Tag: lost civilizations

Neanderthals may have hunted and eaten outsiders, chilling cannibalism study finds

A new study of Neanderthal remains from a cave in Belgium is shedding light on a disturbing aspect of prehistoric life. Researchers analyzing human bones from the Troisième caverne of Goyet (Belgium) found evidence that Neanderthals engaged in selective cannibalism between 41,000 and 45,000 years ago. The remains show that adult women and children were the primary victims.

For the first time, scientists were able to build a biological profile of the individuals whose bones were found at the site. Their findings suggest these people did not belong to the local Neanderthal group living in the area. Instead, they likely came from elsewhere and were brought to the cave.

Evidence of Butchering and Consumption

The condition of the bones provides key clues about what happened. Many show marks consistent with cutting, breaking, and processing, similar to the way animals were hunted and prepared for food. In particular, the lower limbs appear to have been selected, and the bones were deliberately broken open to extract nutrient-rich marrow.

This pattern strongly suggests the bodies were not treated in a ceremonial or ritual way. Instead, the evidence points to cannibalism for food. The same techniques used on animal prey were applied to these human victims, indicating they were processed as a source of nutrition.

The research, published in Scientific Reports, was carried out by an international team that included scientists from the CNRS (Culture, Environment and Anthropology unit), l’Université de Bordeaux, and l’Université d’Aix-Marseille, along with researchers from the Environmental Geosciences Research and Teaching Centre (Aix-Marseille Univ/CNRS/INRAE/IRD).

A Violent Time in the Late Middle Paleolithic

These findings come from a period known as the late Middle Paleolithic (a prehistoric era spanning roughly from 300,000 to 40,000 years ago, most commonly associated in Europe with Neanderthals). During this time, Neanderthal groups in Northern Europe displayed a wide range of cultural behaviors, and early Homo sapiens were beginning to appear in nearby regions.

In this context, the targeted nature of the cannibalism is especially striking. The fact that the victims appear to have been outsiders suggests that different groups may have come into conflict. Researchers propose that this behavior could reflect territorial tensions between Neanderthal communities, possibly linked to competition for resources or space.

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A 2000-Year-Old ‘Lost Script’ Has Been Deciphered—Now It May Help Solve the Enduring Mystery of Ancient Teotihuacan

At the height of its power, the ancient city of Teotihuacan was a marvel of grandeur and magnificence in ancient Mesoamerica, having ascended to become its largest city, as well as being one of its most culturally significant.

Yet by 900 A.D., Teotihuacan had fallen under the might of the invading Toltecs, and knowledge of who had assembled one of the leading cultural centers of the early Americas was erased. Little was left for modern archaeologists beyond the culture’s imposing architecture, which include the famous Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon.

However, these impressive structural remnants were not all that the inhabitants of Teotihuacan left behind. Amid the site’s ruins, ancient murals, and the artifacts that have weathered Mesoamerican climates for millennia, archaeologists have also found symbols left by the city’s ancient inhabitants, which to this day have remained undeciphered.

That is, until now. In a new research effort, led by Magnus Pharao Hansen and Christopher Helmke of the University of Copenhagen, the meaning behind Teotihuacan’s enigmatic symbols is finally coming to light, revealing new evidence of an early Uto-Aztecan writing system.

The discovery, detailed in a study that appeared in the journal Current Anthropology, could potentially reshape theories about the ancient city and its inhabitants, and opens a window to more deeply understanding the lives and beliefs of those who once thrived at Teotihuacan before its fall.

This ancient Uto-Aztecan writing system, the researchers say, appears to have evolved over time into the Cora, Huichol, and ultimately the Nahuatl languages, the latter being associated with the Aztecs.

After studying symbols found in Teotihuacan’s murals and artifacts, the researchers concluded that these markings form a true writing system. They suggest it represents an early Uto-Aztecan language, which later evolved into Cora, Huichol, and Nahuatl, the language associated with the Aztecs.

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What a piece of 15,0000-year-old jewellery found in a Devon cave tells us about this prehistoric ‘civilization’

A piece of prehistoric jewellery, discovered in a West Country cave, is helping to shed new light on Stone Age Europe’s most spectacular culture.

Known as the Magdalenian, that 21,000 to 13,000 year old prehistoric ‘civilization’ dominated much of Western Europe, particularly southwest France, northern Spain and parts of Britain and Germany for most of the final 10,000 years of the Ice Age. A detailed scientific analysis of the British Magdalenian jewellery item, carried out at University College London and the Natural History Museum, has now revealed that it was a polished pendant made from a seal’s tooth.

It’s the first such artefact identified in Britain – and only the fourth anywhere in Europe.

The discovery adds to the substantial evidence showing that Stone Age Magdalenians were extremely fashion-conscious – and that they had a particularly strong preference for maritime-originating jewellery.

For, as well as the four seal-tooth pendants, many sites across Europe, often located far from the sea, have yielded literally thousands of marine shells, virtually all of which would have been used as personal adornments (as pendants, like the seal tooth – but also to beautify clothing and for use in necklaces, bracelets, anklets and headwear).

The scientific investigation into the British artifact (found in Kent’s Cavern, Torquay, Devon) has identified it as a premolar tooth of a grey seal, that had been polished and perforated by a Magdalenian artisan, using a handheld flint boring tool. Microscopic analysis of the wear pattern in the hole has revealed that the tooth had been worn as a pendant, suspended on some sort of cord. The wear, caused by the cord, was so substantial that the pendant appears to have been worn for many years or even decades.

Indeed, it’s conceivable that it may have been a valued heirloom, worn successively by several generations of the same family. Its value and significance to the Kent’s Cavern Magdalenian community – probably an extended family living there seasonally for many generations – is underlined by the fact that the seal tooth would have had to have initially been imported from the seashore which in Magdalenian times was between 50 and 100 miles away.

However, there would have been a direct river connection between the Kent’s Cavern area and the sea – along the river Teign’s prehistoric lower course (now submerged under the English Channel) and then along a now long-vanished major prehistoric waterway, dubbed the Channel River by archaeologists, to the Atlantic. In Magdalenian times, the Thames, the Rhine and the Seine were merely that Channel River’s major tributaries.

Even when living hundreds of miles from the sea, Magdalenian people had a strong cultural connection to it.

Via the Channel River and its many tributaries, they had an easy and direct connection to the Atlantic. They used large numbers of periwinkle, European cowrie and so-called ‘tusk’ shells as well as fossilised molluscs, sea urchin spines and sharks’ teeth to make jewellery and other adornments.

Like ordinary Atlantic seashells, these fossils must have been highly valued because they were often imported from hundreds of miles away. Shells were also imported to inland Magdalenian sites in France, Spain, Germany and Czechia from the Mediterranean. Some had travelled up to 600 miles.

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Early humans in South Africa were quarrying stone as far back as 220,000 years ago

As long as 220,000 years ago—far earlier than previously thought—people quarried rocks for their tools in places they specifically sought out. An international research team led by the University of Tübingen has demonstrated this behavior at the Jojosi site in South Africa, challenging the prevailing view that Paleolithic hunter–gatherers collected their raw materials incidentally during other activities. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Evidence of deliberate rock quarrying

“At Jojosi, we found numerous traces of the quarrying of hornfels—a metamorphic shale—including blocks that were tested for their quality, flakes of various sizes, thousands of millimeter-sized pieces of production waste and hammerstones,” says Dr. Manuel Will from the Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen. Hornfels is a fine-grained rock that was frequently used to produce tools in the Stone Age. “People worked cobbles on site here and knapped the material until they had achieved the desired shape from the rock—probably to make tools from it later.”

The researchers almost exclusively found “production waste” here. The absence of both the end products and other traces of activity and settlement indicate that the people of Stone Age Jojosi were solely and deliberately seeking to extract the coveted raw material. Remarkably, they were doing this for tens of thousands of years, at least until 110,000 BCE, as can be seen from the luminescence dating of the finds. Given its great age and long period of use, Jojosi adds new facets to the image of early Homo sapiens, indicating that they planned the long-term acquisition of resources much earlier than previously thought.

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Archaeologists Are Mystified by These 2,000-Year-Old Bodies Found Seated Upright and Facing West in France

In 2024, archaeologists in France discovered an unusual grave site that contained 13 sets of human remains. All of the individuals appeared to have been buried sitting upright and facing west—a highly unusual and puzzling position.

Now, the researchers say they’ve identified at least five additional seated burials in a previously unexplored area of the same site. The latest discoveries raise more questions about the culture these individuals belonged to more than 2,000 years ago.

According to a March 18 statement from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), the team unearthed the skeletons while conducting excavations during ongoing renovations of the Josephine Baker primary school complex in Dijon, located in France’s east-central Burgundy region.

Just like the remains found in 2024, the newly discovered individuals were interred upright in a seated position, with their faces turned west and their hands resting in their laps. At least three appear to have been buried in a line parallel to the initially identified graves, about 66 feet away.

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Native Americans invented dice and games of chance more than 12,000 years ago, archaeological study reveals

Indigenous people in the western United States invented dice more than 12,000 years ago, offering archaeologists the world’s oldest evidence of gambling and possibly the oldest use of probability, a new study reveals. But the purpose of these games of chance was very different from modern-day gambling, as the games helped people — mostly women, evidence hints — interact with new acquaintances and redistribute goods and wealth.

“There is a deep history of dice, games of chance and gambling in Native America,” Robert Madden, an archaeologist at Colorado State University, told Live Science. “This precedes any evidence we have of dice in the Old World by 6,000 years.”

In a study published Thursday (April 2) in the journal American Antiquity, Madden looked at more than 600 sets of Native American dice from 45 prehistoric archaeological sites in the western U.S. from 13,000 to 450 years ago. He discovered that dice were present at Indigenous sites on both sides of the Rocky Mountains throughout this lengthy period.

“This is the first evidence we have of structured human engagement with the concepts of chance and randomness,” Madden said. “We’re seeing really complex practices and an intellectual accomplishment here.”

To identify the prehistoric dice, Madden first turned to a century-old book called “Games of the North American Indians” by Stewart Culin, an anthropologist who gathered historic accounts of Native American games. Culin described the dice as “binary lots” where one side of the flat or curved object was marked with a specific pattern or color and the other side was blank. Tossing a binary lot and allowing it to fall at random is similar to flipping a coin, and Indigenous people would often toss multiple lots to produce mathematically complicated outcomes.

Using Culin’s descriptions, Madden searched archaeological archives for artifacts that could be dice. He found 565 “diagnostic” examples of dice and 94 “probable” examples across 58 archaeological sites in the Great Plains and the Rockies. But there were no dice in the eastern half of the U.S. until after the arrival of Europeans.

“The dice tend to show up in liminal spaces where you have a lot of high mobility,” Madden explained. “It might have something to do with how separated these people are and the need to relate to people you don’t see very often.” That is, dice games may have been invented as a “social technology of integration,” he said, or an icebreaker for strangers who wanted to exchange goods, information or mates.

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Homo Erectus Made Handaxes With Fossils And Crystals As “Mediators Between Humans And The Cosmos”

Prehistoric humans even older than the Neanderthals deliberately produced stone tools with fossils and geodes at their center. According to researchers, these exceptional items were probably infused with a kind of spiritual “potency”, hinting at the existence of ritual practices and abstract beliefs among early members of the Homo lineage.

The incredible lithic assemblage was first discovered in the Sakhnin Valley in Israel by local independent researcher Muataz Shalata, who then contacted Professor Ran Barkai from Tel Aviv University. Describing the moment when the pair met, Barkai told IFLScience how “Muataz took a handaxe out of his bag and gave it to me with the fossils facing down, so the face I saw looked like a regular handaxe. But when I turned it around, I was really shocked.” 

“It’s the first time I’d seen something like that, and in fact I think no one has seen something like that, so It was a really, really impressive moment,” he said.

Palaeolithic handaxes are extremely common worldwide, and are typically knapped from flint or chert. Only a few “exceptional” examples have ever been found, including one in England that features a shell at its center and one from the famous Sima de los Huesos site in Spain, which is made of brown-veined quartzite.

In the Sakhnin Valley, however, Barkai and Shalata went on to discover 10 extraordinary handaxes featuring fossils and crystals. They also found a spheroid shaped from a geode – a task that would have been extremely difficult to accomplish, given the almost impossibility of knapping such crystals.

While the Sakhnin Valley is unusually rich in fossils and geodes, Barkai says that it also contains an abundance of high-quality flint – and indeed, the team have so far uncovered around 200 regular flint handaxes bearing no exceptional features. The fact that some tools were made from less amenable materials therefore suggests that this was an intentional act that was performed for a particular reason.

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Mystery of ‘second Sphinx’ deepens as new footage reveals shafts that could lead to hidden structure

The possibility of a second sphinx in Egypt has sparked renewed debate after new footage revealed dozens of deep shafts surrounding a mysterious mound at Giza.

The video documented more than 100 shafts clustered around the site in the northwest corner of the plateau, near the western cemetery of Giza, a region historically filled with burial shafts and ancient tomb complexes.

The renewed interest follows claims by researcher Filippo Biondi last week that scans detected a large anomaly deep beneath the mound, which he believes may be a long-lost sphinx.

The footage, released by independent researcher Trevor Grassi of the Archaeological Rescue Foundation, captured dozens of square shafts carved into bedrock, many reportedly extending deep underground but filled primarily with sand.

Grassi, who has spent nearly two decades researching Giza, said the video shows him physically walking along the perimeter of the mound, passing shaft after shaft cut directly into the limestone, some only about three feet across, while others measure roughly eight feet wide.

He said the unusually dense concentration of shafts surrounding the mound raises new questions about what may lie beneath the surface.

The footage is among the first to document the full perimeter of the site, offering what supporters of a second sphinx described as critical context for the ongoing debate.

While no definitive proof of a second sphinx has been discovered, researchers say the location warrants further investigation, given the number of openings and the underground anomaly previously detected at the site.

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Oldest Dog DNA Ever Found Reveals How Ancient Our Friendship Really Is

The discovery of the oldest ever dog DNA suggests they have been our best friends for nearly 16,000 years – 5,000 years earlier than had previously been thought, new research said Wednesday.

Despite being ubiquitous in the homes, backyards and hearts of people across the world, surprisingly little is known about where dogs come from.

“It’s just an interesting mystery,” Swedish geneticist Pontus Skoglund of the UK’s Francis Crick Institute told reporters.

Dogs are most likely a mix of two types of grey wolves, he said. However exactly when dogs diverged from wolves has been difficult to trace, partly because their ancient bones are tricky to tell apart.

That is why scientists behind two new studies published in the journal Nature sequenced the genomes from archaeological remains, shedding light on the elusive origins of our furry friends.

The first study revealed that the world’s oldest canine DNA was discovered in a piece of a skull in Pinarbasi in what is now Turkey.

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A SECOND Sphinx detected in Egypt as scans hint at ‘underground megastructure’

Ancient Egyptians may have left behind a cryptic clue to a hidden second Sphinx,  carved directly into stone more than 3,000 years ago.

The Dream Stele, positioned between the paws of the Great Sphinx, appears to depict two sphinx figures, hinting that the legendary monument may once have had a twin.

Now, Italian researchers who, in 2025, claimed to have uncovered massive underground structures beneath the Giza Plateau believe they have identified the second guardian buried deep beneath the sands. 

Filippo Biondi revealed the discovery on Thursday while speaking on the Matt Beall Limitless podcast, explaining that lines drawn from the pyramids to the known Sphinx point to an identical mirrored location where the buried structure is believed to lie.

‘We are finding precise geometrical correlation, 100 percent of correlation, in this symmetry,’ he said, adding: ‘We are very confident to announce this… we have a confidence about 80 percent.’

Using satellite radar technology capable of detecting subtle ground vibrations, Biondi claimed the data points to a massive structure concealed beneath a 180-foot-high mound of hardened sand, which he said is composed of solidified sand rather than natural bedrock. 

Preliminary scans show vertical shafts and passageways strikingly similar to those already found beneath the original Sphinx, with dense vertical lines believed to represent the solid walls of underground shafts rather than empty voids. 

Beyond the possible second Sphinx, Biondi believes the findings hint at something even larger, an extensive underground complex beneath the Giza Plateau itself.

‘Down underneath the Giza Plateau, there is something very huge that we are measuring,’ he said. ‘There is an underground megastructure.’

The Dream Stele, also known as the Sphinx Stele, was erected between the front paws of the Great Sphinx of Giza by Pharaoh Thutmose IV around 1401 BC, during Egypt’s 18th Dynasty. 

The ancient inscription, like many created during the New Kingdom, was intended to reinforce the ruler’s divine right to the throne.

Legend has it that the stele justified Thutmose IV’s unexpected rise to power by recounting a dream where the Sphinx promised him the throne in exchange for restoring the monument, blending political propaganda with religious legitimacy and documenting early restoration efforts.

However, Biondi and his team believe there is more truth than myth behind the imagery, saying the carvings showing two sphinx figures may not have been symbolic at all, but instead a clue to the layout of the monuments themselves.

 He and his team are not the only researchers to suggest a second Sphinx may be buried beneath the Giza Plateau, as Egyptologist Bassam El Shammaa first raised the theory more than a decade ago.

El Shammaa cited ancient Egyptian records and mythology describing lightning striking the Sphinx, which he believes may refer to a second monument that was later destroyed, possibly after being cursed by one of Egypt’s most powerful deities.

Egypt’s former Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass has long dismissed El Shammaa’s theory, noting in 2017 the area has been dug by so many archaeologists, and it yielded nothing.

However, Biondi explained that when they traced a line from the center of the Khafre Pyramid to the existing Sphinx, the alignment created a precise geometric path across the plateau, forming what he described as a mirrored reference line used to identify the second location. 

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