This 5,500-year-old skeleton named Blodwen on display at Amgueddfa Llandudno Museum  (Image: Amgueddfa Llandudno Museum) The roles of men and women have become more equal in recent decades with women excelling in traditionally male-dominated industries such as science, technology, the military and football. Indeed the pensionable age in the UK for both is now the same at 66. But researchers have found a Neolithic woman who more than pulled her weight with heavy lifting as long ago as 3,500BC. Her remains, which were discovered in a crevice on Llandudno's Little Orme in the 19th Century ..read more

Vittrup man's teeth reveal his maritime origins. Arnold Mikkelsen/Fischer et al., PLOS One, 2024) Violently bludgeoned to death and left in a Danish bog, the Stone Age individual known as 'Vittrup man' was discovered in 1915 by peat cutters in the midst of harvest. His murder – thought to have been part of a ritualized sacrifice – occurred sometime between 3300 and 3100 BCE, during the height of the local Funnelbeaker culture. Archeologists now have the strongest evidence yet that this is not where his life began. The first hint that Vittrup man was a foreigner in Denmark came from a stud ..read more

  Researchers have found a prehistoric man-made stone wall that could be dating back some 11,000 years just off the coast of modern-day Germany. Jacob Geersen, a marine geologist now at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research, found the wall during a night lecture with his students who were mapping with echosounders a swath of seafloor off the coast of Germany. “The idea would be to create an artificial bottleneck with a second wall or with the lake shore,” Geersen told the Guardian. According to experts, the stone wall is more than half a mile long and dates back to the Stone Age ..read more

A rare copper dagger dating back more than 4,000 years has been discovered in a forest near Jarosław, southeastern Poland. Shaped like a flint dagger from the period, it is just over four inches long, but that is actually a large dagger compared to similar such finds because the metal was hard to come by and very valuable. This is the oldest dagger ever discovered in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship (province). The blade was discovered last November by metal detectorist Piotr Gorlach from the Historical and Exploration Association Grupa Jarosław, an organization of local history enthusiasts wh ..read more

Though the lake near Papowo Biskupie is now drained and dry, nearby lakes (including Lake Starogrodzkie in Poland’s Chełmno County) provide a picture of what the ancient waters could’ve looked like when bodies and bronze treasures were deposited beneath the surface. (Credit: Mrugas PHOTOgraphy/Shutterstock) There’s no better place to put bodies and bronze treasures than in the bed of a small, shallow lake. At least, that’s what the Bronze Age people of Poland believed, according to a new article in Antiquity. Published in the journal in January, the article reports that researchers recently ..read more

Tom Quad, Christ Church, Oxford University – image David Beard The Oxford Experience summer school is held at Christ Church, Oxford.  Participants stay in Christ Church and eat in the famous Dining Hall, that was the model for the Hall in the Harry Potter movies. This year there are twelve classes offered in archaeology. You can find the list of courses here ..read more

The Venus of Brassempouy: One of the earliest known realistic representations of a human face. From the Gravettian, probably made 26,000 to 24,000 years ago Credit: Jean-Gilles Berizzi From our earliest days, humans have split off into cultures: large groups that share beliefs, customs and behaviors. Culture is a powerful social tool that can create a sense of common purpose, help us accomplish great projects, or survive in the toughest conditions. It is also a concept that can easily move us to hate and attack those we perceive as being different from us. Just how far back in human (pre)hi ..read more

  A research team from the University of York has discovered there was a large population decline in northern Britain at the same time when the Storegga slide occurred between 6,225 and 6,170 B.C. The Storegga Slide is the largest known exposed submarine landslide in the world, which triggered a tsunami that inundated the coasts of northern Europe. Scientists think the number of deaths was so high that it may have led to a massive dip in Stone Age Britain's population. Northern Britain had a small population of about 1,000 people at this time. Still, according to Dr. Jon Hill, an env ..read more

Ancient shipwreck from the Mediterranean Sea. Credit: Philippe Groscaux / Mission Adriboats / CNRS / CCJ The Zambratija, the oldest boat in the Mediterranean built entirely by hand, is about to begin a new phase in its long history. This ancient shipwreck, lying on the Adriatic seafloor in Croatia for thousands of years, is now getting ready for a special trip to France. There, experts will work to preserve and study it. This historic boat was found in the Bay of Zambratija close to Umag on Croatia’s Istrian peninsula. Read the rest of this article ..read more

A selection of Bronze Age jewelry found at a dry lake bed in Poland. (Image credit: A. Piasecka; Antiquity Publications Ltd.) Archaeologists in Poland have discovered a collection of more than 550 pieces of Bronze Age jewelry that were once part of an ancient burial ritual. Known as Papowo Biskupie, the dried-out lake bed site was occupied from roughly 1200 to 450 B.C. by the Chełmno group, a community from the larger Lusatian culture that lived in northern Europe during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, according to a study published Wednesday (Jan. 24) in the journal Antiquity. The ..read more