New research identifies pre-agricultural intensification of plant use in Pleistocene Sri Lankan rainforests

Writing in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, researchers in Norway and Canada recently investigated the evolution of butchering technology using newly analyzed zooarchaeological data from Bronze Age Tell Aphek, an archaeological site in north Israel. They showed that stone tools dominated during the Early Bronze Age (3000–2500 BCE) followed by a dramatic and sudden shift towards metal tools with the onset of Middle Bronze Age occupation (2000–1550 BCE). By the end of the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE), metal tools had almost completely replaced stone tools as the main butchering tools.

A millennium-old dingo deliberately buried by Barkindji ancestors in Australia, is offering rare insight into the depth of relationships between First Nations people and dingoes. The dingo appears to have been buried with great care in a purpose‑built midden, which continued to be tended and “fed” with river mussel shells for centuries, suggesting an ongoing relationship between the buried dingo and local people. This is believed to be the first time this “feeding” practice has been observed archaeologically anywhere in the world.  

The climate of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean was far more turbulent than previously thought — and a new study suggests that people adapted anyway.

Analysis of Historic St. Mary’s City highlights the power of combining ancient DNA, archaeology, and genealogy to restore lost identities and track the migrations of America's earliest  English colonists and their descendants.

Neanderthals had the know-how to identify a tooth infection and the motor skills to drill out the damage, according to a study published May 13, 2026 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Alisa Zubova of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences (Kunstkamera), St. Petersburg and colleagues.

Agriculture reached the coast of southern Denmark around 4000 BCE, but these prehistoric Scandinavians continued to fish and hunt too, according to a study published May 13, 2026 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Daniel Groß from the Museum Lolland-Falster, Denmark, Sofie Folsach Hellerøe from Aarhaus University, Denmark, and colleagues.

Horses were being ridden, worked, and traded long before anyone thought it possible. New research pushes back the accepted timeline of human use of horses by centuries, showing that humans used horses in organized ways as early as the 4th millennium BCE, if not earlier.