Earliest evidence of humans cooking with fire dates back 780,000 years

An artist's impression of early humans cooking fish at Lake Hula in what is now Israel

Scientists have discovered the earliest evidence of humans cooking food through the controlled use of fire, dating to almost 800,000 years ago. An archeological site in Israel contains fish remains that, on closer examination, show clear signs of having been cooked.

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Oldest known heart found preserved in 380-million-year-old fish fossil

A museum display model of the ancient fish, fossils of which have been found to contain the oldest preserved heart of any vertebrate

Soft tissues don’t fossilize well, so most of the time scientists have to infer organ anatomy from just bones. But an unexpected treasure trove of new information has been discovered in Australia, with a 380-million-year-old fish fossil preserving the oldest heart ever found.

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Stone Age surgery: Ancient amputation marks oldest known operation

Archeologists Andika Priyatno and Tim Maloney excavate the remains

Archeologists have discovered the oldest evidence of a surgical procedure in humans. A Stone Age hunter-gatherer, who lived more than 30,000 years ago, was found to have a carefully amputated leg, making it the earliest known surgery by tens of thousands of years.

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World’s oldest ice core could stretch back 5 million years

Researchers extract an ice core from Ong Valley, Antarctica

To learn about the future of Earth’s climate we can look to the past, and one of the best ways to do that is with samples drilled from deep ice cores. Now, scientists have dated what may be the world’s oldest ice core, with some sections potentially preserving samples as old as 5 million years.

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Fossil footprints mark earliest clear evidence of humans in North America

Archeologists have discovered fossilized human footprints that may represent the oldest unambiguous evidence of human settlement in North America

Exactly when humans first set foot in North America remains a mystery, but archeologists have now uncovered the oldest unambiguous evidence. A series of unmistakably human footprints have been found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, and dated to around 22,000 years ago.

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Million-year-old mammoth DNA smashes record for world’s oldest

A new DNA discovery reveals a previously unknown lineage of mammoth

A new study published in the journal Nature is describing the extraction and sequencing of the oldest known sample of DNA. The sample comes from an ancient species of mammoth found in the Siberian permafrost and dates back nearly 1.2 million years.

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World’s oldest known figurative artwork found in Indonesian cave

Dated more than 45,000 years ago, this cave painting found in Indonesia is the oldest known artwork depicting a reco

Archaeologists have discovered what they claim to be the oldest example of figurative art made by human hands. An ochre painting of pigs, found on a cave wall in Indonesia, has been dated to be at least 45,500 years old.

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