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KFDA reports that some 3,000 artifacts were recovered from the Schaeffer Shelter in south-central Texas. Situated on private property in Ceta Canyon, the rock shelter, discovered in 1949 by Stanley Schaeffer, measures about 20 square feet. Archaeologist Brandon Tully said that different groups of people likely returned to the site over thousands of years, and he estimates that some of the recovered artifacts are between 8,000 and 10,000 years old. "We really don't have a lot of information about archaic period sites in the Texas Panhandle, especially rock shelters," Tully said. "Almost all of our rock shelters are from about...

Phys.org reports that stenciled rock art has been identified in South Africa, which is known for rock art painted with brushes and fingers. "I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking at for a while," said David Pearce of the University of the Witwatersrand. "Then they popped into focus, a bit like optical illusions do," he explained. The two human-like figures were discovered in the La Rochelle rock shelter in eastern South Africa, where few paintings have been found on the region's steep cliffs. Pearce said that brush-painted images of hartebeest, eland, and humanoid beings had previously been identified in...

SciNews reports that a team of researchers including Philippe Walter and Yohan Boulard of Sorbonne University have examined the 37,000-year-old artworks inside Chauvet Cave with ultraviolet fluorescence spectroscopy. Located in southeastern France, the cave contains more than 1,000 drawings and engravings depicting horses, cave lions, mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, bears, and bison. By shining ultraviolet light on the cave paintings from about eight feet away, Walter and his colleagues observed that some materials absorbed the light, while others gave off a visible glow. The color of the glow allowed the researchers to identify the materials on the cave walls and any...

Archaeologists excavating in the famous prehistoric Hohle Fels cave in Germany have uncovered two bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory. ‪‪The thumbnail-size carvings add to the existing ‬‬evidence that ice age humans had a sophisticated artistic sense 40,000 years ago...When the birds were found in 2025, they were lying just 5 feet (1.5 meters) from each other in a layer dating back 40,000 years, according to the statement. The sculptures bring the total number of bird figurines from Hohle Fels up to three; a small water bird was found there in 2001. Hohle Fels was occupied by early Homo sapiens...

...Although the researchers found traces of ancient human DNA in one pigmented calcite crust sampled in Escoural Cave (Portugal), to their surprise they also found ancient human DNA in several nonpigmented parts of the cave wall in Escoural as well as in Covarón Cave (northern Spain), which had initially been sampled as negative controls.The study shows that human DNA can be preserved on cave walls long after the populations that visited the cave have disappeared...Of the 54 samples collected, only five yielded authentic ancient human mitochondrial DNA...two of these samples showed no detectable faunal mitochondrial DNA, a rare finding that...

According to a Mexico News Daily report, 16 paintings and petroglyphs have been discovered on cliffs near the Tula River and the La Requena Dam, at central Mexico's El Venado site, which is named for the depictions of deer on rock faces there. Archaeologists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History investigated the area prior to construction of a passenger train route. The oldest of the newly found artworks has been dated to 4,000 years ago, while the later images were made between about A.D. 900 and the arrival of the Spanish in the early sixteenth century. The rock...

* Elaborate rock murals along the U.S.-Mexico border, dating back over 4,000 years, depict a sophisticated cosmological worldview shared by indigenous cultures. These murals feature human-like and animal-like figures alongside symbolic motifs representing creation myths, cyclical time and multidimensional realities. * Despite spanning 175 generations, the Pecos River Style (PRS) rock art maintained strict iconographic rules—black paint first, followed by red, yellow and white—demonstrating a structured visual language rather than random decoration. * The murals align with pan-indigenous beliefs, such as layered universes and portals between worlds. A Huichol shaman recognized the figures in the 2000s, confirming continuity with modern...

Texas researchers have now definitively dated a distinctive rock art tradition, a profound discovery shared across multiple ancient Mesoamerican cultures.For thousands of years, ancient forager societies across southwest Texas and northern Mexico painted these stunning murals, known as the "Pecos River Style," inside remote limestone rock shelters.These colossal murals stretch up to 100 feet long and soar 20 feet tall...Though the desert climate perfectly preserved these significant American works, researchers only recently attempted to date the tradition...To pinpoint the art's origin, researchers employed 57 radiocarbon dating analyses across 12 sites, utilizing plasma oxidation and accelerator mass spectrometry, which firmly placed...

Neanderthals may have fashioned ocher tools for drawing and marking surfaces, according to a Phys.org report. Francesco d'Errico of the University of Bordeaux and his colleagues analyzed the composition and surface markings on 16 pieces of ocher unearthed at Neanderthal sites in Crimea and Ukraine with scanning electron microscopes and portable X-ray scanners. The study determined that one of the pieces of yellow ocher had been scraped into a crayon-like shape, and that its tip had been repeatedly resharpened and reused. Evidence of polishing, engraving, grinding, and sharpening were detected on another two pieces of ocher. The researchers concluded that...

Left-handedness common in Ice Age By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor A right-hand print signifys left-handedness The fraction of left-handed people today is about the same as it was during the Ice Age, according to data from prehistoric handprints. They were found in caves painted during the Upper Palaeolithic period, between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago. Left-handedness may have conferred prehistoric man advantages, such as in combat, say the researchers. The research is published in the February issue of the journal Biology Letters. Evolutionary advantages When Stone Age man produced their remarkable cave paintings they often left...

Authorities in southern Libya have uncovered a prehistoric rock art site believed to be as much as 10,000 years old, following a report from a resident who spotted unusual engravings on rock faces in the Al-Hasawna Mountains, near Wadi Mubarak. The discovery has sparked major archaeological interest and led to immediate protective action by Libyan officials. The markings were first brought to the attention of the Sabha branch of the Tourist Police and Antiquities Protection Agency. A formal investigation was launched soon after, with the Public Order Prosecution in Sabha and the Fezzan Antiquities Authority notified to oversee the site’s...

...archaeological evidence at one site called Madjedbebe in the far north of Australia's Northern Territory suggests the area may have been occupied much earlier -- at least 65,000 years ago.Archaeologists recovered human-made artifacts, including stone tools and ocher "crayons," from the Madjedbebe rock shelter and published their findings in a 2017 study. One difficulty in dating the artifacts, however, was the copious amount of sand on the floor of the rock shelter, which can move easily and cause artifacts to fall farther down, making them look older than they are.Although the research team took steps to counteract this issue and...

There are around 400 caves in France and Spain that contain painted art made between 40,000 and 12,000 years ago. Many of these bear hand prints or paintings created by children between the ages of two and 12. Experts have long wondered why such young children were taken into some of the deepest and darkest caves in Europe on treks that would have been quite treacherous. A new study suggests that children may have played a special role as mediators between the physical and spiritual worlds, according to a statement released by Tel Aviv University. The prevailing hypothesis has been...

Cutting-edge technology has been used to redate the world-famous Schöningen spears that were discovered in the mid-1990s, according to a statement released by the University of York. At the time, experts estimated that 10 wooden weapons were around 400,000 or 300,000 years old, making them among the oldest hunting weapons ever found. However, scientists recently used a dating method known as amino acid geochronology, which analyzes amino acids locked in snail shells buried in sediment layers, to determine that the spears were around 100,000 years younger. This likely means that the weapons were created and wielded by Neanderthals and not...

A 200-year-old South African cave painting made by the region’s first inhabitants, the San people, appears to depict an animal that has been extinct for over 200 million years. A long-bodied animal with downward-turned tusks, the warm-blooded, lizard-like creature called a dicynodont (two-toothed dog) roamed the area before the first dinosaur appeared and died off at the end of the Triassic. If the artwork from the cave’s Horned Serpent panel at La Belle France (Free State Province, South Africa) is of this extinct species, its creation would predate the first known scientific classification of a dicynodont by at least a...

Art imitates life ... maybe.There’s something intriguing, even frightening, about the image of an ancient horned serpent roaming across the land. Thanks to some suggestive fossils and legends of old, talk of such a creature isn’t a new concept. But the recent discovery of 200-year-old rock paintings found in South Africa now has scientists hypothesizing that this ancient creature may have been far more than just a legend. The first formal scientific descriptions of this horned serpent—a supposed member of the dicynodont group—appeared in 1845. Considering the abundance of dicynodont fossils found in the Karoo Basin in South Africa, some...

A team of Brazilian researchers is investigating a cave site featuring ancient paintings in Itatiaia National Park, near the border between Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. The discovery, which could reshape the understanding of early human presence in the region, has drawn the attention of leading archaeologists and cultural preservation agencies. Though the paintings were discovered in 2023 by Andres Conquista, an operational supervisor at the park, the news was kept under wraps to protect the site, which sits along a well-traveled hiking trail. While hiking during a climbing trip, Conquista was drawn to a cluster of blooming red...

The Indus Valley civilization was one of the most advanced in the world for over 500 years. More than 1000 settlements sprawled across 250,000 square miles of what is now Pakistan and northwest India from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. It had several large, well-planned cities like Mohenjo-daro, common iconography, and a script no one has been able to understand. Linguists studying the Indus script don't know anything about the underlying language and there's no multilingual Rosetta Stone, but scholars have analyzed its structure for clues and compared it to other scripts. Most Indologists think it's “logo-syllabic” script like Sumerian...

The entrance to the Maszycka Cave in southern Poland (Credit: Darek Bobak) In a nutshell * Scientists found evidence of cannibalism in an 18,000-year-old Polish cave, where at least ten people — including children — were systematically butchered and eaten, likely due to territorial conflicts rather than survival needs * The Magdalenian people who created famous cave art like Lascaux were capable of both sophisticated cultural achievements and extreme violence, challenging our understanding of prehistoric societies * As populations grew after the last Ice Age, competition for resources likely led to violent conflicts between groups, with evidence of similar cannibalism...

We don't yet know if the hump disappeared after childhood. None of the previously discovered mummies had a hump. Image credit: Tiberio via Wikimedia Commons (public domain) For the first time ever, researchers have uncovered the mummified remains of a woolly rhinoceros with a big old hump on the back of its neck. Curiously absent in all other known specimens of the Ice Age megafauna, this fatty bulge attests to the remarkable accuracy of ancient cave paintings depicting rhinos with hunched backs. More than 35,000 years ago, prehistoric artists decorated the walls of the Chauvet Cave in France with stunningly...