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…
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.
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…
A mammoth discovery A remarkable collection of mammoth bones has been found in a wine cellar in Lower Austria. Excavations at the site in Gobelsburg, carried out by archaeologists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), have revealed a dense…
REVIEW BY SIMON NORTON Ten years ago, Year 3 primary school teachers in the UK, like myself, were handed a revised National Curriculum which included a brand-new Unit of Study on ‘Prehistoric Britain’. For many teachers of seven-year-olds, this was…
REVIEW BY AB What was life like for the inhabitants of Europe in the last Ice Age? How did they make their clothes? Did children play with toys? What was their relationship with dogs? These are just some of the…
REVIEW BY KK Wolf Road is Alice Roberts’ first foray into children’s literature. Drawing on archaeological and anthropological evidence, the book tries to provide as accurate a window as possible into the world of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, and into how they…
A major new cave-art discovery has recently been made in Cova Dones, Spain. The nature of these images poses fascinating questions about how and where Palaeolithic people created such art, as Aitor Ruiz-Redondo told Matthew Symonds.
An Ice Age mystery In 1999, archaeologists working in Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany discovered the head of a 35,000-year-old ivory figurine, believed to depict a horse. Recent excavations have now produced part of the figurine’s missing body, which…
Among the stone tools recovered from the site were 14 complete and fragmentary stemmed projectile points, dated to around 16,000 years ago.
Scientists identified ancient DNA belonging to the relatives of present-day reindeer, hares, and lemmings.
Archaeologists tend to reserve the term ‘civilisation’ for the settled villages and towns of the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Many of the innovations that we think are characteristic of human civilisation were, however, the inventions of Ice Age hunter-gatherers. Just…
Findings show that there were at least two genetically distinct Late Upper Palaeolithic populations present in Britain after the last Ice Age, around 15,000 years ago.
Recent debate about women’s roles in the Ice Age raises questions about how much can be said about everyday lives in this era. Elle Clifford and Paul Bahn examine the evidence for who did what in the Palaeolithic.
The find has been dubbed the ‘biggest mammoth discovery for a generation’
Archaeologists working in New Mexico, USA, have discovered a set of human footprints that date to thousands of years before people were thought to have arrived in the region.
These tracks could offer concrete evidence that humans reached North America before glacial advances closed the ice-free corridor and Pacific Coastal Route
This book presents the results of excavations at the Dix Pit quarry near the village of Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, which revealed one of the largest and most-remarkable Pleistocene assemblages yet to be found in Britain, with finds spanning over c.200,0000…
New dating of the Shigir Idol, the oldest known wooden monumental statue in the world, has revealed that it was created even earlier than previously thought.
Growing Up in the Ice Age represents both the first book-length work on the lives of children throughout the Plio-Pleistocene, and a superlative example of how the study of children can be fully integrated into more traditional areas of Palaeolithic…
Further analysis revealed the genome derived from a female individual, or multiple females.
At a time of food scarcity, obesity became a desirable condition… the Venus figurines represented an ideal body type.
Archaeologists excavating a 15,000-year-old campsite at Les Varines, Jersey, have recovered ten fragments of stone decorated with hundreds of interweaving lines. Recently published analysis of these ‘plaquettes’ suggests that they may represent the earliest artworks yet identified in the British Isles. Carly Hilts reports.
Humans have been calling the Arctic home for tens of thousands of years. But over the millennia, changes in climate have repeatedly forced groups to adapt or make way for incomers bearing superior tools. Amber Lincoln and Jago Cooper told Matthew Symonds about the archaeology of the circumpolar world.
Around 8,150 years ago, a sudden shift in the seabed created the Storegga tsunami in the North Sea. With all known evidence pointing towards this event greatly affecting, but not completely inundating, Doggerland (the strip of land that once connected…