Archeology

Time capsules are a fun way to get a glimpse into life in the past, and now scientists have opened one from almost 3,000 years ago. The team successfully extracted DNA from inside an ancient clay brick, revealing the area's ecosystem at the time.

The earliest spice mix for a Southeast Asian curry has been identified on a sandstone slab excavated from the Óc Eo site in Vietnam. Incredibly, many of the ingredients are still key in curries today, but it also tells a tale about ancient trade routes.

Researchers from University College London's Institute of Archaeology have uncovered a cache of 800 stone artefacts dating to more than 300,000 years ago. The find includes one of the largest hand-axes ever unearthed in Britain.

Cannibalism among our ancestors is not a surprise, but scientists have been taken aback to find clues of this behavior that hail from 1.45 million years ago. Precision cuts made with a stone tool suggests there were some skilful butchers around too.

At a recent excavation in the Donau-Ries region of Germany, a bronze sword has been unearthed that's reported to be more than 3,000 years old, and is so well preserved that the archeologists who discovered it said that it almost shines.

It’s hard to construct a building without a plan, but when did humans first start doing that? Archeologists have discovered the oldest known blueprints, with a 9,000-year-old rock carving in Jordan depicting a to-scale plan for a nearby megastructure.

Six incredible ancient Egypt animal coffins have been examined for the first time. To do so, scientists used pioneering neutron imaging, which meant the mummified lizards' stories could be pieced together without the sealed sarcophagi being opened.

Horses were likely the first “vehicle” humans used to travel faster and farther, but when exactly did we start riding them? Scientists have now found archeological evidence that suggests horseback riding started some 5,000 years ago.

A new archeological discovery has confirmed that tempered steel was used by artisans in the Iberian Peninsula to carve intricate motifs into hard rock stelae during the Final Bronze Age, earlier than previously thought.

History is full of artifacts that later turn out to be fakes, but occasionally the opposite can happen. New analysis of ancient Roman coins long dismissed as forgeries has found they seem to be authentic, revealing a previously unknown Roman emperor.

Scientists have discovered the earliest evidence of cooking food through controlled use of fire, dating back 780,000 years. An archeological site in Israel contains fish remains that, on closer examination, show clear signs of having been cooked.

Scientists have sequenced the genomes of two ancient skeletons and found the oldest human DNA in the British isles. The data reveals the story of two separate migrations of early humans into what is now the UK, and how these different cultures lived.