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Archaeological excavations off the coast of Rome in the Mediterranean Sea reveal that Stone Age people living over 7,000 years ago utilized sophisticated manufacturing techniques and advanced nautical technology in the construction and operation of their seafaring vessels.According to an analysis published in the journal PLOS ONE, the ancient seafaring vessels discovered at the site are the oldest ever found in the Mediterranean, which may offer "invaluable insights" into the technological sophistication employed by Neolithic navigators...According to the researchers, they found five dugout canoes in the ancient lakeshore village of La Marmotta near the coast of Rome, Italy, dating from...

Public school students were instructed to create a kachina doll representing spirits worshiped by Native Americans, which one boy’s parents say violates their Messianic Jewish beliefs.LEXINGTON, Ohio (LifeSiteNews) — Parents of an Ohio fifth-grader say their son’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was coerced during class into making a pagan idol, that is, the likeness of a spirit worshiped by Native Americans. Students at one of Lexington Local Schools’ elementary institutions were instructed in class to make a Kachina doll, used by the Hopi Indians as a “sacred object” to teach children about spirits believed to have “special...

Archaeologists digging near Prague have discovered the remains of a Stone Age structure that’s older than Stonehenge and even the Egyptian pyramids: an enigmatic complex known as a roundel. Nearly 7,000 years ago during the late Neolithic, or New Stone Age, a local farming community may have gathered in this circular building, although its true purpose is unknown. The excavated roundel is large — about 180 feet (55 meters) in diameter, or about as long as the Leaning Tower of Pisa is tall, Radio Prague International reported. And while “it is too early to say anything about the people building...

A New Zealand news anchor fired back at a viewer who she said has repeatedly complained about her traditional face tattoos. Oriini Kaipara, who co-hosts the political current affairs show "Newshub Nation," shut down the remarks from a viewer who she said emailed her and described her tattoos as “offensive and aggressive looking” and a “bad look.” The viewer’s comments come after Kaipara made history last year as the first person with a moko kauae, a cultural tattoo worn by Māori women, to anchor a prime-time news program. “Please refrain from complaining further, and restrain your cultural ignorance and bias...

A mind-blowing 3D reconstruction has revealed what a Stone Age woman looked like 4,000 years ago. It’s now on display at Västernorrlands Museum in Sweden and is based on skeletal remains that were found in 1923. The remains of the Stone Age woman were found next to the body of a seven-year-old boy who may have been her son. Scientists have reconstructed her after all this time and designed her expression as if she was watching over her child....

Archaeologists in Morocco have announced the discovery of North Africa’s oldest Stone Age hand-axe manufacturing site, dating back 1.3 million years, an international team reported on Wednesday. The find pushes back by hundreds of thousands of years the start date in North Africa of the Acheulian stone tool industry associated with a key human ancestor, Homo erectus, researchers on the team told journalists in Rabat Before the find, the presence in Morocco of the Acheulian stone tool industry was thought to date back 700,000 years. New finds at the Thomas Quarry I site, first made famous in 1969 when a...

These are unique and rare stone axes from the Stone AgeA Saudi scientific team from the Heritage Authority discovered stone tools used by the inhabitants of Assyrian civilization in the Paleolithic period that date back to 2,00,000 years. The Heritage Authority said in a press statement that the discovered stone tools from the Shuaib Al-Adgham area, located east of the Al-Qassim region, are stone axes from the Middle Paleolithic period. These are unique and rare stone axes that were characterised by the high precision in manufacturing that these human groups used in their daily life. The abundance of stone tools...

The excavation of the Stone Age rock tombs is near to the place where a Stone Age figure known as the Balıklıgöl statue or Urfa man, dating to 9000 BC, was also found. Experts from the Şanlıurfa Metropolitan Municipality were collaborating with personnel from the Culture and Tourism Ministry, who were investigating the Kizilkoyun Necropolis area, when they discovered the Stone Age rock tombs. They came across the burial site in the Old Town of Şanliurfa, not far from where some stunning mosaics of hunting Amazons were previously unearthed. The rock tombs are believed to have been part of the...

A new genetic study carried out at the University of Helsinki and the University of Turku demonstrates that, at the end of the Iron Age, Finland was inhabited by separate and differing populations, all of them influencing the gene pool of modern Finns. The study is so far the most extensive investigation of the ancient DNA of people inhabiting the region of Finland. In the study, genes were investigated from archaeological bone samples of more than one hundred individuals who lived between the 4th and 19th centuries AD. Most of the samples originated in the Iron Age and the Middle...

The excavation of a Stone Age community center in Ukraine is helping explain why large groups of tens of thousands of people flourished and then fell more than 5,000 years ago. The "megastructure" excavated in Ukraine was large compared with the houses around it, though not particularly huge by modern standards. At 2,045 square feet (190 square meters), the structure was the size of a modest American home. However, some Eastern European megastructures were up to 18,000 square feet (1,680 square m) in size. Archaeologists have puzzled over these buildings, many of which have been discovered through methods that use...

A series of tracks created roughly 14,000 years ago has revealed stunning new insight into the ways ancient humans explored dark, potentially treacherous cave systems during the Stone Age. Researchers say at least 180 hand and footprints line the clay-rich floor of Italy’s cave of Bàsura in the famous Toirano caves, indicating ancient humans crawled barelegged through low tunnels as they searched for food and even explored for fun. The group that left behind these tracks thousands of years ago included a total of five individuals, from adults to children as young as 3 years old, who navigated the dark...

An American man has been killed by an endangered tribe in India's Andaman and Nicobar islands. Fishermen who took the man to North Sentinel island say tribespeople shot him with arrows and left his body on the beach. He has been identified as John Allen Chau, a 27 year old from Alabama. Contact with the endangered Andaman tribes living in isolation from the world is illegal because of the risks to them from outside disease. Estimates say the Sentinelese, who are totally cut off from civilisation, number only between 50 and 150.

Burials from a cave in Morocco have yielded the oldest human DNA evidence yet from Africa, offering new insight into Stone Age migrations. The DNA samples come from one of the most ancient cemeteries in the world, the Grotte des Pigeons, near the village of Taforalt in northeast Morocco. Beginning around 15,000 years ago, a culture of hunter-gatherers buried their dead with animal horns and other adornments inside this cave. Though burials were found as recently as 2006, archaeologists have been excavating the cave since the 1940s. The name 20th-century researchers gave to this culture —the Iberomaurusians—reflects the theory that...

BERLIN (AP) — Scientists say they have found rare evidence of a prehistoric massacre in Europe after discovering a 7,000-year-old mass grave with skeletal remains from some of the continent's first farmers bearing terrible wounds. Archaeologists who painstakingly examined the bones of some 26 men, women and children buried in the Stone Age grave site at Schoeneck-Kilianstaedten, near Frankfurt, say they found blunt force marks to the head, arrow wounds and deliberate efforts to smash at least half of the victims' shins — either to stop them from running away or as a grim message to survivors. [snip] "What is...

Mohammed Abdullah Ahmed of Saudi Arabia is more than 90-years old. He lives in a shabby randomly-built little house on the edge of a small remote village. “Ahmed’s home indicates as if we are still in the Stone Age,” the Arabic language daily 'Sabq' said, adding that its reporter visited the man at his primitive home on the fringes of the village near the Western Red Sea port of Al Qunfudah. “His home has no electricity. He suffers from cold in winter and from the scorching heat in summer. He lives in the dark away from people as he has...

The data obtained by Teresa Fernández-Crespo in seven megalithic graves in La Rioja and Araba-Álava suggest that certain individuals were excluded from burial on the basis of age and sex. The research Demographic evidence of selective burial in megalithic graves of northern Spain by Teresa Fernández-Crespo and Concepción de la Rúa of the Department of Genetics, Physical Anthropology and Animal Physiology of the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country challenges the widely-held view that societies were egalitarian during the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic ages. This work, published in the leading Journal of Archaeological Science, comes from Fernández-Crespo’s PhD thesis entitled Antropología...

Israel might attack Iran by using electromagnetic impulses (EMP) that could cripple the country by shutting down its electronics and sending the Islamic Republic “back to the Stone Age,” The London Sunday Times reported. EMP causes non-lethal gamma energy to react with the magnetic field and produces a powerful electromagnetic shock wave that can destroy electronic devices, especially those used in Iran’s nuclear plants. The shock wave would knock out Iran’s power grid and communications systems for transport and financial services, leading to economic collapse. The “back to the Stone Age” tactic was proposed in the right-wing publication Israel National...

How the cavemen ate: Cookbook reveals 77 recipes stretching right back to the Stone Age (and they taste surprisingly good!) Fancy something new for dinner tonight? Well if you don't fancy a Chinese or a Thai, researchers have pulled together 77 recipes which were eaten during the Stone Ages. And the surprise is how delicious the recipes, some of them 16,000 years old, sound - with your typical Neolithic families spicing up their meals and using plenty of fresh fruit and herbs along with the simmering main dishes of game. A Culinary Journey Through Time can join Jamie Oliver and...

Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world's oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany.

A new study suggests that Homo erectus, a precursor to modern humans, was using advanced toolmaking methods in East Africa 1.8 million years ago, at least 300,000 years earlier than previously thought. The study, recently published in Nature, raises new questions about where these tall and slender early humans originated and how they developed sophisticated tool-making technology. Homo erectus appeared about 2 million years ago, and ranged across Asia and Africa before hitting a possible evolutionary dead-end, about 70,000 years ago. Some researchers think Homo erectus evolved in East Africa, where many of the oldest fossils have been found, but...