Sandee Oster

On a desolate island at the end of the world, battered by freezing winds, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a possible 19th-century castaway camp that may have belonged to a renowned Argentine sailor and his shipwrecked ...

Around 2,400 years ago, at Łysa Góra in Poland, a group of people took a bronze helmet, crushed it, broke it into pieces and threw it into a pit with iron adzes and a scythe. Such helmets are sometimes found in lavish graves ...

Around 121 million years ago, somewhere in modern northeastern China, an early bird took to the skies. If you drew its silhouette, you'd notice something was missing. Unlike any bird alive today, it had no tail feathers.

Southern Africa has one of the most detailed and elaborate bodies of rock art anywhere in the world, from herds of running antelope to dancing men and humanoid beings with wings, hooves and horns. All are painted with fine ...

Ten years ago, in 2016, a metal detectorist came upon a hoard of gold. It had been buried in the dirt for around 1,800 years and consisted of around 396 grams (14 ounces) of gold rings. The detectorist handed in his finds ...

In 1955, workers in a chalk quarry in Highsted, near Sittingbourne, were working when a human skull came tumbling down the bank at the edge of a pit. It would be the first of some 26 burials, all belonging to an ancient cemetery.

Between 1880 and 1912, no official excavations took place at Kish. Yet museums from London and Paris to New York were somehow acquiring brand-new tablets from the legendary old city. As it turns out, local Iraqis had been ...

In 2014, members of a local museum found fragments of an ancient fossil dating to the end of the Pliocene or early Pleistocene epoch in a seaside cliff on the Argentine pampas. They belonged to a large predator, but the only ...

Deep in Peru's Acarí Valley lie the ruins of Tambo Viejo, an Inka provincial center where excavations have uncovered tasseled sacrificial llamas and brightly adorned guinea pigs. But save for a few seeds and some stored leaves, ...

Nearly 3,000 years ago, in central Italy, dozens of Picene people were laid to rest curled up on their sides, as if asleep. When their eternal slumber was disturbed thousands of years later, researchers noted a curiously ...

In 1967, a Malawian farmer stumbled upon a hidden hoard of eight copper ingots buried beneath a tree. Now, more than half a century later, scientists have traced the metal to its source: a copper mine nearly 800 km (500 miles) ...

In 2023, in preparation for the construction of an underwater gas pipeline, divers were sent to clear a cluster of anomalies in the Bay of Greifswald, a sheltered lagoon in northern Germany. But as they dove deeper into the ...

For decades, an idea has grown in paleontology that, long before scientists began digging up and reconstructing dinosaur bones, the Indigenous San and Basotho in southern Africa noticed them too, incorporating them into songs, ...

About 40 years ago, researchers found ancient ship carvings on a temple wall in Cyprus, possibly all carved at once at the tail end of the Bronze Age, around the time of the infamous Bronze Age collapse. Then, decades later, ...

Deep within an ancient sinkhole lie the remains of dozens of mammoths, prehistoric wanderers who waded into the warm springs to their deaths. These deaths had long been accepted as having occurred roughly 26,000 years ago, ...