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Metin Eren at Kent State University demonstrates flintknapping to make stone tools

Ancient humans may have risked their lives making stone tools

2 June 2023

Modern flintknappers experience a wide variety of injuries that could have led to life-changing consequences or death for ancient humans making stone tools


Canyars_LeatherPunchBoard

Bone fragment reveals humans wore leather clothes 39,000 years ago

12 April 2023

A study of an ancient bone from Spain with a strange pattern of notches hints that it was used by early Homo sapiens in Europe as a punch board for making holes in leather


pottery

Ancient Britons extracted salt from seawater more than 5500 years ago

30 March 2021

A Stone Age pit found in north-east England was probably used to obtain salt from seawater – thousands of years before Britons were thought to have the technology


rock art

Australia's oldest known rock art is a 17,000-year-old kangaroo

22 February 2021

A large, life-like painting of a kangaroo on the ceiling of a rock shelter is the oldest known painting in Australia, and was dated using ancient wasp nests


Stone Age Europeans used human bones to make arrowheads

Stone Age Europeans used human bones to make arrowheads

18 December 2020

Barbed bone points that washed up on the shores of Europe were used as arrowheads or spear tips, and some were made of human bones


‘Bonehenge’: Stone Age structure of mammoth bones discovered in Russia

‘Bonehenge’: Stone Age structure of mammoth bones discovered in Russia

17 March 2020

People living in Russia about 20,000 years ago built a "bonehenge" – a circular structure made of mammoth bones that could have been used to store food


Stonehenge

Hear what music would have sounded like at Stonehenge 4000 years ago

11 July 2019

You can now listen to what music would have sounded like at Stonehenge 4000 years ago, with all of its stones in their original positions


stone tool from several angls

Tool-use became widespread 10,000 years earlier than we thought

3 June 2019

The discovery of an ancient collection of tools suggests that our ancient ancestors began using stone tools on a regular basis about 2.6 million years ago


Stone Age Europe may have been home to no more than 1500 people

Stone Age Europe may have been home to no more than 1500 people

18 February 2019

Our species arrived in Europe about 43,000 years ago – and for the following 10,000 years the population remained astonishingly low


Extinct 'Denisovan' people may have lived on Earth's highest plateau

Extinct 'Denisovan' people may have lived on Earth's highest plateau

29 November 2018

The Tibetan Plateau is a tough environment so we thought humans arrived only about 12,000 years ago, but it seems someone was there 40,000 to 30,000 years ago


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