter Sunday 1722, Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen's fleet became the first Europeans to sight Rapa Nui, counting a settled population of 2,000-3,000 people living beside nearly 900 monumental stone statues — and refusing to believe the islanders' own account of how the moai…...
The ancient Greeks calculated the circumference of the Earth around 240 BCE, using nothing more than a stick, the sun, and the distance between two Egyptian cities
2+ day, 6+ hour ago (582+ words) Published July 17, 2026 Some time around 240 BCE, a librarian in Alexandria worked out the size of the planet from the length of a single shadow. His only equipment was an upright stick, a clear day, and a figure for the distance…...
The Antikythera mechanism, recovered from a Greek shipwreck and dated to roughly 100 BC, was a hand-cranked bronze computer that tracked the heavens, of unknown origin and mechanically unmatched for more than a thousand years
3+ day, 3+ hour ago (26+ words) In the spring of 1902, an archaeologist at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens noticed that a corroded lump of bronze, pulled the previous year from...
The ancient aliens theory claims extraterrestrials built the pyramids, but archaeologists have found the workers’ villages, bakeries, healed bones, graffiti, and crew names — and all the evidence points back to ordinary Egyptians
3+ day, 3+ hour ago (420+ words) Published July 16, 2026 The claim is familiar enough to have its own television franchise: the pyramids of Giza were too large, too precise, and too old to have been built by human hands, so someone from elsewhere must have helped. The…...
In 1960, anthropologist Louis Leakey sent a 26-year-old English secretary named Jane Goodall — who had no university degree and no scientific training — to a stretch of forest called Gombe to study wild chimpanzees. Within months she had observed a chimpanzee stripping leaves off a stalk to fish termites from a mound, overturning the long-held belief that only humans made and used tools
4+ day, 7+ hour ago (83+ words) For most of the twentieth century, science had a simple test for what made us human: we made tools, and no other animal did. In 1949, the British Museum...
In the 1820s, a man who could not read invented a writing system for the Cherokee people — and within a generation, they had become more literate than the Americans around them
4+ day, 8+ hour ago (28+ words) The man who devised a complete writing system for the Cherokee language could not read a word of any language when he began. Sequoyah, born in present-day...
A park ranger lowered himself into an Australian canyon expecting to document an ordinary patch of rainforest and found a stand of trees that had been missing from the living world for millions of years
4+ day, 21+ hour ago (755+ words) In September 1994, David Noble used ropes to enter a remote sandstone gorge in Wollemi National Park, northwest of Sydney. Published July 14, 2026 In September 1994, David Noble used ropes to enter a remote sandstone gorge in Wollemi National Park, northwest of Sydney....
In 1994, a park ranger abseiling into a canyon 150 kilometres northwest of Sydney found a stand of trees with knobbly bark that matched 90-million-year-old fossils, and the Wollemi pine's exact location is still classified
5+ day, 5+ hour ago (127+ words) In September 1994, off-duty NSW park ranger David Noble abseiled into a slot canyon 150 kilometres from Sydney and found a stand of trees that matched 90-million-year-old fossils. Fewer than 90 wild Wollemi pines remain, and the Australian government still keeps the grove's…...