Damaged church floor may have revealed the grave of the fourth musketeer
This will not be turning up in the church rummage sale.
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Kiona N. Smith
Science correspondent
Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Texas A&M University and is currently based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she shares her office with two dogs, a gecko, and a wildly impractical number of books. When she's not at her desk, she's typically knitting, playing tabletop RPGs, or chasing Pokemon.
Recent stories by
Kiona N. Smith
Monte Verde site gets a new date, but the big picture doesn’t change
Stop trying to make “Clovis First” happen; it’s not going to happen.
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Never mind Band-Aids, Neanderthals had antiseptic birch tar
Our view of Neanderthal life keeps getting more complex and vibrant.
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Centuries before the Inca, Peru’s wealthy imported parrots from afar
The Inca Empire’s system of roads were built on centuries-old trade routes.
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An unlikely set of clues helps reconstruct ancient Chinese disasters
Shang Dynasty oracle bones and modern weather models feature in the same study.
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“Million-year-old” fossil skulls from China are far older—and not Denisovans
The revised age may help make sense of 2-million-year-old stone tools elsewhere in China.
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Scientists hunting mammoth fossils found whales 400 km inland
Sometimes, new data raises more questions than it answers.
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This 67,800-year-old hand stencil is the world’s oldest human-made art
The world’s oldest art has an unintentional story to tell about human exploration.
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Most Read
Archaeologists find a supersized medieval shipwreck in Denmark
The sunken ship reveals that the medieval European economy was growing fast.
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Scientists sequence a woolly rhino genome from a 14,400-year-old wolf’s stomach
Fortunately for paleogeneticists, wolf puppies don’t chew their food thoroughly.
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We have a fossil closer to our split with Neanderthals and Denisovans
A recent study suggests that North Africa may be a key place to look.
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This is the oldest evidence of people starting fires
We didn’t start the fire. (Neanderthals did, at least 400,000 years ago.)
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Why is my dog like this? Current DNA tests won’t explain it to you.
Dog behavior is a lot more complicated than any one gene variant.
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First revealed in spy photos, a Bronze Age city emerges from the steppe
An unexpectedly large city lies in a sea of grass inhabited largely by nomads.
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Dogs came in a wide range of sizes and shapes long before modern breeds
Life with humans changed dogs in some dramatic ways, and it didn’t take long.
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10,000 generations of hominins used the same stone tools to weather a changing world
This technological tradition lasted longer than Homo sapiens have even been a species.
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Wear marks suggest Neanderthals made ocher crayons
Neanderthals were apparently no easier on their art supplies than modern kids.
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The first people to set foot in Australia were fossil hunters
Europeans weren’t the first people to collect fossils in Australia.
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Lead poisoning has been a feature of our evolution
A recent study found lead in teeth from 2 million-year-old hominin fossils.
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Megafauna was the meat of choice for South American hunters
Giant sloths are extinct in part because they were tasty and nutritious.
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Is the “million-year-old” skull from China a Denisovan or something else?
Now that we know what Denisovans looked like, they’re turning up everywhere.
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Incan numerical recordkeeping system may have been widely used
The Inca Empire hung by a thread—literally.
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Stone tools may hint at ancestors of Homo floresiensis
The stone flakes don’t look like much, but they’re a clue in an ancient cold case.
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Local cuisine was on the menu at Cafe Neanderthal
We’re starting to find features that distinguish one Neanderthal culture from another.
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Oldest wooden tools in East Asia may have come from any of three species
The find may require rethinking the so-called “Bamboo Hypothesis.”
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A mammoth tusk boomerang from Poland is 40,000 years old
The boomerang is a one-of-a-kind find from the last place archaeologists expected.
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We’ve had a Denisovan skull since the 1930s—only nobody knew
After years of mystery, we now know what at least one Denisovan looked like.
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Neanderthals invented their own bone weapon technology by 80,000 years ago
Neanderthals used sleek bone projectiles to hunt big game.
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A 2,000-year-old battle ended in fire, and a tree species never recovered
An ancient Chinese army set fire to an enemy capital, but things got out of hand.
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Painted altar in Maya city of Tikal reveals aftermath of ancient coup
The altar marks the presence of an enclave of foreign elites from Teotihuacan.
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Archaeologists just mapped a Bronze Age megafortress in Georgia
This recently mapped Bronze Age fortress is just one among hundreds.
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Studies pin down exactly when humans and Neanderthals swapped DNA
We may owe our tiny sliver of Neanderthal DNA to just a couple of hundred Neanderthals.
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Dog domestication happened many times, but most didn’t pan out
Our relationship with wolves, dogs, and even coyotes has always been complicated.
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Ancient fish-trapping network supported the rise of Maya civilization
The Maya were landscape engineers on a grand scale, even when it came to fishing.
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To invent the wheel, did people first have to invent the spindle?
The physics of spinning objects may have seeded concepts key to the wheel.
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More evidence that humans were in North America over 20,000 years ago
That means people must have been in the Americas even longer than we thought.
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