The world’s oldest surviving rock art is a faded outline of a hand on an Indonesian cave wall, left 67,800 years ago.

On a tiny island just off the coast of Sulawesi (a much larger island in Indonesia), a cave wall bears the stenciled outline of a person’s hand—and it’s at least 67,800 years old, according to a recent study. The hand stencil is now the world’s oldest work of art (at least until archaeologists find something even older), as well as the oldest evidence of our species on any of the islands that stretch between continental Asia and Australia.

Adhi Oktaviana examines a slightly more recent hand stencil on the wall of Liang Metanduno. Credit: Oktaviana et al. 2026

Hands reaching out from the past

Archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana, of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, and his colleagues have spent the last six years surveying 44 rock art sites, mostly caves, on Sulawesi’s southeastern peninsula and the handful of tiny “satellite islands” off its coast. They found 14 previously undocumented sites and used rock formations to date 11 individual pieces of rock art in eight caves—including the oldest human artwork discovered so far.

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© OKtaviana et al. 2026

Archaeologists recently found the wreck of an enormous medieval cargo ship lying on the seafloor off the Danish coast, and it reveals new details of medieval trade and life at sea.

Archaeologists discovered the shipwreck while surveying the seabed in preparation for a construction project for the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. It lay on its side, half-buried in the sand, 12 meters below the choppy surface of the Øresund, the straight that runs between Denmark and Sweden. By comparing the tree rings in the wreck’s wooden planks and timbers with rings from other, precisely dated tree samples, the archaeologists concluded that the ship had been built around 1410 CE.

The Skaelget 2 shipwreck, with a diver for scale. Credit: Viking Ship Museum

A medieval megaship

Svaelget 2, as archaeologists dubbed the wreck (its original name is long since lost to history), was a type of merchant ship called a cog: a wide, flat-bottomed, high-sided ship with an open cargo hold and a square sail on a single mast. A bigger, heavier, more advanced version of the Viking knarrs of centuries past, the cog was the high-tech supertanker of its day. It was built to carry bulky commodities from ports in the Netherlands, north around the coast of Denmark, and then south through the Øresund to trading ports on the Baltic Sea—but this one didn’t quite make it.

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© VollwertBIT

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE released thermal energy roughly equivalent to 100,000 times the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, spewing molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over Pompeii. Pompeii's public baths, aqueduct, and water towers were among the preserved structures frozen in time. A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed calcium carbonate deposits from those structures to learn more about the city's water supply and how it changed over time.

Pompeii was founded in the sixth century BCE. Prior research revealed that, early on, the city relied on rainwater stored in cisterns and wells for its water supply. The public baths used weight-lifting machinery to lift water up well shafts that were as deep as 40 meters. As the city developed, so did the complexity of its water supply system, most notably with the construction of an aqueduct between 27 BCE and 14 CE.

The authors of this latest paper were interested in the calcium carbonate deposits left by water in well shafts as well as the baths and aqueduct. The different layers have "different chemical and isotope composition, calcite crystal size, and shape," which in turn could reveal information about seasonal changes in temperature, as well as changes over time in the chemical composition of the water. Analyzing those properties would enable them to "reconstruct the history of such systems—particularly public baths—revealing aspects of their maintenance and the adaptations made during their period of use," the authors wrote.

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© Cees Passchier

A group of 773,000-year-old hominin fossils from Morocco may shed new light on when our species branched off from the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

A team of anthropologists recently examined a collection of fossil hominin jawbones, teeth, and vertebrae that belong to hominins who probably lived very close in time to our species’ last common ancestor with Neanderthals and Denisovans. They reveal a little more about a murky but important moment in our evolutionary history.

From predators’ quarry to rock quarry

Archaeologists unearthed the 773,000-year-old bones just southwest of Casablanca in a cave aptly named Grotte à Hominidés. They’re just fragments of what used to be hominins: an adult’s lower jawbone, plus the partial lower jaw from another adult and a very young child, along with a handful of teeth and vertebrae. A hominin femur from the same layer of sediment in the cave has clear gnaw marks from sharp carnivore teeth, offering a chilling clue about how the bones got there.

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© J.P. Raynal, Programme Préhistoire de Casablanca

Archaeologists have discovered Africa's oldest known cremation pyre at the base of Mount Hora in Malawi. According to a paper published in the journal Science Advances, radiocarbon testing dates the site to about 9,500 years ago, prompting a rethinking of group labor and ritual in such ancient hunter-gatherer communities.

Many cultures have practiced some form of cremation. There is a Viking cremation site known as Kalvestene on the small island of Hjarnø in Denmark, for instance. And back in 2023, we reported on an unusual Roman burial site where cremated remains had not been transported to a separate final resting place but remained in place, covered in brick tiles and a layer of lime and surrounded by several dozen bent and twisted nails—possibly an attempt to prevent the deceased from rising from the grave to haunt the living.)

But the practice was extremely rare among hunter-gatherer societies, since building a pyre is labor-intensive and requires a great deal of communal resources. There is very little evidence of cremation predating the mid-Holocene (between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago). According to the authors of this latest paper, the earliest known concentration of burnt human remains was found at Lake Mungo in Australia and dates back 40,000 years, but there is no evidence of a pyre, making it challenging to determine specific details.

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© Patrick Fahy