News Desk

Court officials and craftspeople serving early Egyptian kings may have been sacrificed when their ruler died, according to research that found fractures in several ancient skulls. The research was published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

Deep in Peru’s Acarí Valley lie the ruins of Tambo Viejo, an Inka provincial center where excavations have uncovered tasseled sacrificial llamas and brightly adorned guinea pigs. But save for a few seeds and some stored leaves, evidence of how the Inka used one of their most sacred plants in rituals remained elusive. Now, archaeologists have discovered coca leaves still stuck in the wool of some sacrificed llamas. The discovery, reported in the journal Ñawpa Pacha, is the first direct evidence of coca in a ritual at the site. It contradicts what Spanish chroniclers reported hundreds of years ago: that coca was burned or bundled up during ritual offerings.

A new study of the available genetic evidence suggests the group that gave rise to today’s Indigenous people migrated to the Americas no earlier than 21,000 years ago. “The evidence points to the arrival of humans ancestral to contemporary Indigenous peoples likely near the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, but earlier migrations may also have occurred,” study co-authors… The study was published online Sept. 23 in the journal Current Opinion in Genetics & Development,

Close analysis of this remarkably detailed fossil suggests the evolutionary path to flight may be far more forked than we thought. Norellraptor is described in a new paper by paleontologist Xuri Wang of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences and his colleagues. The paper is published in Nature Communications.

After months of searching with the Earth’s most powerful telescope, a single star showed us the true scale of the universe.

A longitudinal study of people attending ayahuasca retreats found that those with higher levels of resilience before the retreat tended to report somewhat more intense challenging experiences during their ayahuasca ceremonies. More resilient participants also showed a stronger link between these difficult experiences and searching for meaning in life a month later. The paper was published in Psychedelic Medicine.

In the summer of 2026, researchers from the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology (LDA) Saxony-Anhalt succeeded in unlocking another secret of the lake. The new finds date back around 10,500 years, when people were not yet permanently settled and lived by hunting, gathering and fishing. During this period, which archaeologists refer to as the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), the shaman of Bad Dürrenberg also lived—and there is evidence that people were already present on the shores of Lake Arendsee.

Deep in the murky waters of an ancient lake in Turkey lie mysterious ruins that researchers believe could be part of a forgotten city, rewriting human history.

Combining the psychedelic brew ayahuasca with specialized psychotherapy may help ease the severe psychological pain that follows the loss of a close family member. An exploratory clinical trial published in Scientific Reports found that participants receiving this combined treatment experienced greater reductions in grief severity than those receiving therapy alone or no treatment

In a shallow cave high on a cliff in Chalcatzingo, Mexico, scientists documented three red glyphs in the 1980s, but the paintings received relatively little attention. Fast forward to the present day, and researchers have returned to the cave to take a closer look at what the ancient painted symbols mean. Their interpretations of what these rock paintings are and could represent are detailed in a study published in the journal Antiquity.

Bones from extinct elephant-like creatures discovered along the shore of Lake Tagua Tagua in central Chile bear human-made cut marks and were found alongside stone tools, revealing that some of the first humans to live there were killing and eating these animals 13,000 years ago, new research shows.

Imagine picking up a black stone from an old riverbed in Brazil. Its surface shines like glass, but inside it is riddled with tiny holes. Break it open, and you would find not one crystal, but a tightly packed mass of miniature diamonds. Where did this strange stone come from? A study suggests that an ancient impact may have helped carry carbon-rich material deep into Earth.

Consciousness may have evolved to help living things resolve competing needs when their survival is at stake, rather than simply emerging from greater intelligence. This theoretical account was published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Southeastern Europe and the Balkans are a key region for understanding the European Neolithic. Many ways of life and economic systems that continue to shape our lives today first emerged there in Europe and later spread across the continent. In an article published in the journal Archaeologica Austria, researchers have published the latest data on the Vinča site at Opovo Ugar-Bajbuk.

According to a new study led by physicist Luis Anchordoqui of Lehman College in the US, in a Universe with a dark dimension, all primordial black holes (PBHs) must be five-dimensional – barring some exotic, unknown new physics at low energies. They can’t help themselves otherwise.

Archaeologists excavating in the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusha have uncovered a fragment of the world’s oldest peace treaty, signed around 1269 B.C.