Prehistoric hand paintings at the Cave of Hands in Argentina, thought to be over 10,000 years old.
R.M. Nunes/Shutterstock
It’s possible that low oxygen levels in caves produced hallucinations – but that doesn’t explain the majority of prehistoric art.
Andalusi communal dining bowls known as ‘ataifores’ in El Legado Andalusí, Museum of the Alhambra, Granada.
Practicing Islam was banned in Spain after the Catholic conquest but recent discoveries prove that Muslims continued eating traditions in secret.
New analysis suggests lawyers used sheepskin parchment to aid fraud detection.
Sean Doherty
We studied hundreds of British legal documents and found most were made from sheepskin, which is harder to tamper with than other animal skins.
Conor McAdams
Laboratory experiments with bat poo reveal how archaeological materials in tropical caves have been chemically altered over the millennia.
Researchers examined the traces of what was likely a human settlement in the Cradle of Humankind.
Tim Forssman
Stone-walled structures such as Driefontein often store information that’s not written down and are the only remaining resources to help understand local histories.
The Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland.
Daniel Freyr Jónsson / Alamy Stock Photo
Research into the bodies of victims of the Vesuvius eruption show how pyroclastic flows affect the human body.
Museums across the U.S., including at Harvard University, collected human remains, which were often displayed to the public.
Smith Collection/Gado/Archive Photos via Getty Images
Proposed legislation would identify and protect African American cemeteries. But it wouldn’t cover the remains of thousands of Black people in museum collections.
Divers excavate a shallow water submerged Mesolithic midden off the island of Hjarnø, Denmark.
J. Benjamin.
Undersea shell middens contain important clues about the past - what people ate, who they were interacting with and how the climate was changing. Now we have a better way to detect and excavate them.
Israel Antiquities Authority conservator Tanya Bitler shows newly discovered Dead Sea Scroll fragments at the Dead Sea Scrolls conservation lab in Jerusalem.
AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner
What’s fascinating about the latest Dead Sea Scrolls discovery is how it reflects the stories of those who wrote the ancient texts, those who kept them safe and the archaeologists who found them.
The Viking hoard being excavated.
Acta Konserveringscentrum
A Viking hoard of silver coins and jewellery expands our understanding of French history.
The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than any other place on Earth.
Kevin Xu Photography via Shutterstock
Plus, new discoveries about early humans in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge. Listen to episode 5 of The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Mummies fascinate people.
Shutterstock/Andrea Izzotti
CT scans of the mummy revealed new injuries.
Mr Nai/Shutterstock
A remarkable set of discoveries has confirmed that parts of Stonehenge first stood 140 miles away at Waun Mawn, west Wales.
Fragments of Sappho? The 2014 discovery was of five stanzas of one poem and portions of a second.
('Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene,'1864, by Simeon Solomon)
In 2014, reports of a new discovery of Sappho’s poems were remarkable. New research argues the papyrus had a fabricated backstory.
Larry Horricks/Netflix
The Digs’ archaeologists are closer to reality than the intrepid Indiana Jones, and that’s refreshing.
The main chamber of Cloggs Cave. Monash University archaeologist Joe Crouch is standing in the 1970s excavation pit, digging a new area in the wall of the old excavation.
Bruno David
Two starkly different research projects at East Gippsland’s Cloggs Cave, 50 years apart, show the importance of Indigenous perspectives in archaeology.
The Shrine of the Holy Nativity, Bethlehem, 1849.
David Roberts
Recent archaeological studies suggest that early Christians were identifying important sites as little as a century after the last of the gospels.
A variety of clues can tip off archaeologists about a promising spot for excavation.
Gabriel Wrobel
Archaeologists used to dig primarily at sites that were easy to find thanks to obvious visual clues. But technology – and listening to local people – plays a much bigger role now.
Cain killing Abel.
Titian/Wikimedia
A war with Neanderthals makes a compelling narrative but the evidence is limited is best.
Artist impression of a prehistoric woman hunting.
Matthew Verdolivo (UC Davis IET Academic Technology Services)
New research is challenging the hypothesis that men did the hunting in prehistoric societies.