Stone Age

The paper’s authors write that they have “compelling evidence of a complex and sophisticated megalithic site”

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.

In the 1800s, archaeologists began reconstructing the deep history of Europe from the bones of ancient hunter-gatherers and the iconic art they left behind, like cave paintings, fertility figurines and "lion-man" statues.

Over the past decade, geneticists have added a new dimension to that history by extracting DNA from teeth and bones.

A hillside dwelling overlooking the picturesque Rhone Valley in southern France proved irresistible for our ancestors, attracting both Neanderthals and modern humans long before the latter were thought to have reached that part of Europe, a new study suggests.

They used other Neanderthal skulls and previously collected data on Neanderthal eye, skin, and hair color to assist with the facial details

Excavations at the Stone Hills in Turkey's southeastern province of Şanlıurfa, which hosts the first examples of settled life and social communities in the world, reveals new and stunning details that could rewrite the history of the region.

Neanderthals may have been closer to our species of prehistoric modern human than previously believed after cave paintings found in Spain proved they had a fondness for creating art, one of the authors of a new scientific report said on Aug. 9.

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Italian archaeologists have uncovered the fossilized remains of nine Neanderthals in a cave near Rome, shedding new light on how the Italian peninsula was populated and under what environmental conditions.

Researchers Oana Teodora Moldovan and Silviu Constantin from the "Emil Racovita" Institute of Speleology of the Romanian Academy recently signed an article in Nature journal, together with an international team of archaeologists and speleologists, that shows that there was a genetic transfer, resulting from the interbreeding between the Neanderthals and the first anatomically modern humans to a

Neanderthals fascinate us because of what they tell us about ourselves – who we were, and who we might have become