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 turtles and penguins each show that mammals, reptiles and birds can live at sea, with no […]

When the James Webb Space Telescope began photographing galaxies from the universe’s earliest chapters, astronomers ran into a problem. There were more very bright galaxies than their models predicted, and some looked far too massive for such a young cosmos. Part of that puzzle has since faded. Some of those objects turned out to be […]

Between 34,000 and 25,000 years ago, much of Europe shared a way of life that archaeologists call the Gravettian. It is recognized by its stone and bone tools, by the way people buried their dead, and by small carved figurines of women known as Venus figurines. They turn up from the Atlantic side of the […]

On Tuesday, October 20, a team in southeastern Spain lifted a block of stone out of a wall where it had been sitting for about twenty centuries. The block carries fragments of two lines of text. The letters of the main line are 23 centimeters (9 inches) tall, a little more than the width of […]

When an electron meets a positron, both vanish. Their mass turns into energy and nothing is left of either particle. That is the main reason positrons are so hard to study. There is no jar to keep them in, because the walls of any container are made of ordinary matter, and a single touch would […]

About 2,000 years ago, while Augustus ruled Rome, a leftover patch of ice in the Canadian Arctic stopped shrinking and began to grow. A team from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, argues that this turning point marked the beginning of the next glaciation, what most people would call the next ice age. […]

In 160 years of digging at Troy, nobody had found anything you could play. Archaeologists have pulled walls, gates, jewelry, weapons and tableware out of the ground in huge quantities, but never an instrument. This season that changed. The team led by Rüstem Aslan of Onsekiz Mart University in Çanakkale, in northwestern Turkey, recovered a […]

Roman Spain had a network of official roadside stops for officials, soldiers and couriers, yet archaeologists know very few of them for certain. A new study may have added one. The building lies on the edge of Mellaria, a Roman town in the south of the country, on the road between the provincial capitals of […]

On a gravel plain in northern Western Sahara, with no shade for miles, there is a heap of stones 54.5 meters (179 feet) long. Two rows of stone slabs run out from it like the arms of a V that never quite closes. Archaeologists call these rows “antennae”, and the monuments antennae tumuli (a tumulus […]

In the early 5th century, a woman of high rank was buried beside an old Roman posting station on the Via Augusta, in what is now the province of Castellón. Her grave held a glass cup and two gold pins in a style from the Danube region. Her brother died in Mérida, the Roman city […]

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 history of textiles from the tools that do last, above all spindle whorls: small stone or ceramic discs that weigh down the […]

Some 1,900 years ago, a man named Thrasymedes gave a thin sheet of gold to a god who was neither Greek nor Roman. The deity came from the borderlands of what is now southeastern Turkey. The offering was left inside a Roman army fort on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, in modern Georgia, […]

The church is Santa Eulalia de Esperante, known in Galician as Santalla de Esperante. It stands in a hamlet a few kilometres southwest of Lugo. Until now, historians saw a simple rural church from the high Middle Ages, with one nave, a square east end and a smooth 18th-century front topped by a bell gable […]

In 2006, the Carabinieri, Italy’s national military police, raised the alarm about illegal digging in a forest of oaks and chestnuts near Vetralla, in the province of Viterbo, north of Rome. The Soprintendenza, the state body in charge of archaeology in the region, sent a team to the site for an emergency excavation in May […]

If matter and antimatter had come out of the Big Bang in equal amounts, there would be no stars today. Every particle has an antimatter twin with the opposite electric charge, and when the two meet, both vanish in a burst of energy. A perfect balance would have left a universe of pure light, with […]

Neanderthals left plenty of traces in the western Pyrenees, the mountain range that separates Spain from France. Stone tools, butchered animal bones, the leftovers of their camps. What nobody had ever found in Navarre, the region of northern Spain whose capital is Pamplona, was a single bone of the people themselves. On Monday that changed, […]

About 2,200 years ago, someone pressed a finger into a lump of damp clay to stick down the flap of a suit of armour. The kiln sealed that print, and it has survived intact ever since. Now a team from the museum at the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang and from Shandong University has used […]

Around 4,200 years ago, in the dry south-east of the Iberian Peninsula, a society began building cities on hilltops, stockpiling grain on a large scale and arming its warriors with halberds (blades like axe heads mounted on long poles) and metal swords. Archaeologists call it El Argar. Further north, in what are now La Mancha, […]

Around 1200 BC, the eastern Mediterranean fell apart. The great empires of the Bronze Age collapsed, many cities were destroyed or emptied, writing disappeared from much of the region, and long-distance trade shrank to almost nothing. Archaeologists call what came next the dark age, and the name is earned: with few texts and almost no […]

Ancient geographers listed many cities called Arsinoe, from Cyprus to Cilicia (in what is now southern Turkey), from Ephesus to the Gulf of Suez. Most of them were linked to the Ptolemies, the dynasty that ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great. One, however, lies far from the Nile. It stood in the […]