Middle Stone Age

The oldest known cave engravings in France, and possibly Europe, have been discovered in the Loire Valley, with researchers uncovering designs dating back at least 57,000 years to the age of Neanderthals.

According to the findings, reported on June 21 the American journal PLOS One, the engravings, also called finger-flutings, predate the arrival of Homo sapiens to Western Europe.

About 15% of these “super-archaic” regions may have been passed down to modern humans

With fossils and DNA, scientists are piecing together a picture of humanity’s beginnings, an origin story with more twists than anything you would find at the movie theater.

Anthropologists have long sought to pin down the exact location of the proverbial “Garden of Eden” — the region of our planet where the earliest Homo sapiensemerged.
Over the last two decades, a combination of genetic evidence and data from the fossil record led scientists to conclude that the first members of our species evolved in Eastern Africa about 200,000 years ago.

Neanderthals may not have been as lucky as our human ancestors in the long run, but that doesn’t mean the two subspecies didn’t get lucky.

A 430,000-year-old case may be the world's oldest murder mystery, NBC news has reported.