The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient texts that contain passages from the earliest version of the Hebrew Bible.

Researchers thought that they had pulled all the information available out of the texts, but later found writing on smaller sections of the page that were invisible to the naked eye.

Multispectral imaging was used to reveal this new information which researchers are still analyzing.

Acheaoligsts around the world tend to agree that humans started building permanent settlements and leaving their nomadic lifestyles behind around 10,000 years ago.

When researchers discovered the temple of Gobekli Tepe, however, it predated their 10,000-year assessment by 1,000 years.

To date, this is the oldest permanent settlement that we know of and it reveals that humans may have settled into long-term communities early than previously thought, totally throwing off our timeline of human history!

Before the discovery of these skulls and fossils in South Africa, archaeologists thought that the belief in an afterlife and the subsequent burial of dead relatives and community members was only done by more modern humans with more developed brains.

However, this discovery of a burial revealed that earlier forms of humans retained this capacity of thought with brains about half the size of modern humans.

This discovery is known as Skull 5 and was discovered in Dmanisi, Georgia. It’s a 1.8 million-year-old hominid skull that has allowed researchers a much more detailed look into the past because of its intact features.

Because of this discovery, some scientists now believe that there may have been many fewer individual homo species than previously believed.

This 43,900-year-old cave painting was discovered on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia. It depicts animals being flushed out of their hiding places towards armed hunters.

These cave images are believed to be the earliest story ever told by humans.

There is a commonly held belief that Neanderthals were nothing but dumb cave people that modern humans eventually wiped out.

However, a recent discovery in Italy of painted shells suggests that this species was actually much more intelligent and similar to modern humans than previously believed.

We’ve all heard of the great Library of Alexandria. It’s been believed for some time that the library was destroyed at the hand of Julius Ceaser, and with it, thousands of texts and scrolls containing writing from some of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world.

However, recent discoveries of texts written by the workers in the library reveal that it may have actually been budget cuts, not fire, that destroyed this great institution.

We’re not sure we buy it, but it’s pretty interesting.

For thousands of years, humans and animals have worked side-by-side when the situation benefited both groups. Over time, this caused the wild nature of some of these animals to be bred out of them. Cats are a great example.

It was previously believed that the earliest domestication of cats was done in Egypt around 4,000 ago.

However, new discoveries suggest that cats in China may have been domesticated earlier than this when a rodent infestation threatened farmers’ rice crops.

Ayahuasca is a psychedelic and hallucinogenic tea that has been used in medicinal and shamanic ceremonies in South America for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

A recent discovery of a medicine pouch in Bolivia that dates back to sometime between 905 and 1170 AD, contained this mixture of vines and leaves and offers the oldest evidence of early humans combining plant materials to create this psychoactive medicine.

We have recorded evidence of sacrificed children from Incan ceremonies. However, it wasn’t until the discovery of perfectly persevered mummies in Argentina in 1999, that researchers were able to see exactly how these children were sacrificed.

The discovery revealed that the children were given high quantities of cocoa leaves and maize beer until they passed out and were left for dead on exposed mountain tops.

The Ancient Greeks have long been praised for their incredible inventions. However, one of the most impressive has to be the Antikythera Mechanism.

This genius machine worked as a sort of analog computer, comprised of gears and cogs, that could predict things like eclipses and the orbits of the planets.

It was discovered in 1900, but was dated to at least 100 BCE, and predates any other technology like it by about 1,000 years.

For centuries, the common belief was that the pyramids were built by slaves. However, a recent discovery of tombs near the pyramids may suggest otherwise.

These tombs contained what some archaeologists believe to be paid laborers who were buried with items like beer and bread, something slaves were never given after death.

Paleofeces, otherwise known as fossilized excrement, have long been used to learn about what kinds of things early humans were eating. The only problem is that fossilized dog and human feces is so hard to tell apart that much of what scientists believed to be human excrement was actually from a dog.

A new AI tool was invented and revealed in an article from PeerJ academic journal that allowed for scientists to now accurately distinguish dog feces from human feces and discover so much more about early human gut microbiota and their diet.

Researchers from the Natural History Museum in London and Griffith University in Australia discovered that a skull that was previously thought to be 500,000 years old was actually only 299,000 years old!

This was significant because it meant that this species of Homo heidelbergensis was alive during the same time as early Homo sapiens. This provided more evidence for the claim that at one point there were multiple human species living together at the same time.

It is generally believed that James Cook discovered Australia in 1770.

However, a recent discovery of 5 African coins (as well as various cave art and other coins) that date back 900 years on the island continent provides evidence that people from Africa, India, China, and Europe may have been trading with native Australians long before Cook arrived in the 18th century.