Colorful stones, fossils, and ancient flint tools discovered at prehistoric sites in Israel are at the heart of a new study. The researchers hypothesize that such objects helped people remember places and events from their lives and may have influenced the evolution of autobiographical memory and our sense of self.

Oracle bone script is the earliest known Chinese writing, and most of it is still unread: of roughly 4,500 characters carved on ox scapulae and turtle plastrons in the Shang dynasty, about 3,000 have no agreed reading. Writing in The Innovation, researchers at Huazhong University of Science and Technology with South China University of Technology and Anyang Normal University describe AlphaOracle, an AI system that follows an epigrapher's workflow instead of matching shapes. It parses a rubbing, proposes readings from glyph evolution and radical structure, re-ranks them against how the character is used elsewhere in the corpus, then tests them against classical texts and modern scholarship, returning candidates with confidence scores and sources. On characters withheld from training it took 23.1% top-1 accuracy; recovering missing characters from context it reached 56.1%. Eighty-six specialists took part, 78.7% rated it useful and estimated it saved 64% of analysis time.

When England industrialized during the late 18th- and early 19th centuries, an extended period of cooling – the Little Ice Age, marked by volcanic activity and cooler temperatures – came toward its end. Poor working and living conditions drove disease and deficiencies – but climate factors may have played a role, too, a new study has shown. To examine the impact of climate on vitamin D deficiencies during Industrial Revolution childhoods, scientists used excavated teeth and the burial register from a Quaker cemetery in north-east England. Their findings showed that many people buried at the cemetery had been born shortly after periods of high volcanic and low solar activity. The scientists said these findings point to climate as a possible additional driver of disease in the past and shows the importance of considering the full picture of factors impacting human health.

Bournemouth University (BU) archaeological research has revealed that Iron Age British ruler ‘Verica’ who was central to the Roman Invasion of Britain AD 43 was in fact a woman. This discovery re-writes the history of early Roman Britain. 

Ancient DNA reveals that denizens of the Iberian Peninsula made leather from domestic goats as far back as 7,000 years ago, according to a study published November 4, 2026, in the open access journal PLOS One by Jolijn A. M. Erven of University College Dublin, Ireland and colleagues.

An 88-year-old murder mystery surrounding British archaeologist James Leslie Starkey, who was shot dead in 1938 while traveling from the ancient city of Lachish to Jerusalem, has gained new clarity now. Building on a 2016 study, new research combines previously overlooked archival documents, British intelligence records and Palestinian oral testimonies to reveal that the killing was likely a targeted assassination linked to bitter land disputes between the archaeological expedition and local villagers. The findings identify a Palestinian rebel commander as the likely perpetrator and shed new light on the complex relationship between archaeology, land ownership and political violence during the British Mandate.

A new study from Tel Aviv University reveals how plants, despite having neither a brain nor a nervous system,

integrate light coming from multiple directions to determine where to grow. The researchers show how this process emerges from local sensing across the stem, without the need for centralized information processing.

Light receptors scattered around the stem sense the light sources locally, convert their intensities into biological signals that “encode” the information, and only then add them together. In certain cases, this mechanism may cause the plant to lean in a direction slightly different from the most intense illumination - a phenomenon the researchers define as a kind of “optical illusion.”

The 'Little Ice Age' in Transylvania demonstrated far-reaching, intertwined environmental and societal impacts of climate variability, as unearthed by diaries and other historical sources from the 17th century.