News from the ancient world
Stone Age · c. 11,000 to 3300 BC
New discoveries from Göbekli Tepe and the first villages to the Copper Age: Çatalhöyük, megaliths, early farmers and ancient DNA.
Stone Age · Neolithic, c. 7000 BC · Diyarbakır province, South-eastern Anatolia, Turkey
The roughly 9,000-year-old work area had a stone-paved floor and six postholes, and Turkey's culture minister says local mining continued for about 2,000 years.
Stone Age · c. 3000 BC · Fanshan, Liangzhu, Zhejiang, China
Post holes at Fanshan outline three wooden buildings next to China's highest-ranking Neolithic graves, built about 5,000 years ago.
Stone Age · c. 9000 BC · Karahan Tepe, Şanlıurfa, Turkey
The 70-centimetre sculpture, about 11,000 years old, reverses a known motif at the site, where earlier statues show humans carrying live leopards on their backs.
Stone Age · c. 4500–2500 BC · Atbai Desert, Eastern Sudan
Only about 20 of the circular tombs in the Atbai Desert were known before; they were built between about 4500 and 2500 BC as the Sahara dried.
Stone Age · 4th millennium BC · Eurasian steppe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia
A Science Advances study argues that people rode, milked and managed horses in the 4th millennium BC, long before the spread of the DOM2 lineage around 2200 BC.
Stone Age · c. 4300–2300 BC · Valdelasilla, Illescas, Toledo, Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
Dates on human bones show the planned cemetery, with a central tomb inside a 36-metre ditch, was laid out in the late fifth millennium BC.
Stone Age · Neolithic, before 3000 BC · Loch Bhorgastail, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, United Kingdom
Archaeologists recorded the Neolithic island above and below the waterline as one structure, using a new shallow-water camera method described in Advances in Archaeological Practice.
Stone Age · Late 4th to 3rd millennium BC · Bury, Oise, Hauts-de-France, France
Genomes of 132 people buried near Paris show the tomb's first community collapsed around 3000 BC and was replaced by newcomers with ancestry from southern France and Iberia.
Stone Age · 3842–3838 BC · Biel, Canton of Bern, Switzerland
Tree rings from the timbers date the 23-house settlement at Biel to 3842–3838 BC, when a west windstorm and floods wrecked it.
Stone Age · 40th–39th century BC · Stăuceni-'Holm', Botoșani, Botoșani County, Romania
A 350-square-metre building at Stăuceni-'Holm' near Botoșani gave radiocarbon dates of the 40th or 39th century BC, later than its pottery phase is thought to have ended.
Stone Age · c. 3800–3200 BC · Caithness and Orkney, Highland and Orkney, Scotland, United Kingdom
Genetic study of chambered tombs in Caithness and Orkney, used between about 3800 and 3200 BC, finds many men buried together were paternal relatives.
Stone Age · c. 13,000–10,000 BC · Hayonim, el-Wad, Nahal Oren and Eynan-Mallaha, Northern Israel
The 142 unfired beads and pendants predate pottery and farming, and 50 fingerprints show that children, adolescents and adults all made them.
Stone Age · c. 8500 BC · Lüchow LA 11, Duvensee Moor, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
The skull of a wild ox, impaled on a pine post about 10,500 years ago, stood in front of the oldest known cremation burial in northern Germany.
Stone Age · c. 12,000–10,000 BC · Şika Rika 5, near Akıncı, Mardin province, Turkey
Round stone houses at Şika Rika 5 in Mardin province date to about 12,000–10,000 BC, and the team says settled life there may have had deeper local roots than thought.
Stone Age · 7th millennium BC · Zagros Mountains, Western Iran
Milk fats in pottery and milk proteins in dental plaque place dairying in western Iran in the seventh millennium BC, according to a Nature Human Behaviour study.
Stone Age · c. 5635–5230 BC · La Marmotta, Anguillara Sabazia, Lazio, Italy
Wood analysis of 19 bows from La Marmotta, near Rome, shows its early farmers used six local tree species, most often hornbeam, in an area where yew did not grow.
Stone Age · c. 10,000–5500 BC · Umm Araka Plateau, near Serabit el-Khadim, South Sinai, Egypt
Red animal paintings on the ceiling of a sandstone shelter near Serabit el-Khadim open a sequence of images that runs into the Islamic period.
Stone Age · 9290–8925 BC · Heaning Wood Bone Cave, Great Urswick, Cumbria, England, United Kingdom
The child, aged 2.5 to 3.5 and named the Ossick Lass, was buried between 9290 and 8925 BC in a cave later reused by Neolithic and Bronze Age communities.
Stone Age · c. 4500–2500 BC · Rhine-Meuse region, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany
A Nature study of 112 genomes finds farmer ancestry entered Rhine-Meuse forager groups mainly through incoming women, until steppe newcomers arrived around 2500 BC.
Stone Age · c. 3300 BC · Badari, Asyut Governorate, Egypt
Wear marks and six coils of leather thong indicate that a 63-millimetre copper alloy tool from a Predynastic grave was spun with a bow about 5,300 years ago.
Stone Age · c. 9000 BC · Kızılöz, Samsat, Adıyaman province, Turkey
Falling water in the Atatürk Dam reservoir exposed stone enclosures near Kızılöz village in Samsat, which investigators believe are around 11,000 years old.
Stone Age · c. 7500 BC · Hora 1, Mount Hora, Northern Region, Malawi
An adult woman was burned on a large, tended pyre some 6,000 years before Africa's next known cremations, and people lit fires on the spot for centuries afterwards.