An ochre-rich mixture, possibly used for decoration, painting and skin protection 100,000 years ago, and stored in two abalone shells, was discovered at Blombos Cave, 300km east of Cape Town, South Africa.
Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower thought the intelligence was vital to Allied victory in World War II. Eisenhower is said to have called it “decisive.” Churchill was reported to be even stronger in his assessment to King George VI.
The UK mainland’s first fully intact Viking boat burial site has been discovered by archaeologists working in the Scottish Highlands.
An Oxford University academic is leading a project to study coroners' reports of accidental deaths in Tudor England.
Bonhams will be auctioning the internationally renowned glass collection of A C Hubbard Jr.
Insect "Frankensteins" have been discovered among fossils from a deposit in Brazil. The prehistoric creatures had the wings and middle-body segments of a dragonfly's, wing veins arranged like a mayfly and a praying mantis's forelegs.
A student prank led to British Army and intelligence units being mobilised for fear that aliens were mounting an invasion of England, documents released recently by The National Archives show.
This has to be one of the biggest long shots in history. A retired schoolteacher called Leonard Dawes had been compiling the daily crossword puzzle for London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper for over twenty years.
In the first century AD, a Greek geographer and historian named Strabo noted that a peninsula just south of Athens called Piraeus had, at one time in the past, been an island.
Marks on a clay tablet fragment found in Greece are the oldest known decipherable text in Europe, a new study says. Considered "magical or mysterious" in its time, the writing survives only because a trash heap caught fire some 3,500 years ago, according to researchers.