Across 8 Greek island, location of the Loizos Cave archaeological site (6)9 ___ limestone, sedimentary rock made of small grains of calcium carbonate (7)10 Kathleen ___, British archaeologist, author of Ancient Sparta (8)11 Location of a Makah village site in…
Two remarkably detailed bird figurines have been discovered at Hohle Fels cave in south-western Germany. The cave, which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site ‘Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura’, has produced an array of…
Hidden within the limestone cliffs of the Gower Peninsula in South Wales is a cave that has witnessed dramatic changes in climate, landscape, and human history. Bacon Hole, overlooking what is today the Bristol Channel, is home to one of the most intriguing and controversial stories in British prehistoric archaeology. It is a story that began more than a century ago with the discovery of possible Ice Age paintings, continued through decades of doubt, and has now been reopened through modern scientific investigation. George Nash explains.
A study of human remains from two cemeteries in Bulgaria, all buried with distinctively ‘Gothic’ jewellery, brooches, and belt buckles, suggests that the ancient Goths were ethnically diverse and not a single homogeneous community.
A series of ten red horizontal lines, recently rediscovered in Bacon Hole on the southern coast of the Gower Peninsula in Wales, has been interpreted as rock art possibly dating to the Upper Palaeolithic period c.17,100 years ago. If this…
Dogs are man’s best (and oldest – see CA 352 and 401) friends, but how they came to be that way is still a bit of a mystery. Based on morphological changes and genetic estimations, they are believed to have…
Ice Age art engages something within us that feels deeply and inherently human. Most of us feel it immediately: awe, curiosity, and perhaps even sometimes a feeling that borders on spiritual. Yet, while this response is nearly universal, the opportunity…
In 2024, Paul Bahn and Elle Clifford published Living in the Ice Age, adapting their 2022 publication Everyday Life in the Ice Age for a younger audience. In my review of their 2024 publication (CWA 126), I discussed how, following…
Analysis of quartz arrowheads from South Africa reveals that they may represent the earliest use of poison arrows in hunting. Researchers from Sweden and South Africa carried out gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis of ten microliths discovered in the Umhlatuzana…
Analysis of a fragment of elephant bone, first discovered during excavations at Boxgrove, West Sussex, in the early 1990s (see CA 153), has revealed that it was used as a hammer by early hominins roughly 500,000 years ago, making it…
Archaeologists have revealed that humans were making fire 350,000 years earlier than previously known. Opportunistic use of wildfire, usually created by lightning strikes, is likely to have developed over a million years ago, but – until now – the earliest…
Excavations at East Farm, Barnham, have uncovered the oldest-known traces of deliberate fire-making – a game-changing step in the human story that we now know took place 350,000 years earlier than was previously thought. Carly Hilts reports.
For my third and final column on the Palaeolithic, I will clamber into some of the most famous caves in the country. Even better – as I will outline at the end of this selection – the majority are open to the public, offering unparalleled opportunities to visit these stunning prehistoric sites.
REVIEW BY OSCAR MORO ABADIA This publication was created to accompany the British Museum Partnership Exhibition Ice Age art now, held at Cliffe Castle Museum in summer 2025. The exhibition showcased the British Museum’s remarkable collection of Pleistocene mobiliary art…
In last month’s column, I explored Palaeolithic Norfolk and Suffolk, visiting some of the most important prehistoric sites not just in Britain but in the whole of western Europe. Here I will follow up on that review by moving south into Kent and Sussex
Stone tools on Sulawesi Excavations at a site called Calio, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, have found new evidence of the island’s occupation by early hominin species. Carried out between 2019 and 2022 by a joint team from Indonesia…
In the previous few columns I have explored some of the great towns of Roman Britain – so, as a change of pace, here I will begin a new mini-series on the country’s great prehistoric sites. I will commence this month with a series of locations in Norfolk and Suffolk.
Excavations at Old Park, on the eastern outskirts of Canterbury in Kent, have revealed further evidence of occupation of the site by ancient hominin species. These new discoveries have dated the earliest lithic layers to between 712,000-621,000 years ago –…
Far below the Nullarbor Plain in Australia lies an extraordinary gallery of rock art. Exploration and research in Koonalda Cave has revealed much about these ancient markings, as well as mining and the early occupation of Australia, as Keryn Walshe, April Nowell, and Clem Lawrie reveal.
A remarkable site containing Palaeolithic stone tools was found in modern rainforest near Anyama, Côte d’Ivoire, in the 1980s. The chronology of these deposits remained unclear, but could modern dating techniques help to fill in this blank? Matthew Symonds learnt from Eslem Ben Arous, James Blinkhorn, and Eleanor Scerri what happened when a field team returned to Anyama.
Stone tools recently discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are rewriting the story of the early human occupation of island Southeast Asia. Perhaps the most famous hominin from this region is Homo floresiensis (the ‘Hobbit’), a small-statured species found…
An exhibition at Cliffe Castle Museum showcases artworks dating back 24,000 years, bringing together Continental artefacts with two key British finds. Carly Hilts reports.
REVIEW BY HANNA MCNULTY What if Ice Age art was not confined to glass cases or academic articles, but displayed in galleries alongside contemporary artists? In Ice Age Art Now, Jill Cook curates just that experience. Spanning the final 20,000…
‘Dragon Man’ was Denisovan? New palaeoproteomic and DNA evidence suggests that ‘Dragon Man’ – a hominin cranium first discovered in the 1930s near Harbin in north-east China – is not a new species as had previously been hypothesised but is…
A recent Netflix documentary, Secrets of the Neanderthals, has attracted a massive worldwide audience, and taken a major step forward in dealing with the widespread myth that Neanderthals were brutish and backward. As we now know from comparing their DNA and ours, we can count them among our remote ancestors.
New analysis of a hominin skull previously believed to represent a new species of ancient human suggests that it may in fact be a Denisovan. The Denisovans were first discovered in 2010, when ancient DNA from a finger bone in…
In this month’s ‘Science Notes’, we are examining amino acid geochronology (AAG) – a dating technique that can be used to help date the whole Quaternary period, from c.2 million years ago up to the present day. Recently, a team…
There are lots of great ways to get stuck into history and heritage this summer, from new exhibitions and activity days to lectures and conferences. Or, if you’re looking for opportunities to get involved from home, there are a wide variety of resources available, including virtual site tours and digital offerings from museums, podcasts, and TV shows. Amy Brunskill has put together a selection of some of the latest options.
Two locations on the Isle of Skye have recently revealed evidence for occupation during the Late Upper Palaeolithic (LUP). Now new research (published in the Journal of Quaternary Science: ) into the environment at this time shows that these Palaeolithic…
A few years ago, Sarah Paris – then a graduate student at Cambridge University – asked if she could access the human skeletons from Khok Phanom Di in order to study the mortuary use of red ochre. I excavated this great Neolithic site in 1985, and I willingly agreed. Last year, she completed her doctoral dissertation and at the last Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand, she won the prize for the best presentation by a graduate student.
An assemblage of bone tools found in Tanzania is revolutionising our understanding of early human technologies.
The emergence of bipedal walking has long been recognised as a central aspect of hominid evolution, but much less is known about the development of running. Recently, a team of researchers from the UK and the Netherlands set out to…
REVIEW BY GEORGE NASH Given the severity of the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is no surprise that the rich prehistoric archaeology of the country has been largely forgotten, especially within its southern and eastern regions, but it makes this…
Neanderthal fossil hunters? Excavations of Prado Vargas cave in northern Spain have uncovered 15 marine fossils in a Neanderthal assemblage dating to 39,800-54,600 years ago. With the exception of one, which had been used as a hammer, none of these…
Recent research has shed invaluable light on the use of adhesives on ancient metalwork, and how these substances can be identified and analysed in curated artefacts. Carly Hilts spoke to Tabea Koch, Sophia Adams, and Rebecca Stacey to learn more.
Analysis of engraved stone slabs from the 15,800-year-old site of Gönnersdorf, located on the banks of the Rhine in west-central Germany, has identified a set of carvings that appear to depict fish nets or traps. Gönnersdorf has produced a rich…