Gunung Padang: The Oldest Pyramid on Earth — or a Hill We Wanted Too Badly to Be One?
Some mysteries are about what we found. This one is about what we want to believe. On a forested ridge in West Java, Indonesia, sits a stepped…
Çatalhöyük: The 9,000-Year-Old City With No Streets — Where the Dead Slept Beneath the Living
We carry an idea of “city” so deep we rarely question it: streets, doors that open onto them, a public square, the dead kept out past the…
The Canoe at the Bottom of the Sacred Sinkhole
Some discoveries are valuable for what they’re made of. This one is haunting for what it seems to mean. Deep beneath the Yucatán, divers found a single…
The Green Mummy of Bologna: The Child the Copper Kept`
Somewhere in Bologna, at some point between the year 1617 and the year 1814, a child died. He was between twelve and fourteen years old. Someone placed…
A Stone That Survived Millions of Years and Every War in Human History. Then Someone Finally Found It.
For millions of years, it sat in the dark. Compressed under unimaginable pressure. Subjected to heat that would have liquefied stone of lesser character. Formed in a…
A 2,600-Year-Old Tomb Was Just Opened in Italy — and Nothing Inside Had Moved
Roughly 70 kilometers northwest of Rome, in the rugged necropolis of San Giuliano, archaeologists did something almost no one gets to do anymore. They rolled back a…
Struck by a Harpoon in the 1800s, Found Alive Over a Century Later: The Astonishing Bowhead Whale
In 2007, whalers off the coast of Alaska began butchering a bowhead whale they had just taken — and found something that stopped them cold. Buried deep…
Easter Island Moai: The Statues That Actually Walked
For generations, the great mystery of Easter Island was not who built the statues — it was how they moved. The moai of Rapa Nui, those immense…
Sensational shipwreck discovery off Norway: Intact Chinese porcelain and chandeliers at a depth of 600 metres
The porcelain wreck is the best-preserved find of its kind in northern Europe. “No one has ever done this before in the Nordic region,” says Sven Ahrens…
Global Cargo
Found in the waters off a small Dutch island, a seventeenth-century shipwreck provides an unparalleled view of the golden age of European trade (Kees Zwaan/Courtesy Province of…