June 1, 1952, was Whitsunday, and provided the young Michael Ventris with a convenient break from his duties as an architect. At the end of the day he would write his 20th Work Note on Minoan Language Research, with the somewhat disbelieving title, “Are the Knossos and Pylos Tablets Written in Greek?” Responsibility was disclaimed: this was only “a frivolous digression”, that would “sooner or later come to an impasse, or dissipate itself in absurdities.” It became instead one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century.

The first Linear B tablets had been discovered at Knossos on the island of Crete. Kephala Hill, as it was then known, was one of the few true ‘tells’ in the Greek world and preserved rich layers of inhabitation dating back to the younger stone age (7,000 BC). The archaeological significance of the site had been clear already in the late 19th century, its first excavator being the fatefully named Minos Kalokairinos. He found great storage jars, pithoi, from which the locals began to call the site Ta Pitaria. These had been placed in hallways of great stone blocks, many carved with curious but distinctive signs.

Before he was bludgeoned to death and left in a Danish bog, an ancient individual now known as Vittrup Man was an emblem of past and future ways of living.

He was born more than 5,000 years ago into a community of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who probably lived in northern Scandinavia as their ancestors had for millennia. But Vittrup Man spent his adult life across the sea in Denmark among farming communities, whose ancestors came from the Middle East.

For many years, researchers at MPI-EVA have been collecting and analyzing ancient DNA from humans who lived during the past tens of thousands of years. Analyzing these data has allowed the researchers to trace the movement and mixing of people, and even to uncover ancient pathogens that affected their lives. However, a systematic study of uncommon genetic conditions had not been attempted. One of those uncommon conditions, known as Down syndrome, nowadays affects around one in 1,000 births.

To their surprise, Adam "Ben" Rohrlach and colleagues identified six individuals with an unusually high number of DNA sequences from Chromosome 21 that could only be explained by an additional copy of Chromosome 21. The work has been published in Nature Communications.

One case from a church graveyard in Finland was dated to the 17th to 18th century. The remaining five individuals were much older: dating to between 5,000 and 2,500 years before present, they were found at Bronze Age sites in Greece and Bulgaria, and Iron Age sites in Spain. In all cases, the researchers were able to obtain a wealth of additional information about the remains and the burials.

A metal detectorist has discovered a rare Merovingian gold ring dating to 500-600 A.D. in Emmerlev, Southwest Jutland, Denmark. The ring is made of 22-carat gold and is set with an oval cabochon almandine garnet, a red semi-precious stone prized among Germanic peoples as a symbol of power. The mount has four spirals on the underside and trefoil knobs where the band meets the bezel. The spirals and knobs are characteristic of the highest quality of Frankish manufacture, and rings of this type were worn by the elite of the Merovingian dynasty.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University crafted replica Stone Age tools and used them for a range of tasks to see how different activities create traces on the edge. They found that a combination of macroscopic and microscopic traces can tell us how stone edges were used. Their criteria help separate tools used for wood-felling from other activities. In addition, dated stone edges may be used to identify when timber use began for early humans.

Two large graves discovered in northern Bulgaria likely tell "a sad family story" about wealthy Roman landowners whose child predeceased them in the third century A.D., archaeologists say.

In December 2023, a farmer unexpectedly found the graves while plowing his field in the village of Nova Varbovka. Because this region was a Roman province called Moesia in antiquity, archaeologists from the Veliko Tarnovo Regional Museum of History came to excavate the graves.

Scientists have found a giant wall underneath the Baltic Sea — and they're pretty sure humans made it.

In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the German research team who discovered the megastructure, which they've called the Blinkerwall, say they believe it was constructed for hunting on land.

As the paper penned by geoscience researchers led by Kiel University notes, some parts of the Baltic Sea basin only submerged in the mid-Holocene era, dating back between 5,000 and 7,000 years.

With sediment dating estimates putting the Blinkerwall's age at between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago during the Stone Age, scientists say the uniformity of this lengthy structure — which runs for 971 meters, or roughly 60 percent of a mile — makes it seem more likely to have been made by humans than by the movements of glaciers or tsunamis. If they're right, it could be the "oldest man-made megastructure in Europe," the paper declares.

Abstract

With the beginning of the Early Bronze Age in Central Europe ~ 2200 BC, a regional and supra-regional hierarchical social organization emerged with few individuals in positions of power (chiefs), set apart by rich graves with extensive burial constructions. However, the social organization and stratification within the majority of people, who represent the non-elite, remain unclear. Here, we present genome-wide data of 46 individuals from the Early Bronze Age burial ground of Leubingen in today’s Germany, integrating archaeological, genetic and strontium isotope data to gain new insights into Early Bronze Age societies. We were able to reconstruct five pedigrees which constitute the members of close biological kinship groups (parents and their offspring), and also identify individuals who are not related to individuals buried at the site. Based on combined lines of evidence, we observe that the kinship structure of the burial community was predominantly patrilineal/virilocal involving female exogamy. Further, we detect a difference in the amount of grave goods among the individuals buried at Leubingen based on genetic sex, age at death and locality but see no difference in the types of grave goods.

Egypt has scuttled a controversial plan to reinstall ancient granite cladding on the pyramid of Menkaure, the smallest of the three great pyramids of Giza, a committee formed by the country’s tourism minister said in a statement.

Mostafa Waziri, the secretary general of the supreme council of antiquities, announced the plan last month, declaring it would be “the project of the century”.

But news that the ancient monument could be altered quickly drew an international outcry, prompting Egypt’s antiquities authority to review the project. The pyramids are the only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world that still remain.

Some people from an ancient community in what is now northern Italy were interred with animals and animal parts from species such as dogs, horses and pigs. The reasons remain mysterious, but might indicate an enduring companion relationship between these humans and animals, or religious sacrificial practices, according to a study published in PLOS ONE by Zita Laffranchi from the University of Bern, Stefania Zingale from the Institute for Mummy Studies, Eurac Research Bozen, Umberto Tecchiati from the University of Milan, and colleagues.

Of the 161 people buried at Seminario Vescovile, an archaeological site in Verona from the third to first century BCE, 16 were buried with some kind of animal remains. Some of the graves contained the remains of animals often eaten by people—including many pigs, a chicken and part of a cow—which may have represented food offerings to the dead. But four of the people buried on the site were buried alongside the remains of dogs and/or horses, which are not commonly eaten.

The bones of a Neolithic man found over a century ago in a Danish peat bog reveal that he was an immigrant who was brutally murdered. To solve the 5,000-year-old cold case, researchers studied everything from dental plaque to DNA. They concluded that this "Vittrup Man," as researchers call him, may have been an itinerant flint trader who was sacrificed by hostile locals.

In 1915, peat diggers discovered a handful of human and bovine bones at the bottom of their trench near the village of Vittrup in northern Denmark. After finding a ceramic pot and a wooden club, the diggers contacted the local history museum about the artifacts. While these two objects, dated to around 3800 to 3500 B.C., were soon taken to the National Museum of Denmark and displayed, the bones remained largely unstudied for a century.

Two recent studies of genomes of people who died in the Mesolithic to Neolithic periods of European prehistory, however, revealed that Vittrup Man lived between 3300 and 3100 B.C. and had a genetic profile distinct from those of his local contemporaries. The results of a full analysis of Vittrup Man, published Wednesday (Feb. 14) in the journal PLOS One, reveal a life history that included migration, dietary changes and an early death in a land far from his original home.

A gallery's worth of rock art decorating the inside of a cave in Argentina is several millennia older than once thought and contains hundreds of drawings that span 100 generations.

At one time, archaeologists dated the art — located in Patagonia, a region in South America's southern tip — as being only several thousand years old. But a new analysis has revealed that some of the works actually date to as early as 8,200 years ago and were created during the late Holocene epoch (11,700 years ago to present), according to a study published Wednesday (Feb. 14) in the journal Science Advances.

"It turned out to be several millennia older than we expected," study lead author Guadalupe Romero Villanueva, an archaeologist with the Argentine National Research Council (CONICET) and the National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought (INAPL), told Live Science. "We got surprised."

An underwater stone wall discovered in the Baltic Sea near Germany was built about 11,000 years ago for hunting reindeer when the location was dry land, a new study indicates.

The researchers suggest the local prehistoric people built the wall; its remaining parts were crafted from 1,670 stones and stretch about two-thirds of a mile (975 meters) long, stand 3 feet (1 m) tall and are 6.5 feet (2 m) wide. The team discovered the wall via sonar and dives to the location, which is at a depth of about 70 feet (21 m) and roughly 6 miles (10 kilometers) east of Rerik, Germany, in the Bay of Mecklenburg.

The wall may be the largest of its kind from the early Holocene (11,700 years ago to present) in Europe, the researchers said in the study. Based on similar prehistoric walls — including the ancient "desert kites" found in the Middle East — the authors propose that it was built on dry land by hunter-gatherers to drive wild animal herds into corrals where they could be killed. They also suggest that the wall in the Bay of Mecklenburg was used to hunt reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), which was a common species in that part of Europe at the time.