A Seal Tooth in a Cave Rewrites Ice Age Britain
A 15,000-year-old pendant misidentified for 160 years turns out to be from a grey seal, carried 100 kilometers inland. It changes what we know about Magdalenian Britain.
Casey Cooper·
Category
History
Latest history articles and coverage
A 1,000-Year-Old Viking Whale Trap Just Surfaced on the Norwegian Seabed
Marine archaeologists found a massive belt of stones beneath a narrow Norwegian strait. It matches descriptions in the oldest Norwegian law code, and it rewrites what we knew about medieval whaling.
Casey Cooper·
Alexander the Great's Lost Mega-City Has Been Hiding Beneath Iraq's Desert for 2,300 Years
Archaeologists have confirmed the location of Alexandria on the Tigris, a massive trade port that once rivaled its Egyptian namesake. Then war shut the dig down again.
Casey Cooper·
The Twin Sacred Lakes of Karnak: Egypt's First-of-Its-Kind Discovery
After eight years of digging, an Egyptian-Chinese team uncovered a hidden sacred lake at Karnak, forming the first twin-lake layout ever found in Egyptian archaeology.
Casey Cooper·
The Bronze Age City That Was Hiding on the Kazakh Steppe for 3,500 Years
Archaeologists have uncovered Semiyarka, a 140-hectare Bronze Age settlement in Kazakhstan that challenges everything we thought we knew about ancient steppe societies.
Casey Cooper·
40,000 Years Before Writing, Ice Age Hunters Had Their Own Sign System
A computational analysis of 3,000 carved marks on Aurignacian artifacts reveals a 22-symbol inventory with rule-governed placement, pushing structured symbolic communication back 10,000 years.
Casey Cooper·
Alexandria on the Tigris: Rediscovering Alexander the Great's Lost Desert City
Archaeologists have identified the remains of Charax Spasinou, a massive port city founded during Alexander's campaigns that controlled nearly all maritime trade entering Mesopotamia for 600 years.
Casey Cooper·
Inside an Ice Age Hunter's Pouch: What 29 Stone Tools Reveal About a Life 30,000 Years Ago
A tightly packed cluster of blades found in the Czech Republic preserves the complete personal gear of a single Gravettian hunter, offering one of archaeology's rarest glimpses into individual Stone Age life.
Casey Cooper·
The Daughters of Catalhoyuk: DNA Reveals the World's Oldest Known Female-Centered Society
Genetic analysis of 131 skeletons from a 9,000-year-old Turkish settlement proves that the earliest farming communities organized around mothers, not fathers.
Casey Cooper·
Phantom Islands: Mapping Places That Never Existed
For centuries, islands that were never real appeared on authoritative maps, shaping exploration, geopolitics, and even murder. Their legacy reveals how knowledge systems propagate error.
Casey Cooper·
The Execution Pit at the Edge of Cambridge
Ten bodies in a shallow grave. Severed heads. A giant with a hole drilled in his skull. A training dig for archaeology students uncovered a Viking Age mystery that raises more questions than it answers.
Casey Cooper·
The Founding King of Caracol: A 1,700-Year-Old Maya Royal Tomb Reveals Its Secrets
Archaeologists have found the tomb of Te K'ab Chaak, the 'Tree Branch Rain God' who founded one of the Maya's greatest cities. His jade death mask tells a story 17 centuries old.
Casey Cooper·