An ox, a ram and a pig, surrounded by garlands, festoons and carved ox skulls, share a single block of stone. At some point in antiquity it ended up as paving at one of the main crossroads of Aquinum, a Roman city in central Italy. It is one of two finds that archaeologists from the […]

Long ago, the patch of sky that would become our galactic neighbourhood looked nothing like a galaxy. It was a collection of thousands of smaller galaxies. Some were turning out stars at a frantic pace, others held nothing but gas, and others were littered with dead stars and black holes. That is the picture drawn […]

A metal detector has pulled a small lead statuette of Venus Pudica out of a forest in the Buda Hills, northwest of Budapest. It is the first religious object recorded at the Roman village of Pilisszentiván–Hárs erdő, a rural settlement in the province of Pannonia. Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) has been excavating it for four […]

Around 30 million years ago, a heavily built animal prowled the area that is now Vallbona de les Monges, in Lleida province (Catalonia, northeastern Spain). It had a long head, prominent cheekbones and formidable jaws lined with large, sharp teeth. Paleontologists call it the hell pig. The nickname misleads. Its kinship with modern pigs is […]

Cyrene was one of the wealthiest Greek cities in the ancient Mediterranean, built on a plateau some 9 km (about 6 miles) inland from Libya’s northeastern coast, on what is now known as Jebel Akhdar. According to Herodotus, it was founded in 631 BCE by colonists from the Greek island of Thera — modern-day Santorini. […]

The archaeologists were not looking for a Sarmatian. When they opened the burial mound near the Sea of Azov, they expected Bronze Age graves — and found plenty: thirty-one of them. But one grave didn’t fit. Inside lay a man in his late twenties or early thirties, stretched out on his back with his arms […]

Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has announced the discovery of a Roman-period tomb whose architecture, according to the country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has no exact parallel elsewhere in the cemetery where it was found. The tomb sits at Bir al-Shaghala, a site in the Dakhla Oasis, about 750 kilometers (roughly 465 miles) southwest […]

Roughly 315,000 years ago, a group of early humans lived in what is now Morocco. Their remains, unearthed at a site called Jebel Irhoud, are the oldest fossils ever attributed to our species, Homo sapiens. Now, an international team of researchers has digitally reconstructed the face of one of these individuals, building a composite skull […]

Quarks, the smallest known building blocks of matter, are never seen alone. They are roughly a billion times smaller than an atom and exist only locked inside larger particles such as protons and neutrons — no one has ever observed one in isolation. That impossibility has a name, confinement, and a strange consequence: try to […]

Nobody expects to find a two-thousand-year-old fortification in the courtyards of a working hospital. But that is what archaeologists have uncovered at the Hôtel-Dieu, on the Île de la Cité, the island in the Seine where Notre-Dame stands. The wall runs for about 20 meters (roughly 65 feet) and shows clear signs of having burned […]

In the mountainous interior of Sardinia, where the Gennargentu massif gives way to the valleys of the Flumendosa river, a site called S’Arcu ‘e is Forros has been surprising archaeologists for more than four decades. Its Sardinian name translates roughly as “the pass of the furnaces” — a fitting label, as it turns out. On […]

About 56 miles (90 km) from Brescia and 75 miles (120 km) from Milan, in the Lombard Alps, the forest of Naquane is still turning up surprises after seventy years of excavation. The latest field season, which resumed on August 31, 2026, has uncovered a rock surface that had never been recorded before: a panel […]

An international team of astronomers has published a detailed study of VT J1906+0849, a radio source discovered in the VLASS survey (Very Large Array Sky Survey) that doesn’t resemble anything else previously catalogued in the Milky Way. The paper, led by Jessie M. Miller of the California Institute of Technology, combines radio, infrared, optical, and […]

Somewhere between an electron and a human being, the rules of physics change. Quantum mechanics allows an atom to exist in two states simultaneously — spinning left and right at the same time, for instance — which is impossible to picture at human scale. Nobody has ever seen a person, or even a speck of […]

While Brutus and his allies were stabbing Julius Caesar to death, a good chunk of the Roman working class was having a picnic. They drank wine, pitched makeshift tents out of branches and cloth, and toasted to as many years of life as cups they could down. It was the feast of Anna Perenna, the […]

In the district of Monteleone Sabino, a town of under 1,300 people in Italy’s Rieti province, a team of cavers has made its way through a passage first cut into the mountainside more than two thousand years ago. On the other side, they documented a pre-Roman aqueduct, now walkable for roughly 100 meters (about 328 […]

There’s a temperature nothing in the universe has ever touched. It’s called absolute zero, equal to -273.15°C (-459.67°F), the point at which the particles that make up matter would lose all their kinetic energy and simply stop moving. In 1848, the British physicist William Thomson — better known as Lord Kelvin — proposed making that […]

The site is provisionally dated to a six-century stretch, from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD, offering a window into funerary rites practiced by a population that neither buried nor cremated its dead — long before that same principle produced the famous Towers of Silence. The find comes from Odirmon, a site […]

In February 2012, after twenty years of nearly uninterrupted work, a Russian drill broke through the last stretch of ice over East Antarctica and reached something no human had ever touched: the surface of a lake sealed shut long before our species existed. Water surged up the borehole, mixed with the kerosene and Freon used […]

The body has been lying face-down for close to two thousand years. When archaeologists reached tomb 162, on the outskirts of modern Solin, Croatia, they immediately noticed something at odds with the rest of the cemetery: the deceased had not been laid on their back, as Roman custom required, but on their stomach. Around the […]