The campfire was a social hub for ancient humans, and a virtual reality investigation suggests that the flickering light may have made art etched on flat rocks look animated. Image: Needham et al., 2022, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0
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Two Inca children who were sacrificed more than 500 years ago had consumed ayahuasca, a beverage with psychoactive properties, an analysis suggests. Image: Jairinflas
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A set of ancient footprints seems to show children splashing around in water that had pooled in tracks left by a now-extinct ground sloth. Image: David Bustos/Matthew Bennett
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A new wave of archaeological investigations is reconstructing intimate details of our ancestors’ lives from fossilised footprints. They give us glimpses of everything from parent-child relationships to the thrill of a giant sloth hunt. Image: Bernard Spragg
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eternal souls still smell sweet. A team of analytical chemists and archaeologists has analysed these scents to help identify the jars’ contents. Image: Stefano Merli
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For more than 450 years, Norse settlers from Scandinavia lived—sometimes even thrived—in southern Greenland. Then, they vanished. Was it drought that drove their disappearance? Image: gordontour
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The characters used to write the Vai script, which was invented in Liberia in 1833, have become visually simpler over time, reflecting the evolutionary pressures acting on writing. Image: Kelly et al.
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The ancient Egyptians were adept at bandaging dead bodies during the mummification process, but we have had no evidence of the way they dressed flesh wounds until now. Image: Free Public Domain Illustrations by rawpixel
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A bone found at an archaeological site may encode numerical information. And if that’s correct, anatomically modern humans might not have been alone in developing a system of numerical notations: Neanderthals might have begun to do so, too. Image: F. d’Errico
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With the archaeology of our coastal waters largely unexplored, we are missing a huge piece of human history. Now, however, that is changing. Image: NOAA’s National Ocean Service
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Ancient Egyptian legends tell of a magical faraway land where intrepid travelers could obtain wondrous products including gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Now researchers they may have their hands on the first known Puntite treasure: a 3300-year-old baboon skull that may have come from the fabled land. Image: The Trustees of the British Museum
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Some of the ancient humans living in Europe half a million years ago had a remarkable strategy for dealing with winter: they hibernated. At least, that is the claim being made by two researchers. Others dispute the evidence – but ongoing research suggests that it might be possible to induce a hibernation-like state in modern humans. Image: quinet
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