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25 Stone Turtle Figurines Found in a Turkish Cave May Reveal a 16,500-Year-Old Ritual World
Deep inside a prehistoric cave in northwestern Türkiye, archaeologists have uncovered an unusual collection of about 25 stone turtle figurines, some deliberately pushed into the ground around circular architectural features. The discovery is offering a rare glimpse into the symbolic world of hunter-gatherers who used the site toward the end of the Ice Age. The…
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Ancient DNA Reveals Ice Age Humans Disproportionately Targeted Female Woolly Mammoths
Ancient DNA recovered from more than 500 woolly mammoths has revealed an unexpected pattern in the relationship between Ice Age people and one of the largest animals they shared the landscape with: at archaeological sites associated with human activity, female mammoths vastly outnumber males. An international team analyzed genomic data from 521 woolly mammoths from…
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7,000-Year-Old Fish Traps Reveal Hunter-Gatherers Stocked Norway’s Mountain Lakes
Wooden fish traps discovered in a mountain lake in southern Norway have revealed that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers deliberately introduced brown trout into waters the fish could not have reached naturally. Radiocarbon dating places the earliest traps at around 5000 BC, making them direct evidence that communities in prehistoric Scandinavia were actively managing aquatic resources thousands of…
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Ancient Human DNA Found on Cave Walls for the First Time
A cave wall is not usually treated like a genetic archive. In Spain and Portugal, however, researchers have recovered ancient human DNA from the surface of cave walls, including areas close to prehistoric rock art. The study, led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and published in Nature Communications, examined 24 rock art…
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Child Graves Near Lake Baikal Reveal Plague’s Deadly Reach 5,500 Years Ago
A prehistoric Lake Baikal plague outbreak is no longer just a theory drawn from scattered graves. Ancient DNA from children buried near the Angara River in southeastern Siberia shows that Yersinia pestis was killing hunter-gatherer communities around 5,500 years ago, long before the Black Death or the first cities usually linked to epidemic disease. Three…
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10,500-Year-Old Cremation Burial in Germany Found with Aurochs Skull on Ritual Post
While investigating the prehistoric wetlands of Duvensee Moor in Schleswig-Holstein, archaeologists uncovered an aurochs skull mounted on a wooden post, positioned only a few meters from what is believed to be the oldest known cremation burial in northern Germany. Dating back roughly 10,500 years, the find suggests that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers practiced complex funerary rituals in…
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The Oldest Story Painted in the Americas? Rock Art in Texas and Mexico Carried a Single Message for 4,000 Years
Deep inside the limestone canyons that cut across the borderlands of Texas and northern Mexico, ancient murals stretch across cliff walls in sweeping tapestries of color. For decades, archaeologists knew they were old—what they did not know was how old, or how far their cultural influence may have travelled. A new study in Science Advances…
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6,000-Year-Old DNA Analysis Reveals Colombia’s First Hunter-Gatherers Completely Disappeared
A groundbreaking genetic study in Colombia’s Altiplano region reveals that the first human groups who settled there left no genetic traces behind. DNA samples dating back 6,000 years show a complete population replacement in South America’s settlement history. Researchers from the University of Tübingen, the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment, and the National…