Bronze is mostly copper with a smaller share of tin, and the copper that prehistoric miners could reach was scattered ...

Under the soil and corrosion that coat some of China's most spectacular bronze masks, scraps of cloth have survived for ...

In a drawer at the herbarium of Kew Gardens, in southwest London, there is a dry twig collected in Ghana in 1974. (A ...

An animal stepped on a mudbrick while it was still soft and left its paw prints in the clay. The brick went into the wall of ...

Researchers at Lund University have found that the leftovers of a virus that swept through chimpanzees millions of years ago silenced a gene that humans keep active while the brain forms. When the ...

There are more than 8,000 species of amphibians on Earth, and not one of them lives in the sea. Fewer than 2% tolerate any salt at all, and even those have limits. It is a striking gap. Whales, sea ...

Excavators at Troy have recovered a bone flute from around 800 BC, which they describe as the first musical instrument found at the site in more than 160 years of digging. The head of a human-shaped ...

A small village church just outside Lugo, in northwest Spain, has been described for decades as a plain medieval building. A new study argues that it is about 300 years older than that, and that it ...

Remains of a right hand belonging to the Neanderthal individual from Abauntz, shown from different angles. Credit: Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA Six hand bones from Abauntz Cave in northern Spain are ...

Almost nothing survives of what people wore in the Iron Age. Linen, wool and dyes are all organic matter, and in most soils they simply rot away. Archaeologists therefore tend to reconstruct the ...

When the James Webb Space Telescope began photographing galaxies from the universe's earliest chapters, astronomers ran into ...

On Tuesday, October 20, a team in southeastern Spain lifted a block of stone out of a wall where it had been sitting for ...