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Archaeology
There were many other species of human on the planet. Svante Pääbo discovered one of them.
The monsoon rains were not always so reliable.
The artifacts were often made from found objects – an Ivory dish-soap bottle transformed into an earthenware figure.
Was our distant ancestor a biped or not – i.e., human or not human?
"Spanish Stonehenge" contains 526 giant stones, three circular burial sites, a quarry, and four necropolises.
Advances in ancient DNA analysis gave researchers a new way to trace the movements of peoples across Eurasia.
The “first-of-its-kind” archeological find is being reburied despite the fact that researchers haven’t finished studying it.
Sex can be a death trap even for modern toad and frog species.
The Greeks were among the first to move beyond “primitive money” and establish an official currency, transforming their trade, government, and even philosophy.
Million Stories
Looking at ourselves in a mirror — or on a video call — shapes our sense of self. But what you see is not what others see.
Mesopotamian beer was not flavored with hops, and it was probably on the thick, porridgey side.
Many people lived long enough to grow old in the olden days, too.
Bloodcurdling war cries, shrieking elephants, and whistling arrows all made soldiers flee in terror.
More than mindless bloodshed, the gladiatorial games were organized sports. Gladiators were treated as world-class athletes, receiving superior diets and medical care.
Some artifacts drown in shipwrecks, others are taken by the tide. Many others will vanish as a result of climate change and rising sea levels.
Rock art in northern Australia depicts marsupial lions, giant kangaroos, and other megafauna that populated the Land Down Under long ago.
Human beings are descendants of these early tetrapods – at least those who made a new life on land.
Horses pranced around the western hemisphere until they went extinct in the late Holocene. They were reintroduced by European colonists — though where, when, and how has remained unclear.
Using data collected from ancient civilizations across the world, researchers identified the most significant factors in human development. War came out on top.
Long before tobacco arrived from the Americas, ancient civilizations in the Old World were getting high off hemp smoke and opium.
Fossils of Australopithecus in a South African cave are one million years older than previously thought. This challenges the consensus that humans first evolved in East Africa.
The architecture and infrastructure found may well have required the greatest amount of skilled labor of any construction from the same time period in the entire continent.
The weird and wild ways mummy fever swept through Europe.
Unlike other world rulers, Genghis Khan was laid to rest not inside an elaborate mausoleum but an unmarked grave somewhere in Mongolia. Maybe.
Before gunpowder was introduced to the West, medieval Arabs devised grenades using crockery.
In the Canaan religion, Yahweh was a lesser god, who was assigned the land of Israel. Here's how he became "God Almighty."
Some of the coastal areas were not repopulated for millennia afterward, showing that there was a long-lasting memory of this tragic event.
Yorkicystis lived during the “Cambrian explosion,” 539 million to 485 million years ago – hundreds of million years before the dinosaurs.