Stones, Bones, and Wrecks

The National Geographic Society has paid to send forensic dogs to the island of Nikumaroro.

Something is poopy in the state of Denmark.

Archaeology badger don’t care if it's mucking up our knowledge of the ancient past.

Michael Cordonsky and Noa Evron, Tel Aviv University

The text remained invisible until this year, even though the clay was on display in the Israel Museum.

On day one, the archaeologists excitedly announced the discovery of a ship. And then came days two and three.

The view from above—sometimes way above—has revealed lost cities, forgotten pyramids, and ancient trading routes.

The USCGC McCulloch was part of the Asiatic Squadron, a group of U.S. Navy warships that fought in the 1898 Battle of Manila Bay.

The front (left) and back (right) of a 3000-year-old copper mask. Small holes near the edges suggest the mask could have been attached with threads. Someone tried to repair the fracture near the left eye—note the holes near it.

Its discovery complicates the long-standing idea that metalworking began on the continent in Peru.

Watanabe. 2017. The Auk: Ornithological Advances.

One fossil expert developed a new system for classifying extinct ducks and geese.

A strange calculation machine from an ancient Roman shipwreck is still unlocking its secrets.

Two views of an adult Homo naledi cranium found in the Lesedi Chamber of the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, where the remains of 15 individuals were discovered in a different cave in 2013.

Scientists date the intriguing hominin remains to 335,000–236,000 years ago—and find three more bodies.

Academics at the University of Mississippi want to construct a new lab to study the remains and build a visitor's center and a memorial.

With enough funding, they will analyze—and then reinter—the remains of people buried between 1707 and 1859 in a Baptist cemetery—and mental_floss will be in the lab with them.

Opening March 20, "Mummies" lets visitors peer inside remains thousands of years old—all without disturbing or unwrapping them.

Despite its fame, Stonehenge remains one of the world's most mysterious megalithic sites.

Perhaps even more puzzling than the meaning of their creation is how they were built in the first place.

Welcome to Myra, where a Greek bishop became a power player in early Christianity.

The Antikythera Mechanism is in the collection of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece.

The mysterious Antikythera mechanism—sometimes called 'the world's first computer'—has fascinated scholars for decades.

Reproduction of woodcut, 1483. Wikimedia Commons // CC BY 4.0

And when did women and babies start surviving it?

We spoke to archaeologist Murat Gülyaz about the phenomenal dig.

Forgery of art and antiquities is far from a modern phenomenon.

The brain imprints itself on the inside of the skull. These impressions have been key to the study of the evolution of the human brain.

Noblewoman Louise de Quengo was still fully clothed in a wool dress, cape, bonnet, and shoes.

Photo courtesy of G. Cole, C. Rando, L. Sibun, and T. Waldron; UCL Institute of Archaeology

"I've never seen anything quite like that before, nor have my colleagues, and we were very excited."

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