Tag: lost civilizations

The moment the earliest known man-made fire was uncovered

A stunning discovery at an archaeological dig in the UK is rewriting the timeline of when humans first made fire.

Researchers have discovered the earliest known instance of human-created fire, which took place in the east of England 400,000 years ago.

The new discovery, in the village of Barnham, pushes the origin of human fire-making back by more than 350,000 years, far earlier than previously thought.

The ability to create fire was the moment that changed everything for humans. It provided warmth at will and enabled our ancestors to cook and eat meat, which made our brains grow. It meant we were no longer a group of animals struggling to survive – it gave us time to think and invent and become the advanced species we are today.

The team say they found baked earth together with the earliest Stone Age lighter – consisting of a flint that was bashed against a rock called pyrite, also known as fool’s gold, to create a spark.

BBC News has been given world exclusive access to the prehistoric site.

Under the treetops of Barnham Forest lies an archaeological treasure, buried a few metres beneath the Earth, that dates back to the furthest depths of human pre-history.

Around the edges of a clearing, tangled green branches frame the scene like a curtain, as if the forest itself were slowly revealing a long-buried chapter of its past. Prof Nick Ashton of the British Museum leads me through the trees and we both step into his astonishing story.

“This is where it happened,” he tells me in a reverent tone.

We walk down onto a dirt floor carved into deep, stepped hollows of raw earth and pale sand.

This was an ancient fireplace at the heart of a prehistoric “town hall”, around which early Stone Age people came together hundreds of thousands of years ago.

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New discovery: The ‘sacred boundary’ surrounding Stonehenge

Some 4,500 years ago, people dug a series of deep, wide pits in the area near Durrington Walls in southern England. They were gemometrically arranged, forming a 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) wide circle that enclosed over three square kilometers (1.16 square miles).

Long mistaken for naturally occuring features, the circle of human-made shafts has now come to be understood as a colossal project that lends new dimensions to the Stonehenge landscape.

An invisible ring around Durrington Walls

Durrington Walls is just a stone’s throw from the small English town of Amesbury, and just three kilometers, or about half an hour on foot, from Stonehenge. Each pit or shaft is approximately 10 meters (32.8 feet) wide and 5 meters deep.

Of the 20 pits discovered so far, a new study suggests that at least 15 form a huge, even circle around the henge of Durrington Walls. A henge is a type of prehistoric earthwork consisting of a ring-shaped bank, fortified with an inward ditch, encircling a flat circular area.

They were likely used for ceremonial purposes, to congregate or perform rituals. At the center of Durrington Walls used to be a circular structure of wooden posts, driven deep into the ground and surrounded by a settlement.

The pits were discovered years ago, but the newest research is just now uncovering more details, and providing deeper understanding. Scientists have now been able to date the structure to about 2480 BCE using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL).

The OSL method is a fairly precise way of pinpointing a sediment’s last exposure to light — and by extension, the last time it was covered or buried — by measuring the natural radiation captured in certain minerals like quartz and feldspar. This technique relies heavily on the quality of the sample and has a margin of error of about 5-10%.

The recent study shows that the circular structure did not accidentally form over centuries, but was the result of intentional efforts in a planned, momunental project. The pits were actively used as part of the cultural landscape — and traces of humans, plants and animals indicate deliberate coordination.

A ‘sacred boundary’ mapped with astounding precision

None of the shafts examined can be attributed to natural erosion of the chalky landscape — the pits’ sheer size and number clearly suggest they were dug by humans. They form a near-perfect circle, and are spaced at even intervals. The width and distance of the pits follow a clear pattern.

This means that the humans involved were able to mark distances, count steps or measurements, and work out a coordinated plan — all before they started digging. And so, what at first glance seemed like an assortment of strange holes became a rare testament to the fact that numbers, measurements, and large-scale planning were already part of the daily lives of Neolithic people living in the area.

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“Bronze Age People Didn’t Do That”: English Team Unearths “Unprecedented” Evidence of 4500-Year-Old Ancient Monument

British archaeologists have made a discovery they believe points to an unusual ancient monument that once stood in Northwest England 4,500 years ago.

The unique find, made by avocational archaeologists with the Wigan Archaeological Society, was discovered on a farm in the Greater Manchester area, after aerial photography of the region revealed an unusual, dark circular area in a farmer’s field.

Initial excavations at the discovery site had revealed what the Wigan team believed to be a burial site near Aspull, a village in the greater Wigan area. However, further studies at the site have revealed that there may be more to this ancient English mystery.

“We think it’s been repurposed from an earlier monument,” said Bill Aldridge, a member of the Wigan Archaeological Society, in a statement. Aldridge and others say the unique evidence they have unearthed, which includes a massive, oval-shaped ring ditch encircling the area, points to the existence of “a neolithic henge” that once stood there.

Such structures were unique to the Neolithic period and were not associated with later groups that occupied the area.

“Bronze Age people didn’t do that,” Aldridge recently told the BBC about his team’s discovery.

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Neanderthals’ Disappearance May Not Have Been from Extinction, Controversial New Study Argues

The disappearance of the Neanderthals—our archaic hominin cousins—remains one of the great unresolved riddles of ancient human history. Now, new research puts forward an intriguing theory: they may not have truly gone extinct.

At least not in the conventional sense of extinction, according to a paper published in Scientific Reports that argues the Neanderthals may have instead simply interbred with humans until they were essentially “absorbed” over long periods, as evidenced by new mathematical modeling.

The Mysterious Disappearance of the Neanderthals

“The disappearance of Neanderthals remains a subject of intense debate, with competing hypotheses attributing their demise to demographic decline, environmental change, competition with Homo sapiens, or genetic assimilation,” write authors Andrea Amadei, Giulia Lin, and Simone Fattorini in a new paper.

The team relied on a unique mathematical model that allowed them to show how small waves of ancient modern human immigration into populations of Neanderthals led to recurrent interbreeding. The resulting gene-mixing, they argue, “could have led to almost complete genetic substitution over 10,000–30,000 years.”

Computing Ancient Hominin Extinction

The team’s model, which is based primarily on the theory of neutral species drift, holds that most evolutionary changes within a species are due to the random genetic “drift” of mutational alleles—forms of genes that arise due to mutations—and are essentially neutral.

Employing a computational model on this basis allowed the research team to overstep considerations involving selective advantage or unexpected catastrophes that, throughout Earth’s ancient history, have also helped account for the sudden demise of species.

Instead, the team’s model “shows that sustained gene flow from a demographically larger species could account for Neanderthals’ genetic absorption into modern humans,” while also providing a good match for what archaeological data has yielded.

“This scenario aligns with growing evidence of interbreeding and genetic introgression through recurrent H. sapiens immigration waves,” the researchers write, adding that their findings offer an explanation that aligns with researchers’ past perspectives on the abundance of Neanderthal ancestry observed in modern European and Asian populations.

Lingering Questions

Given the abundance of evidence from genetic analysis in recent years that points to mixing between Neanderthals and modern humans, researchers have increasingly moved toward the idea that this ancient human species’ extinction was something more akin to an absorption, which occurred very gradually over time.

In their new study, Amadei, Lin, and Fattorini concede that while their mathematical models lend support to this theory, there are still a few remaining questions about precisely what circumstances may have led to the decline of the Neanderthals.

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Hidden Inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, a Tantalizing Discovery May Soon “Write a New Chapter in the History of the Pharaohs”

A remarkable discovery within the Great Pyramid of Giza could potentially reshape our understanding of ancient Egypt, one of the country’s most renowned Egyptologists has said.

The claims were made by Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass, who recently hinted at a tantalizing discovery that will come to light sometime in 2026, adding that he expects it will “rewrite history” and offer new insights into the ancient history of Egypt and its rulers.

The 78-year-old Egyptologist made comments during an appearance at the 44th Sharjah International Book Fair, where he described the mysterious discovery as one that will “write a new chapter in the history of the Pharaohs.”

A New Discovery at Giza’s Great Pyramid

Hawass, Egypt’s former Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, has conducted work at many of the country’s most renowned archaeological sites in the Western Desert and Nile Delta, among other locations.

During the recent event, Hawass offered additional clues about the forthcoming revelation, stating that “This great discovery is a new 30-meter-long passageway,” which he said had been “detected using advanced equipment,” and appears to lead to a concealed doorway within the Great Pyramid.

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Neanderthals created the world’s oldest cave art

Neanderthals didn’t just survive Europe’s Ice Age landscapes – they ventured into deep caves and made art. What they left isn’t figurative like the later animal scenes of Homo sapiens.

Instead, it is a repertoire of hand stencils, geometric signs, finger-drawn lines, and even built structures. This type of artmaking points to creative intent and symbolic behavior long before our species arrived.

The latest synthesis of discoveries from France and Spain shows that these nonfigurative markings and installations predate modern humans in western Europe by tens of millennia.

The research moves the long-running debate about Neanderthal cognition from speculation to evidence.

Neanderthal art decoded

All confirmed examples so far are nonfigurative – no animals or humans. Instead we see hand stencils made by blowing pigment over a hand, “finger flutings” pressed into soft cave surfaces, linear and geometric motifs, and purposeful arrangements of cave materials.

Neanderthals inhabited western Eurasia from about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago and have often been caricatured as the archetypal “cavemen.”

Questions about their cognitive and behavioral sophistication persist, and whether they produced art sits at the center of that debate.

Despite proof that Neanderthals used pigments and made jewelry, some researchers resisted the idea that they explored deep cave systems to create lasting imagery.

New dating work from researchers at Université de Bordeaux has shifted that view. In three Spanish caves – La Pasiega (Cantabria), Maltravieso (Extremadura), and Ardales (Málaga) – researchers documented linear signs, geometric shapes, hand stencils, and handprints made with pigments.

At La Roche-Cotard in France’s Loire Valley, Neanderthals left suites of lines and shapes in finger flutings (the trails left when fingers move through soft cave mud).

Testing Neanderthal creativity

Deep inside the Bruniquel Cave in southwest France, Neanderthals broke off stalactites into similarly sized sections and assembled them into a large oval structure, then lit fires on top.

It was not a shelter but something stranger – and if you saw it in a contemporary gallery, you might well call it “installation art.”

Now that well-dated examples exist in Spain and France, more finds are likely. The challenge is timekeeping: establishing reliable ages for Paleolithic cave art is technically difficult and often controversial.

Stylistic comparisons and links to excavated artifacts can help, but they only go so far.

Aging art in stone

There are three main ways to anchor ages. First, if black pigment is charcoal, radiocarbon can date when the wood burned.

But many black figures were drawn with mineral pigments (for example, manganese), which can’t be radiocarbon dated, and even genuine charcoal carries a risk. The date reflects when the wood died, not when someone used it.

Second, calcite flowstone (stalactites and stalagmites) that overgrows art is a natural time cap. Uranium–thorium dating can pin down when the calcite formed, giving a minimum age for the pigment or scoring beneath it.

Using this method, researchers dated calcite on top of red motifs in La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales to older than ~64,000 years.

Even at that youngest bound, the imagery predates the first Homo sapiens in Iberia by at least ~22,000 years, and Middle Paleolithic archaeology – the Neanderthals’ “calling card” – is abundant in all three caves.

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The Rise and Mysterious Fall of Cahokia: Researchers Unearth New Secrets of America’s Greatest ‘Lost’ Ancient Megacity

For centuries, the sprawling earth mounds of Cahokia have stood as silent remnants of a massive, lost American city. Once the largest and most influential urban settlement north of Mexico, this pre-Columbian metropolis near modern-day St. Louis mysteriously flourished, and then vanished, hundreds of years before European colonists arrived. 

Now, a team of researchers has uncovered new clues about Cahokia’s rise and decline, thanks to a single massive wooden monument that once towered over the landscape.

In a study published in PLOS ONE, scientists from the University of Arizona and the University of Illinois used advanced tree-ring dating and isotope analysis to determine that a monumental wooden post known as the “Mitchell Log” was cut around 1124 CE, at the height of Cahokia’s power. 

The analysis also revealed something unexpected and fascinating. The enormous bald cypress tree was not local. It had been transported at least 110 miles (180 kilometers) to the site, likely from southern Illinois or even farther south along the Mississippi River.

This finding reshapes our understanding of Cahokia’s reach and organization. The massive log, originally part of a towering 60-foot (18-meter) ceremonial post, offers a rare and significant timestamp for when the city’s influence stretched across the Midwest and South.

“The date, provenance, and context of the Mitchell Log establish a historical datum for the peak influence of the Cahokia polity,” the researchers write. “[It also] prompts new questions about the long-distance transport of thousands of other such marker posts.”

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Lead poisoning has been a feature of our evolution

Our hominid ancestors faced a Pleistocene world full of dangers—and apparently one of those dangers was lead poisoning.

Lead exposure sounds like a modern problem, at least if you define “modern” the way a paleoanthropologist might: a time that started a few thousand years ago with ancient Roman silver smelting and lead pipes. According to a recent study, however, lead is a much more ancient nemesis, one that predates not just the Romans but the existence of our genus Homo. Paleoanthropologist Renaud Joannes-Boyau of Australia’s Southern Cross University and his colleagues found evidence of exposure to dangerous amounts of lead in the teeth of fossil apes and hominins dating back almost 2 million years. And somewhat controversially, they suggest that the toxic element’s pervasiveness may have helped shape our evolutionary history.

The Romans didn’t invent lead poisoning

Joannes-Boyau and his colleagues took tiny samples of preserved enamel and dentin from the teeth of 51 fossils. In most of those teeth, the paleoanthropologists found evidence that these apes and hominins had been exposed to lead—sometimes in dangerous quantities—fairly often during their early years.

Tooth enamel forms in thin layers, a little like tree rings, during the first six or so years of a person’s life. The teeth in your mouth right now (and of which you are now uncomfortably aware; you’re welcome) are a chemical and physical record of your childhood health—including, perhaps, whether you liked to snack on lead paint chips. Bands of lead-tainted tooth enamel suggest that a person had a lot of lead in their bloodstream during the year that layer of enamel was forming (in this case, “a lot” means an amount measurable in parts per million).

In 71 percent of the hominin teeth that Joannes-Boyau and his colleagues sampled, dark bands of lead in the tooth enamel showed “clear signs of episodic lead exposure” during the crucial early childhood years. Those included teeth from 100,000-year-old members of our own species found in China and 250,000-year-old French Neanderthals. They also included much earlier hominins who lived between 1 and 2 million years ago in South Africa: early members of our genus Homo, along with our relatives Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus. Lead exposure, it turns out, is a very ancient problem.

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Subsurface Structures Detected at Göbekli Tepe

Archaeological investigations at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Türkiye have revealed rectangular architectural features, possibly used as dwellings. These were found beside the site’s well-known circular enclosures. The discovery offers fresh insight into how ritual and daily life coexisted in one of the world’s earliest Neolithic settlements.

Survey Methods and Discovery

Under the umbrella of the Heritage for the Future and Stone Mounds (Taş Tepeler) initiatives, researchers from Istanbul University, the German Archaeological Institute, and Freie Universität Berlin carried out integrated geophysical surveys, including geomagnetic mapping, ground-penetrating radar (GPR), and lidar scanning.
These subsurface investigations have identified not only the well-known circular pillars and enclosures but also rectangular structural traces that could represent early dwellings.

From Monumental to Domestic: Interpreting the New Structures

Project director Prof. Necmi Karul explained that the rectangular formations are concentrated primarily on the eastern and southern slopes of the mound. He described this phase as a shift toward documenting previously undisturbed zones.

Earlier this year, the removal of olive trees allowed full-scale measurements for the first time. This helped clarify the site’s boundaries and guide future excavations.

Geoarchaeology Reveals New Insights

Led by Prof. Barbara Horejs of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, geoarchaeological studies used high-resolution scans to identify a large building and several smaller house-like structures. Her team emphasized the importance of ongoing analysis in guiding future excavation strategies.

Highlights of the 2025 Excavation Season

  • Life-size human statue: Discovered between Enclosures B and D, the sculpture features a clearly defined head and torso. It complements earlier finds such as the wild boar statue.
  • Restoration of Enclosure C: Conservation teams stabilized the walls, repaired erosion damage, and re-erected columns to protect the monumental complex.

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Psychedelic beer may have helped pre-Inca empire in Peru schmooze elite outsiders and consolidate power

The growth of a pre-Inca civilization known as the Wari may have been aided by psychedelic-laced beer, researchers propose in a new study.

The Wari flourished from roughly A.D. 600 to 1000 and are known for their mummified burials, human sacrifices, and elaborate objects created out of gold, silver and bronze. They also built cities such as Huari and Pikillaqta, which contained temples and dwellings for elite inhabitants, and controlled much of Peru as well as parts of Argentina and Chile.

In the new study, published Monday (Oct. 6) in the journal La Revista de Arqueología Americana (The Journal of American Archaeology), the researchers suggest that Wari rulers used psychedelics mixed in beer to help grow their empire. They explain that the “afterglow” — the long-term effect of drinking the mix — would have lasted weeks and that communal feasts where it was drunk would have brought people together. While the body may excrete psychedelics quickly, the aftereffects can last for days or weeks.

The study authors noted that the remains of seeds from a plant named Anadenanthera colubrina (also known as vilca) have been found at Wari sites, including near the remains of beer made from a plant called Schinus molle. Mixing the vilca, which is known to produce a psychedelic effect, with the beer would have “lessened but extended the high,” Justin Jennings, a curator of South American Archaeology at the Royal Ontario Museum and co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email.

In the paper, the authors noted that scientific studies of similarly acting psychedelics found that people who took them tended to display “greater openness and empathy.”

These traits “would have been highly desirable for a Wari political system that depended on friendly, routine face-to-face interactions between people who had once been strangers or even enemies,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

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