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The excavation of a mountain castle in central Turkey has revealed a secret tunnel, built by the Hittites around 4,000 years ago. Geval Castle, on Takkel Mountain in Central Anatolia, sits over 5,500 feet above sea level and once offered a strategic 360-degree vantage point for a population that regularly faced assaults from the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Thracians throughout their history. As a result, Hittites were master underground builders, although the exciting discoveries at Takkel Mountain appear to be the first of their kind. "We have discovered secret tunnels in the castle. We have cleaned there and revealed a [328-foot...

Forty-seven smooth teeth dug out of a cave in southern China reveal that Homo sapiens may have arrived there 80,000 years ago...The findings, published this week in the journal Nature, may compel researchers to reconsider their theories about human migrations out of Africa.

A serendipitous deal between a history museum and a smuggler has provided new insight into one of the most famous stories ever told: "The Epic of Gilgamesh." The new finding, a clay tablet, reveals a previously unknown "chapter" of the epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia. This new section brings both noise and color to a forest for the gods that was thought to be a quiet place in the work of literature. The newfound verse also reveals details about the inner conflict the poem's heroes endured. In 2011, the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Slemani, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, purchased...

Islamic State militants have blown up the Arch of Triumph, a major monument in the 2,000-year-old Roman city of Palmyra, Syria's antiquities chief said on Sunday, after they destroyed two ancient temples at the central Syrian site in recent months. Maamoun Abdulkarim told Reuters that sources in Palmyra had confirmed that the Arch of Triumph, a jewel in the exquisite collection of ruins in the oasis city, had been blown up.Islamic State militants have blown up temples at the Roman-era UNESCO World Heritage site, which it has controlled since capturing Palmyra from Syrian government forces in May and mined other...

The long-lost Biblical city of Sodom — a city that the Bible claims was destroyed by God because of its immorality — may finally have been found. Archaeologists have uncovered a slew of monumental structures and artifacts in a Jordan Valley mound known as Tall el-Hammam offering evidence of a city-state that is believed to have thrived during the Bronze Age when other Holy Land cities were being abandoned or were in decline. Based on the location, dates of occupation, and the remains of other ancient cities nearby, archaeologists think it's the best candidate yet for what was once Sodom....

A rare 3,000 year-old seal dating to the period of kings David and Solomon of the 10th century BCE was recently discovered at the Temple Mount Sifting Project in Jerusalem. According to Dr. Gabriel Barkay, co-founder and director of the Temple Mount Sifting Project, the seal is the first of its kind to be found in the Israeli capital. “The dating of the seal corresponds to the historical period of the Jebusites and the conquest of Jerusalem by King David, as well as the construction of the Temple and the royal official compound by his son, King Solomon… What makes...

A large mausoleum recently uncovered in Israel may be the Tomb of the Maccabees, the celebrated Jewish family that led an uprising against the Greeks in the second century B.C. Archaeologists, however, are still searching for conclusive evidence that the site is the Maccabees’ final resting place.The Israel Antiquities Authority, working with local residents and volunteers, recently excavated the site near the city of Modi’in, 19 miles northwest of Jerusalem, long rumored to be the Maccabees’ tomb.Related: Board game pieces found in settlement built on Roman military fortThe Maccabees – Matityahu the Hasmonean and his five sons were from the...

Construction workers in California's Santa Cruz mountains were subject to a surprise delay last week when a team of archaeologists took over the site to remove an ancient whale fossil. The project site was expected to have a high potential for archaeological finds, so a monitor was assigned to the Scotts Valley development and found the fossil amid construction vehicles on Sept. 4. This project site is not the only one in California with fossils ... Since the 19th century, paleontologists have been studying the “Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed” near Bakersfield, California, where fossils and bones of ancient whales, seals,...

Aerial Image of the foundation of a Roman stone building. Length of the leveling staff (White) at the upper edge of the Picture: 5 meters. Credit: Dennis Braks ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- During their first Gernsheim dig last year, Frankfurt University archaeologists suspected that a small Roman settlement must have also existed here in the Hessian Ried. Now they have discovered clear relics of a Roman village, built in part on the foundations of the fort after the soldiers left. This probably occurred around 120 AD. At the time the cohort (about 500 soldiers) was transferred from the Rhine to the Limes, and...

Archaeologists in Israel have uncovered evidence of early cereal cultivation at a 23,000-year-old site in Galilee, effectively doubling the timespan humans are believed to have practiced farming.

An archaeological team excavating the ancient site of Alacahöyük, one of the most significant centers of the ancient Hittite civilization, cooked pastries belonging to Hittite cuisine that dates back 4,000 years. The foods found on Hittite tablets were cooked without modern technology or equipment. The 4,000-year-old Hittite cuisine was cooked in Alacahöyük, an important Neolithic settlement and Turkey's first nationally excavated area. Aykut Çınaroğlu, the head of the excavations and professor of archaeology at Ankara University, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that Chef Ömür Akkor, an excavation team member, prepared a special Hittite menu in light of the available archaeological findings....

They are one of our closest human relatives and dominated Europe and much of Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, but Neanderthals may be far older than previously thought. A new study by geneticists has revealed a collection of fossilised bones discovered in a cave in northern Spain belonged to an early member of the Neanderthal family. It is the oldest partial genome from early human fossils ever to be sequenced and pushes back the date for the origins of the Neanderthal branch of our evolutionary tree by up to 300,000 years....

Archaeologists discover palace with archaic inscriptions built during the Mycenaean period 'Archaeologists in Greece have discovered the ruins of an ancient palace with important archaic inscriptions dating back to the Mycenaean age, the culture ministry said Tuesday. The palace, likely built around the 17th-16th centuries BC, had around 10 rooms and was discovered near Sparta in southern Greece. At the site, archaeologists found objects of worship, clay figurines, a cup adorned with a bull’s head, swords and fragments of murals.'

Ongoing excavations at a site in the southern Peloponnese are offering rare insight into the ancient past of Laconia, about which very little physical evidence exists, the state-run Athens-Macedonian News Agency cited the Culture Ministry as saying on Tuesday. Covering an expanse of 3.5 hectares, the site on Aghios Vassilios Hill near the village of Xirokambi on the Sparta plain has been under excavation since 2009 and is believed to contain valuable evidence that will shed light on life in the area during the 17th to 16th centuries BC, the announcement said. A palace complex found on the site and...

MIAMI: Treasure hunters off Florida have found $4.5 million in gold coins from a Spanish ship that sunk during a hurricane in the 18th century , the sal vage company said on Wednesday. The ship 'Ten Galleons' traveling from Havana to Spain... "Over 350 gold coins, including 9 Royals were recovered on July 30 & 31 on the actual 300th anniversary of the wreck,"

Found on the western side of what was once the Templo Mayor complex in Tenochtitlan, in modern Mexico City, the partially unearthed skull rack was likely built between 1485 and 1502 and may have been about 112 feet (34 meters) long and 40 feet (12 meters) wide. Mostly belonging to young adult men, but also to women and children, several of the unearthed skulls feature holes on both sides, suggesting they belonged to a tzompantli. This was a rack on which the skulls of sacrificed people were arranged on wooden poles and displayed... To make the scene even more horrifying,...

But experts say the five that he identified in Bosnia-Herzegovina are natural hills.Despite his many critics, maverick archaeologist Sam Osmanagich stands by his claims that he has uncovered not one, but five structures which he says are pyramids in Visoko in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Dr Osmanagich, who earned his doctorate on the history of civilisations at the University of Sarajevo in 2008, was in Singapore recently for a conference, where he spoke about his work on pyramids. The 55-year-old claims that he has discovered the "biggest complex of pyramidal structures in the world" comprising five pyramids, all connected by underground tunnels. The...

The ancient city of Ephesus and the Diyarbakir Fortress and its surrounding Hevsel Gardens have become the latest historical sites in Turkey to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in July. Turkey’s next nomination is the Stone Age cult site of Gobeklitepe, located in Sanliurfa province not far from the turbulent Syrian border. The site’s discovery began with a coincidence reminiscent of a movie plot. In 1983, local farmer Mahmut Kilic found a carved stone while plowing his field in the village of Orencik. He took it to the Sanliurfa Museum, where it was to wait a decade...

A 12-METRE monolith, hacked out of limestone by stone-age humans some nine thousand years ago, has been found at the bottom of the Mediterranean. The enormous stone totem, now split in two and sitting in the Sicilian Channel between Tunisia and Sicily, was hewed from a rocky outcrop some 300m away when the Mediterranean Sea was still a dry basin. It’s now under 40m of water. The new study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, says the area was submerged about 9350 years ago (give or take 200 years) when the last Ice Age retreated. Before that time the...

The fragments making up the 6th century AD marble slab with a christogram and a donor’s inscription below it have been discovered by the archaeologists excavating the Bishop’s Basilica of Ancient Parthicopolis in Bulgaria’s Sandanski over a period of 25 years. Photo: TV grab from BNT Archaeologists excavating the so called Bishop’s Basilica of the Ancient Roman and Early Byzantine city of Parthicopolis located in the town of Sandanski in Southwest Bulgaria have discovered the last fragment from a marble slab with a christogram, a Christian symbol consisting of a monogram of letters standing for the name of Jesus Christ.The...