Medical memories The article on Temperance (CA 434) was very interesting, but one important establishment was missed: the National Temperance Hospital on Hampstead Road, purpose-built in the late 19th century. When I was nursing there in the early 1970s, we…
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.
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.
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…
Since March 2020 I have criss-crossed the United Kingdom, examining its history through the eyes of Current Archaeology. I have now visited every county in every country, but I have just a few geographical loose ends to tie off, including, this month, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.
In 1994, the 300,000-year-old spears from Schöningen, Germany, made headlines as some of oldest wooden objects ever discovered. But these were not the only finds from the site. By the time excavations at Schöningen 13 (the ‘Spear Horizon’) came to…
REVIEW BY MATTHEW POPE From the start, Slimak is clear that The Naked Neanderthal is a very personal book and offers his own individual views on the archaeology of Neanderthal people. And this is an important point to make. The…
This year’s CA Live! conference was our biggest yet, with more than 500 people coming together at UCL’s Institute of Education in London to share the latest news about the past. Here is a round-up of what went on.
He told us that he was a speleologist, whose girlfriend had just left him. He was in a very sorry state of distress.
We all enjoy stories about new discoveries, and it is these that tend to grab the news headlines, but there is another kind of story that gets far less coverage: those that contradict an earlier claim. In that category is…
Excavations at Manor Farm in Frindsbury, Kent – in advance of the construction of a Maritime Academy – have revealed more than 800 stone artefacts found within sediments thought to relate to a Middle Pleistocene tributary of the River Medway.…
A round-up of some of the latest discoveries from across the globe.
A round-up of some of latest archaeology news from around the world.
Researchers conducted genetic analysis of bone and tooth remains from 13 Neanderthals from two sites in the foothills of the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia.
New analysis has revealed that the layer containing the footprints dates to c.295,8000 years ago.
Review by Lucia Marchini As well as death and displacement, conflict brings with it a threat to cultural heritage. Nearly one year on from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this timely and attractive volume (with profits donated to the organisation…
Research suggests that, for Neanderthals and early modern humans, flavour was an important consideration during food preparation.
In this slim and accessible volume, Palaeolithic archaeologist Paul Pettitt writes with confidence about the recent history of history, or, rather, prehistory. A prologue introduces us to the immersive world of Palaeolithic archaeology, introduces its intent, and from there we…
The researchers discovered that there were at least four phases of alternating Neanderthal and modern human occupation in the rock shelter.
Professor Charles Higham will be a familiar figure to CWA readers. Not only does he write a regular column for the magazine, but he is also a world authority on the archaeology of Southeast Asia. When COVID shut down international…
What is it? This 51,000-year-old engraved toe bone is one of the oldest works of art ever found. The bone, which is the second phalanx of a giant deer, is 56.8mm long, 38.9mm wide, and 30.9mm thick, and weighs 36.1g.…
The fossil human cranium, thought to belong to a male about 50 years old, was found in 1933
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…
Over the last decade, revolutions in the scientific analysis of archaeological material have allowed us to delve deeper into the origins and migrations of modern humans. Through the lens of Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary…
Museums and sculptors should work more closely with archaeologists and palaeontologists to recreate the appearance of our extinct ancestors.
The team from the ORAU and a group of researchers from across Europe have applied a compound-dating technique to Neanderthals, this time from Belgium, and once again the results have caused a re-evaluation of the timeline of Neanderthals in Eurasia.
Neanderthals have long been stereotyped as our less-capable cousins, but advances in archaeological research have given fascinating new insights into the lives of our closest hominin relatives and the world they inhabited, as Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes explains.
Late Neanderthal tooth Investigation into a canine tooth found at Riparo Broion, a rock shelter in Vicenza, north-eastern Italy, has revealed that it may represent an important piece of direct evidence for late Neanderthal occupation in the area. The tooth…