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Archaeologists in France have excavated a Neolithic site containing 63 burials and hundreds of structures and artifacts from a human occupation spanning roughly 4,000 years.

The site in Clermont-Ferrand, a city in the Auvergne region of central France, was discovered during construction work in the 1980s. However, it wasn't until a highway-widening project that started in 2019 that archaeologists began excavations there, according to a translated statement from France's National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP).

Radiocarbon dating revealed that humans visited the area before 6000 B.C., during the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age. But the vast majority of the radiocarbon dating showed that the site was used throughout much of the Neolithic period, also known as the New Stone Age. During this time, people began creating settlements and relying on agriculture; some of the site's ceramics, hearths and dug pits date to between 4750 and 4500 B.C.

Archaeologists have discovered more than 100 ornaments for use in piercings in ~11,000-year-old adult burials in Türkiye, providing the earliest conclusive evidence for body perforation and suggesting that piercing may have been a coming-of-age ritual.

Earring-like objects have been found at Neolithic sites in South-west Asia before, but there was no clear evidence for their use in piercings.

"We knew that there were earring-like artifacts in the Neolithic, they have been found at many sites," says co-author of the research, Dr. Emma Baysal from Ankara University. "But we were lacking in situ finds confirming their use on the human body before the late Neolithic."

The upper half of a giant statue of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II has been discovered near the ancient city of Hermopolis (modern-day el-Ashmunein), about 155 miles (250 kilometers) south of Cairo.

The large stone piece is about 12.5 feet (3.8 meters) tall and depicts Ramesses II (reign circa 1279 to 1213 B.C.) wearing a double crown and a headdress topped with a royal cobra, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in an Arabic language statement. The back of the statue has hieroglyphs that state the various titles of the king. These titles help to glorify Ramesses II, according to the statement.

The lower part of the statue was found in 1930 by German archaeologist Günther Roeder. The original statue, when the lower and upper parts were together, would have stood about 23 feet (7 m) tall, the statement said.

A 3,300-year-old clay tablet from central Turkey describes a catastrophic foreign invasion of the Hittite Empire, a mysterious Bronze Age state. The invasion took place during a Hittite civil war, apparently in an effort to aid one of the warring factions, according to a translation of the tablet's cuneiform text.

The palm-size tablet was found in May 2023 by Kimiyoshi Matsumura, an archaeologist at the Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology, amid the Hittite ruins at Büklükale, about 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of the Turkish capital Ankara.

Archaeologists think Büklükale was a major Hittite city. The new discovery suggests it was also a royal residence, perhaps on a par with the royal residence in the Hittite capital Hattuša (also spelled Hattusha), about 70 miles (112 km) to the northeast.

Plague pits containing the remains of at least 1,000 victims have been unearthed in southern Germany. The pits could together form the largest mass grave ever discovered in Europe, archaeologists say.

The excavations, which were carried out ahead of construction work in the city of Nuremberg, revealed eight pits each crammed with hundreds of skeletons belonging to adults, children and babies that date to between the late 15th and early 17th centuries. Archaeologists also found pottery shards and silver coins in two of the three pits they have finished excavating. Radiocarbon dating revealed the pottery coincides with plague outbreaks that occurred between 1622 and 1634, while the coins date to around 1619, according to a statement released by the archaeological excavation company In Terra Veritas.

"A discovery like that has never happened before and quite honestly, no one had thought this to be possible," Melanie Langbein, of Nuremberg's department for heritage conservation, said in the statement. "The site is of enormous importance to the city of Nuremberg."

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Starting about 7,000 years ago, ancient humans in what is now northeastern Spain buried their dead deep in a cave, creating a necropolis of sorts that spans about four millennia and now contains more than 7,000 bones, according to archaeologists. And there are signs it may have been used for tens of thousands of years before that.

The Cova dels Xaragalls (Cave of the Ravines) was "a collective burial place," archaeologist Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) and the Merida Institute of Archaeology, told Live Science in an email.

He said people were buried in communal graves within the cave starting about 7,000 years ago, during the late Neolithic or New Stone Age, though most of the Chalcolithic ("Copper-Stone") period and throughout the Bronze Age, which ended in Spain about 3,000 years ago.