Ancient humanity, surprise us: Best archaeology stories in 2025

The fury of the struggle between ancient Rome and the Carthaginians over control of the Mediterranean basin has resonated over the ages, as has the hideous massacre of Carthage’s people by the victorious Romans. It was surprising to many to learn in 2025 from genetic analysis who exactly the defeated Carthaginians were.

Only our species, Homo sapiens, has produced figurative art, going back to our earliest successful exit from Africa. Narrative art adorns cave in Indonesia going back some 54,000 years and the Aurignacian art in Europe is legendary. Now a team proposes a new theory for why we find no parallel artistic whispers in Israel.

In our part of the planet, the Neolithic revolution starting about 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent spread in all directions as of 7,500 years ago with farmers migrating out of Anatolia. It seems their innovations were not universally welcomed.

Boomerangs are so associated with Australian aborigines that it’s cliché but this particular weapon apparently emerged more than once, and the very earliest one, from over 30,000 years ago, wasn’t found where one might expect.

The paradigm of Mayan cities’ collapse due to drought is reversed by new theory of early urbanization, and actual data.

Paw-prints on a church wall freshly mortared 1,700 years ago at a site by the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee were initially identified as a cat’s, the ultimate commensal wall-walker. Enter the experts.

A papyrus found in the Judean Desert in the 1950s isn’t a Nabataean text, as assumed; the longest Greek papyrus ever discovered in this desert contains the Roman prosecutor’s scribbles ahead of a fraud trial against Jewish ‘scoundrels’ (tax evaders).

An Assyrian cuneiform seal is found in Jerusalem, for the first time. What could it be from? Who knows, but archaeologists suspect it sealed a letter of complaint from the overlords in the eighth century B.C.E. after the King of Judah welshed on tax. This surmise is based on the nature of their communiques to other vassal regions that have actually been found.

The fire-makers of Barnham may have been early Neanderthals, and the archaeologists believe they have found the smoking match to show intentionality.

There is a conundrum in the Land of Israel. Is the ancient site of Rujm el Hiri rotating, in geological terms? And if it is, at what speed is it doing so? The answer could determine whether the mysterious prehistoric stone circles in Israel, called Rujm el Hiri, was an observatory or not.