Sandee Oster

About 22,000 years ago, a giant brown bear lumbered across what is now Portugal. The creature weighed around 385 kg (about 850 pounds), making it one of the largest of its kind ever found, towering over the Iberian brown ...

When you first step into Japan's Kyushu tombs, the first thing you notice is nothing at all. "When you enter, you're engulfed by darkness; you can smell earth and stone, and you have the sensation of being enclosed …," said ...

For more than 150 years, fossils of Jurassic fish scattered across Europe's museums were studied and drawn by generations of scientists. However, when a paleontologist decided to shine an ultraviolet light on them, a hidden ...

Buried in the rubble outside an ancient city, archaeologists have discovered golden diadems and mouthpieces stamped with sun-crowned bulls and running ibexes. Their designs borrow from nearly every corner of the ancient Mediterranean, ...

Around 1,800 years ago, a fossilized spinal bone lay on the windswept beaches of Roman Britain until a curious passerby picked it up and carried it far away, only to drop it in a pit.

When archaeologists opened the 2,600-year-old tomb of an ancient Chinese lord, they discovered his magnificent bronze bells had been scattered, their wooden hangings broken. But the most mysterious part of all: This was apparently ...

In the rugged landscapes of southern Siberia, rare images of shamans disappearing into the cracks of mountains can be found. Hundreds of years old and their artists long gone, their meaning remains a mystery. But perhaps ...

In the arid landscapes of southern Peru, around 1,100 years ago, someone carefully dug a small pit, laid down a woven mat and placed a young dog within as if sleeping, possibly wrapped in twine. Centuries later, the mummified ...

Four goose skulls were pulled from a former toilet shaft in Brandenburg, Germany, each of them riddled with strange holes. As it turns out, these holes were the telltale signs of fancy feathered crests, making them the first ...

On the edge of the Mongolian steppe, overlooking where two rivers meet, lies an ancient cemetery. Buried within are two families, traced through ancient DNA across six generations, surrounded by dozens of "strangers." The ...

A tiny, iridescent shell seal found in an ancient garbage pit in Israel is the first of its kind ever found in the region and may have belonged to a community deported and relocated by one of the ancient world's mightiest ...

Archaeologists digging at an Inca site on the arid coast of southern Peru have unearthed two rare, roughly 500-year-old freeze-dried potatoes. The potatoes are among the only ones found in more than a century and would have ...

A clay figurine, small enough to cradle in your hand, with 11 dots arranged in columns where its head should be, may depict the oldest known example of written numbers in Mesoamerica.

Over 3,000 years ago, the people of Bronze Age Poland burned their dead and placed their ashes in urns, often destroying the intimate records of their lives preserved in their bones. Now, researchers have shown that some ...

The Langobards are frequently depicted as fierce warrior-like people, with all known archaeological evidence of violence restricted to men. However, nearly 1,400 years ago, a Langobard woman took two severe injuries to the ...