This article was originally featured on MIT Press. November 26, 1922, marks what is arguably the most famous discovery in the history of archaeology. On that day, the British Egyptologist Howard Carter made a small hole through which he could ...

The oldest evidence of Homo erectus comes from an arid hillside near the border of Ethiopia and Kenya. Though the 1.9-million-year-old fossil is only a tiny shard, more complete, if more recent individuals show that the species looked recognizably human. ...

Every domestic animal presents a mystery of how it came to be. Sometime in the distant past, an animal—whether wolf, wild ox, jungle fowl, or boar—started to trot down a road that ended with reliance on, or even trust in, ...

Popular culture depicts medieval warhorses as majestic creatures—tall, muscular, and powerful, with shining knights atop. But new research shows that the steeds of the Middle Ages were likely much smaller than we would expect. A team of zooarchaeologists in the ...

If you lived in antiquity and you wanted to paint something, then your colors probably came from squeezing a natural material into powdered pigment. If you wanted red, you had a few options: ochre, for instance, or madder, which comes ...

Just a river’s crossing away from St. Louis, Missouri, rests an ancient and mysterious anthropological site that few Americans know of. Scholars still discuss the potential reasons for the demise of Cahokia, a massive settlement that may have housed as ...

A fossilized skull discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s should be considered an entirely new species of human, scientists proposed this week in an effort to shed light on the very murky question of what to call our ancient ancestors.  ...

Whether you’ve been chased by a goose or witnessed an ostrich run at top speed, you know birds can sometimes be terrifying. At the top of the list is the cassowary—a demon bird that clocks in between 4 and 5.6 ...

A set of footprints buried in the dunes of New Mexico’s White Sands National Park has landed in the middle of an ongoing reevaluation of the human history of the Americas. The prints were left over thousands of years by ...

In the mid-16th century, the residents of a regional capital called Chikasha, situated in the prairies and flatwoods of eastern Mississippi, became some of the first inhabitants of the now-United States to encounter European colonists. In the winter of 1540, ...