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The Ancientzen
A Neanderthal woman and Denisovan man meet in the Altai Mountains, c. 90,000 years ago

This Ancient Girl Had a Neanderthal and a Denisovan Parent

A sliver of bone no larger than a thumb tip, pulled from a Siberian cave and nearly discarded as unidentifiable, turned out to belong to a teenage girl with a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father, the only first-generation hybrid between two ancient human lineages ever confirmed. She was not a distant, diluted trace of ...

Sisyphus tricks Thanatos into chaining himself, Corinth, c. 700 BCE

Before His Boulder, Sisyphus Once Captured Death Itself

Long before Greek tradition remembered him for an eternity spent pushing a boulder uphill, Sisyphus was remembered for something almost as remarkable: he captured Death itself, and got away with it for long enough that people stopped dying at all, warriors and invalids alike trapped in bodies that could no longer let them go. A ...

Týr places his hand in Fenrir's mouth, Prose Edda myth, Iceland, c. 1220 CE

Tyr Paid for the Gods’ Broken Promise With His Hand

Týr appears only a handful of times in the medieval Icelandic sources that preserve most of what survives of Norse mythology, far less often than Odin or Thor. His name, though, points toward something older than either of theirs, and the one story where he plays a central role costs him more, in permanent physical ...

Magyar raiders reach Wiborada's cell near the Abbey of Saint Gall, May 926

She Saved a Library, Then Refused to Save Herself

On May 1, 926, raiders broke through the roof of a walled-up stone cell outside the Abbey of Saint Gall and killed the woman living inside it. She had known they were coming for almost a year, and had used that year to save a library instead of herself, a decision that would outlast her ...

A family of Neanderthals stepping inside Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel.

This Child’s Skull May Be Human and Neanderthal Both

A child’s skull excavated on Mount Carmel nearly a century ago may be rewriting how early Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, and when. A study published in July 2025 in the journal L’Anthropologie argues that the skeleton known as Skhul I shows a genuine mix of features from both species, pushing the earliest solid evidence ...

The Shigir Idol wooden face.

The World’s Oldest Wooden Statue Was Once Twice as Tall

In January 1890, gold prospectors digging through a peat bog in Russia’s Ural Mountains hit something that had nothing to do with gold: a carved wooden figure that would turn out to be the oldest known wooden sculpture on Earth, older than Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt combined. A Gold Mine Gives Up an ...

Oil Jars from Monte Testaccio

The Roman Hill Built Entirely From Broken Oil Jars

Rome has an artificial hill built almost entirely out of garbage, and the garbage happens to be one of the best economic records the ancient world left behind. Monte Testaccio rises 35 metres above the streets south of the Aventine Hill, made up of the broken remains of an estimated 53 million olive oil jars, ...

Shaharah Bridge

The Yemeni Bridge Designed to Be Pulled Apart by Hand

High in northern Yemen, a single stone arch spans a gorge nearly 300 feet deep, and for centuries it doubled as a weapon in its own right. The Shaharah Bridge could be pulled apart by hand, and when it was, an entire invading army had nowhere left to go, stranded on bare rock with a ...

An American lion attacks a steppe bison on Alaska's mammoth steppe, c. 50,000 years ago

The Alaskan Bison So Well Preserved Scientists Ate It

In July 1979, gold miners working the permafrost near Fairbanks, Alaska aimed a hydraulic hose at a wall of frozen muck and uncovered a pair of bison feet instead of gold. What they had found was one of the most complete Ice Age mammals ever recovered in North America, a carcass so well preserved that ...

Mourners bury a high-status man with gold ornaments at Varna, c. 4400 BC

How a Cable Trench Uncovered the World’s Oldest Gold

In October 1972, an excavator operator named Raycho Marinov was cutting a trench near Varna, Bulgaria, to lay an electric cable, when his machine turned up small squares of shining yellow metal. What he had struck was the edge of a cemetery that would change how archaeologists understand the earliest use of gold anywhere on ...

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