Two trails of ancient human footprints pressed into a beach in Morocco form one of the largest and best-preserved trackways in the world.

Researchers happened upon the footprint site near the northern tip of North Africa in 2022 while studying boulders at a nearby pocket beach, according to a study published Jan. 23 in the journal Scientific Reports.

"Between tides, I said to my team that we should go north to explore another beach," study lead author Mouncef Sedrati, an associate professor of coastal dynamics and geomorphology at the University of Southern Brittany in France, told Live Science. "We were surprised to find the first print. At first, we weren't convinced it was a footprint, but then we found more of the trackway."

An enormous tsunami with gigantic waves reaching 20 meters submerged large parts of northern Europe and may have wiped out populations of people in Stone Age Britain, a new University of York study has discovered.

The research focuses on a tsunami that hit Britain and northern Europe about 8,000 years ago. The authors think the waves were so huge and the number of deaths were so high that it may have led to a massive dip in Stone Age Britain's population.

Tens of thousands of years ago, prehistoric humans in Europe adorned themselves with such a wide variety of beads that researchers have classified nine distinct cultural groups across the continent based on their location and distinctive styles.

The researchers focused on the Gravettian period, which stretched between 34,000 and 24,000 years ago and was defined by hunter-gatherers who were also adept artisans, according to a study published Monday (Jan. 29) in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The Gravettians' crafting skills can be seen in the variety of materials they used to make beads, such as ivory, bones, teeth (including those from bears, horses and rabbits), antlers, jet gemstones, shells and amber. These beads likely served as personal ornaments as well as cultural markers.

Last summer, archaeologists from Gothenburg University and Kiel University excavated a dolmen, a stone burial chamber, in Tiarp near Falköping in Sweden. The archaeologists judge that the grave has remained untouched since the Stone Age. First analysis results now confirm that the grave in Tiarp is one of the oldest stone burial chambers in Sweden.

"It's an early grave which dates to the Early Neolithic period, about 3500 BCE," says archaeologist Karl-Göran Sjögren. However, the odd thing is that parts of the skeletons of the people buried are missing.

Archaeologists have found hundreds of preserved artefacts within the remnants of the HMS Erebus nearly two centuries after it sank in Arctic Canada.

Pistols, sealed bottles of medicine, fishing rods and seaman’s chests were among the discoveries made by Parks Canada, the underwater team that completed the most recent exploration of the wreck.

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror went missing in 1845 during an expedition that set off from Greenhithe in Kent to find the Northwest Passage, a polar route that linked the Atlantic and Pacific. It was led by the British Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin.

Archaeologists have combined DNA analysis with the study of pottery to examine the spread of broomcorn millet across Eurasia, revealing how regional culinary traditions persisted even as new crops were introduced.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jqs.3586

Tucked away in rock shelters in the secluded northern mountains of Luzon in the Philippines, the Kabayan "fire" mummies lie at rest.

These mummies are what's left of a tradition that was carried out for hundreds of years up until the 19th century.

Known popularly as "meking" or the "fire mummies," these sacred remains are the preserved ancestors of the Ibaloi, one of the distinct ethnolinguistic groups of the mountainous Cordillera Benguet region.

Some of the history of the mummies has been lost over time, but what we do know is that this process of mummification dates back as early as 200 BC and involved drying and dehydrating human remains using heat and smoke from a fire—giving us the term "fire mummy."

Inscription on knife discovered by archaeologist in grave on island of Funen spells hirila, which means ‘little sword’

An engraving on an almost 2,000-year-old knife believed to be the oldest runes ever found in Denmark has been discovered by archaeologists.

The runic inscription – the alphabet of Denmark’s earliest written language – was etched into an 8cm iron knife found in a grave below an urn near the city of Odense on the island of Funen. The five characters, each about 0.5cm tall, followed by three grooves, spell out hirila, which means “little sword” in Old Norse.

In the autumn of 2021, an 800-page report crossed the desk of Washington state lands archaeologist Sara Palmer. It came from an energy developer called Avangrid Renewables, which was proposing to build a solar facility partly on a parcel of public land managed by the state. Palmer was in charge of reviewing reports like these, which are based on land surveys intended to identify archaeologically and culturally significant resources.

Developers have proposed dozens of similar solar and wind projects across the state — a “green rush” of sorts amid rising fears of climate change. With the projects came more reports.

Often, Palmer, who worked for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, read the reports and signed off; sometimes she shared notes on any concerns or told the developer to have the archaeologists they’d contracted with do additional fieldwork. This time, as she looked at the report, she grew concerned. The consulting company that Avangrid had hired, Tetra Tech, had included a lot of boilerplate language about human history on the Columbia Plateau, but fewer details than Palmer expected about what was actually found on the land.

Palmer knew that the parcel, located on a ridge called Badger Mountain, near the confluence of the Wenatchee and Columbia rivers, was historically a high-traffic corridor for the škwáxčənəxʷ and šnp̍əšqʷáw̉šəxʷ peoples (also known as the Moses Columbia and Wenatchi tribes). The area would likely be rich in cultural resources, including historic stone structures and first foods, the ingredients that make up traditional Indigenous diets.

Palmer was used to helping developers improve their technical reports to meet state standards. So, as soon as the snow melted, she drove out to Badger Mountain to look at the land herself.

As she walked the sagebrush overlook, Palmer quickly found signs of current-day Indigenous ceremonial activity, as well as ancient sites such as stone structures that can look like natural formations to the untrained eye but serve a variety of functions, including hunting and storage.

Most of the proposed development is on private lands, which Palmer lacked the authority to access. But in about 20 hours of fieldwork on the state-owned parcel, over the course of several days, Palmer said she found at least 17 sites of probable archaeological or cultural importance not listed in Tetra Tech’s survey. She would find more on subsequent visits.

Over the next year, Palmer’s findings — and how she shared them — would pit her against corporate and political forces that seemed determined to push the project through.