Google Earth reveals mysterious giant stone circles in the Andes

Techlicious
Updated Mon, September 28, 2026 



Key takeaways

A mountaineer discovered a unique complex of stone circles in Argentina's Andes, suspected to be a geoglyph, with no known parallels in the region.


A mountaineer combing through Google Earth has located a previously unknown complex of enormous stone circles more than 3,000 meters (about 9,800 feet) up in Argentina's Andes, and the archaeologists now studying it say they know of nothing like it in the region. The team suspects it is a geoglyph, a large design built or carved into the ground that is best appreciated from the air.

Mendoza climber Carlos Gobbi, who had spent nearly 30 years searching the mountains for archaeological sites, spotted the formations in satellite imagery in May 2025, according to Los Andes. The site sits in the Cordillera del Tigre, a mountain range that runs roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles) north to south through the Andes of Mendoza and San Juan provinces. Reaching the remote location – with no nearby water sources – took three tries. Attempts in September and November 2025 fell short. On February 14, 2026, Gobbi and his companions finally arrived after a trek of almost four days. Gobbi recalls that seeing the site in person was "really striking."

On the ground, the group found stone walls forming corridors, along with trenches filled or lined with rock. From above, satellite images show large circular structures linked by passageways, plus rectangular areas, joined as a single figure. The circles measure 27 to 35 meters (roughly 89 to 115 feet) across.

The obvious comparison is Peru's Nazca Lines, but Horacio Chiavazza, an archaeologist at Argentina's National University of Cuyo who co-directs the ArqueoAndes research project studying the site, sees no parallel in design or construction. The Nazca figures were made by cutting trenches into the desert floor, while this site was built by piling stones on top of the ground. Geoglyphs also exist in northern Chile, Chiavazza said, but they come from different eras and cultures and may have served different purposes. He added that the team cannot yet say the Mendoza site depicts any particular figure.

Nobody knows how old the complex is, who built it, or why. Researchers found no pottery, food remains, or other surface evidence of people living there, which points away from a settlement. Combined with the extreme location, that has led the team to consider a ritual or symbolic purpose, possibly from the Inca period (the empire the Incas called Tahuantinsuyo) or earlier. If it is Inca, Chiavazza said, it would be one of the southernmost geoglyphs of that empire and could be tied to the Tambo de Ranchillos, an Inca waystation in the Uspallata Valley.

Those ideas remain hypotheses until the fieldwork, which starts in December, is complete. Chiavazza and Cristina Prieto-Olavarría, an archaeologist with Argentina's national research council CONICET who co-directs ArqueoAndes, will climb to the site with Gobbi as guide, joined by colleagues from Spain's University of Jaén. The team has permits from Mendoza's provincial heritage directorate and plans detailed mapping, drone surveys, remote sensing, and geochemical work, along with sediment excavation to help date the structures. The Spanish specialists will examine sediments and plant remains at microscopic scale to reconstruct the climate, water supply, and human activity around the site. The researchers also plan to involve Indigenous communities from Uspallata in the interpretation.

DNA evidence from Thomas Jefferson’s hair reveals the truth about his relationship with Sally Hemings

Mindy Weisberger, CNN
Tue, September 29, 2026 


Thomas Jefferson has long been rumored to have fathered children with Sally Hemings. New genetic evidence strengthens that connection. (Photo by Burstein Collection/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images) - Burstein Collection/Corbis/Getty ImagesMore

Opening a Bible that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, staff at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 2011 discovered a reddish-blond hair pressed between the pages. That hair, suspected to have belonged to Jefferson himself, launched a DNA investigation spanning more than a decade that's now providing a long-missing puzzle piece regarding Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman in his household.

After spending years reconstructing DNA fragments, scientists have revealed the most compelling evidence to date that Jefferson, a founding father of the United States, also fathered children with Hemings — a relationship that has been long rumored but never definitively proven. How that investigation unfolded is documented in the book "History by a Hair: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings & Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery," written by Richard Kurin, a distinguished scholar and ambassador-at-large at the Smithsonian, and published on September 22.

Kurin is also senior author of a paper describing the methods that connected the former US president to Hemings' descendants, which involved delving deep into the genetics of the Jefferson and Hemings family trees. The paper, published September 21 on the preprint platform bioRXiv, has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Richard Kurin, author of the recent book and paper about the genetic connections between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, examines collection items. - Danielle Kurin

In addition to testing the hair found in the Bible, the researchers also collected genetic material from multiple confirmed samples of Jefferson's hair, held in the collection of the Smithsonian. They compared that with DNA from descendants of multiple lineages: Jefferson and his wife Martha, Jefferson's brother Randolph, and two of Hemings' sons, Eston and Madison. (Hemings had four children who lived to adulthood, but only Eston and Madison claimed Jefferson as their father).

Matches in the DNA suggest the chance that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one of Sally Hemings' children was 99.96%.

Previously, a genetic study from 1998 led by the late Eugene Foster, a retired pathology professor at Tufts University and the University of Virginia, claimed to prove Jefferson's parentage of Hemings' children. That study found a rare haplotype — a combination of genes — in the Y chromosomes of males descended from Thomas Jefferson's uncle. That same haplotype existed in descendants of Hemings, too. However, many experts questioned Foster's claim for one very important reason, Kurin told CNN.

"He didn't have Thomas Jefferson's DNA," Kurin said. "He didn't have something to directly compare living descendants of the Jefferson family to Madison Hemings and Eston Hemings and others that might have been the descendants of Thomas Jefferson." Critics of that the 1998 study said Foster's evidence merely connected Hemings' descendants to a male in the Jefferson lineage, and not necessarily to the former president.

"I thought, if we can get Thomas Jefferson's DNA, we could use that as the source of comparison to various descendants, and really firmly solve the question," Kurin said.
A 'dead end' hair

Kurin and his team were initially disappointed to find that the Bible hair wasn't the smoking gun that they thought it would be. To check whether the hair was Jefferson's, they compared its DNA with that of a living woman who was a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson's mother along the family's female lineage. They expected to find identical mitochondrial DNA, which is genetic material specifically inherited from the maternal side.

But their hopes were dashed when the two samples didn't match.

Still, they were able to access other hair samples that records attributed to Thomas Jefferson. These hairs, including a lock clipped at his deathbed, were in a packet provided by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, and had not previously been available for analysis. The scientists reconstructed and compared historic genome sequences of Jefferson and Hemings with DNA collected from 16 living individuals, including multiple descendants of Eston and Madison Hemings. These analyses found matches across genomes that linked Hemings descendants to Thomas Jefferson.

"What made this study so powerful is that researchers weren't just comparing two genomes," said Éadaoin Harney, a senior population geneticist at the 23andMe Research Institute. "Instead, they collected DNA samples from multiple people from different branches of the family tree."

A lock of hair taken from Thomas Jefferson on the day of his death on July 4, 1826. This sample was used in additional DNA analysis. - Ian Aktins/Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello

In genetic analysis, larger sample pools provide more robust conclusions, said Harney, who was not involved in the new research. "By studying the patterns of DNA sharing across all of these individuals, it became possible to disambiguate exactly how the descendants of Sally Hemings were related to Thomas Jefferson," she told CNN in an email.

While the new book and paper focus on genomic data of well-known historical figures, these methods are also broadly useful for illuminating the obscured history of enslaved people, which has been a focus of Harney's own research. In a 2023 study of enslaved and free African Americans from Maryland, Harney used DNA analysis combined with other biomolecular and archaeological techniques to uncover individuals' ancestry and places of origin. The data also suggested links to people who still live in Maryland.



"Historical records are full of gaps, particularly when it comes to documenting the lives of people who occupied less privileged places in society," she said. "This is particularly true for enslaved Africans and African Americans, who are often only described in historical records as property."

Genetic analyses, such as those used in the new Jefferson study, can help restore connections that were lost because of slavery, Harney added. "The same tools can be applied to study the many enslaved people whose lives were never well documented, and help reconnect them with their descendants."
From rumor to confirmation

Whispers about Jefferson's sexual relationship with Hemings — who was 30 years his junior and a half-sister to his wife — have endured for more than 200 years. Initial rumors were fueled by local innuendo and supported by records aligning Hemings' pregnancies with Jefferson's presence at his plantation home of Monticello in Virginia. An article published in 1902 in the Richmond Recorder stated that "there is not an individual in the neighbourhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story," regarding Jefferson fathering children with Hemings.

Though the conclusions of Foster's 1998 study were not universally accepted, that genetic evidence was compelling enough for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation to issue a statement two years later acknowledging "the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings."

Finally laying that uncertainty to rest was enough of a motivation to keep Kurin and the other researchers going for more than a decade, despite their initial disappointment that the hair found in the Bible did not belong to Thomas Jefferson, he said.

"We had hit a dead end, but scientists are always looking for alternatives," he said. "I think we were propelled still by scientific and historical curiosity."

While the question of Jefferson's ancestry in Hemings' descendants may finally have been answered, another remains: Whose hair was pressed in Jefferson's bible? The researchers had collected enough of its fragmentary genetic data to know that it belonged to a female member of the Jefferson family, but that was all the information the team could learn, Kurin said.

"It's like a partial fingerprint," he explained. "That is still a lingering mystery."

Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine. She is the author of "Rise of the Zombie Bugs: The Surprising Science of Parasitic Mind-Control" (Hopkins Press).

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Underwater ruins found near alleged site of Noah’s Ark

Footage shot by divers reveals a stone wall 75 feet underwater in Turkey's Lake Van that may point to a lost city

Stefan Milovanovic
Tue, September 29, 2026 

Lake Van, eastern Turkey, where divers have filmed a submerged stone structure | Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / EvgenyGenkin (own work)


Divers exploring Lake Van in eastern Turkey have filmed a stone wall 75 feet below the surface, and one member of the team believes it could be the edge of a city older than recorded history.

The wall rises in seven courses of fitted stone to more than eight feet, with three steps climbing toward a large circular structure on the lakebed. Independent researcher Matthew LaCroix said it runs well past what the team has been able to see.

LaCroix took the find public on his own show, The Lost Civilizations Podcast, in an episode released this month titled I Found the Lost Ararat Civilization at the Bottom of Lake Van. Presenting previously unseen images of a circular megalithic structure and a causeway on the lakebed, he argued the ruins are far older than mainstream archaeology allows: "We see the footprint. We just don't find their city," he noted on the episode.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, LaCroix said, "What we know of the underwater ruins may just be a tiny piece of something much larger." He says he measured more than 150 feet of the causeway, which continues into the darkness beyond.

No one noticed the wall while in the water, however. It appeared months later in footage shot by videographer Brandon Barnes behind the circular ruin.
Uncovering the depths

The lake first drew attention in 2017, when Turkish underwater filmmaker Tahsin Ceylan came across what looked like a stone fortress while studying the lake's fish. LaCroix has since identified nearby circular temples and a capstone he says is carved with a six-spoked "Flower of Life," a motif that recurs in several ancient cultures, though the name is modern. Ceylan later dove into the site with LaCroix in 2025.

How old the ruins are is the central dispute. Lake Van once drained to the west until eruptions from Mount Nemrut blocked that outlet during the Pleistocene, an epoch that ended 11,700 years ago. Geologists generally date the lava flow that sealed the basin to the middle Pleistocene, roughly 250,000 years ago; LaCroix points instead to estimates as recent as 40,000 years. He argues the structures had to be standing before the water covered them.

Many archaeologists see a much younger site. Some attribute the walls to the Urartian kingdom, which controlled the region about 3,000 years ago, while others suspect medieval construction that reused older blocks. No stone from the lake has been independently dated, however, and no excavation has established that the structures belong to a city.

LaCroix's timeline comes from the lake's geology, not from the masonry itself. He remains convinced the wall was part of something larger and says it cannot simply go to nothing. There would have to be a major urban area it led to, in his view.

Answering that will take more work than a few dives. Because Lake Van has no outlet, fine sediment stays suspended in the water, and LaCroix says visibility holds only from roughly 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. His own time on the bottom amounted to eight minutes at the circular ruin, about 30 feet down.

Sonar mapping and study by underwater archaeologists would be needed to settle whether the causeway is man-made and where it goes. The lake sits about 90 miles from Mount Ararat, the mountain some believe is the resting place of Noah's Ark.

Read the original article on GEEKSPIN.

Archaeologists Unearth ‘Rare’ 5,000-Year-Old Arrowheads in ‘Rapidly’ Melting Ancient Norwegian Ice

Researchers at the Glacier Archaeology Program have recovered 48 prehistoric arrows from melting mountain ice in Jotunheimen, Norway

Tabitha Parent
Tue, September 29, 2026 



An ancient slate arrowhead, dating to approximately 5,000 years ago, was discovered in melting ice in Norway.

Credit: Ã…sa Rommetveit Celius, Innlandet County Municipality, Secrets of the Ice.

NEED TO KNOW

Researchers found Stone Age arrowheads during a three-week expedition in Norway's Jotunheimen mountains


The Glacier Archaeology Program has recovered more than 5,000 artifacts from 73 ice sites since 2006


Melting ice is revealing increasingly older ancient hunting gear, clothing and travel objects once preserved for millennia

After spending three "intense weeks" in the mountains of Jotunheimen in Innlandet, Norway, members of the Glacier Archaeology Program are reporting their most dramatic findings.

In a post on the Secrets of the Ice website, researcher Espen Finstad recapped some of the crew's most recent ancient archaeological finds from their exploration of the Kvitingskjølen mountain area at Langfonne, Storfonne and Hadklefonne.

"For thousands of years, ancient ice has safely preserved unique objects from the past," Finstad wrote. "Now that ice is disappearing."

A 5,000 to 6,000 year-old arrow with its wooden shaft and bindings.
Credit: Åsa Rommetveit Celius, Innlandet County Municipality, Secrets of the Ice.

With the "rapidly" disappearing ice, Glacier Archaeology Program researchers have been able to uncover increasingly older and older artifacts from the sites in Innlandet, including many from the Stone and Bronze Ages, as older and older layers of ice disappear.

Finstad added that, when the program (a collaborative initiative between the Innlandet County Council and the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Norway) first began its work 20 years ago in 2006, most of the artifacts being discovered were less than 2,000 years old. Many of the items were dated to the Viking Age, and finding anything older than 2,000 years was considered quite rare.

"Now the picture has changed dramatically," wrote Finstad. "Increasingly, the [artifacts] melting out of the ice are more than 2,000 years old. Many date to the Stone Age and Bronze Age. The oldest are more than 6,000 years old."

Images posted to the site show different ancient artifacts uncovered by the archaeologists.

Since the work began in the region, the group has recorded 73 archaeological sites and recovered more than 5,000 artifacts from the ice, including everything from arrows, bows and other hunting equipment.

Archaeologist Espen Finstad hold a prehistoric arrow recovered from melting mountain ice in Norway.
Credit: Espen Finstad, Innlandet County Municipality, Secrets of The Ice.

Evidence that ancient people hunted reindeer appears in some of the more recent findings, along with other clothing, shoes, packhorses and common items of the age.

"We expect to see more of the same in the years ahead," added Finstad. "Based on what we have observed over the past two decades, the ice on many of the archaeological ice sites we have been studying may be completely gone within 20 years."

Finstad also spoke to the limited window of opportunity that their research resides within. "Every field season matters, as the objects decay fast once they emerge of the retreating ice."

He added: "We have been at the edge of the ice. We have seen it happening. And we are witnesses to a rapidly changing archaeological landscape."

Read the original article on People

Melting Permafrost Is Poisoning Alaska Rivers With Metal Levels 70 Times Higher Than Normal

Jess Cockerill
Tue, September 29, 2026 


An aerial view of the Kutuk River in Alaska's Gates of the Arctic National Park. (Ken Hill/National Park Service)

Key takeaways

Scientists have discovered that the orange plumes flowing into rivers in Alaska's Brooks Range are caused by thawing Arctic permafrost releasing metals into the water.

Over the past decade, a network of usually pristine blue rivers and lakes that winds through Alaska's breathtaking Brooks Range mountains has been starting to look a little… rusty.

Scientists first noticed the unusual orange plumes flowing into the water back in 2018. They began to investigate, collecting water samples from various sites so remote they can only be accessed by helicopter – but at the time, they were only able to get a snapshot of what was going on.

"The more we flew around, we started noticing more and more orange rivers and streams," said ecologist Jon O'Donnell, of the US National Park Service. "There are certain sites that look almost like a milky orange juice."

Taylor Evinger holds a bottle of orange water sampled from the Igning River in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve in Alaska. (Brett Poulin/UC Davis)

Environmental toxicologist Brett Poulin (of UC Davis) was intrigued at how similar the orange staining looked to the acidic pollution he had seen draining from metal mines.

There are no mines nearby – but a new study led by environmental chemist Taylor Evinger, a member of Poulin's lab at UC Davis, confirms that the orange stuff flowing into these rivers may be an even bigger cause for concern.

The new study is published in AGU Advances.

The rust, Evinger and colleagues say, can be attributed to thawing Arctic permafrost. As water seeps through once-frozen soils, it encounters bedrock minerals that have been locked away for potentially thousands of years.

When these minerals are oxidized, they release metals – iron, aluminum, manganese, zinc, nickel, cadmium, and rare earth elements – that can then seep into waterways, hence the rivers' rusty appearances.

From 2022 to 2024, Evinger and team collected water samples from six different watersheds across the Brooks Range, to track how the river chemistry was changing over time.

Some of those samples revealed water more acidic, and loaded with more metals, than those used for drainage from metal mines.

On the Salmon River, one of these seepages bumped metal levels up to 70 times higher than usual, even 60 miles downstream from the source.

Orange, metallic water enters the Igning River. Scientists believe this color change is linked to melting permafrost, which interacts with the soil to produce highly metallic, "rusted" water — an increasing global phenomenon in regions where permafrost is present. (Taylor Evinger/UC Davis)

The team were able to trace a major release of metals back to Alaska's warmest summer on record, 2019, which was followed by an abnormally snowy winter.

"When you have more snow, it insulates the soil, preventing refreezing," says Evinger.

"We think water went deeper into the soil because of soil thaw, interacted with these minerals, and all of these watersheds were triggered around the same time."

In the wake of that warm summer, the rivers experienced a sudden, steep rise in sulfate and zinc concentrations, which then steadily fell in the years that followed.

Evinger holds a bright orange filter collected from a seep affected by acid rock drainage amid melting permafrost. (Taylor Evinger/UC Davis)

Questions remain about how this sudden influx of acidic metals impacts communities that rely on the rivers.

Since 2018, more reports have come in from across thousands of seepages in North America's permafrost zone, documenting acid rock drainage into more than 200 rivers and streams.

"This was a process that was not forecast, predicted or included in any assessment of how the Arctic will change under a warmer climate, but we're seeing it in rivers across the Arctic," says Poulin.

"'Rusting rivers' have been documented in Boreal and Arctic Canada, and other parts of the world that have permafrost."

Earth scientist Elliott Skierszkan, of Carleton University in Canada, says "this widespread outcome of global warming presents a major risk to water resources and aquatic ecosystems," in a related article also published in AGU Advances.

The toxic metals entering these waters – and the low pH affected rivers can sometimes reach – can be detrimental to ecosystems. So far, scientists have seen extensive areas of plants die back near acidified rivers, as well as a loss of important fish like salmon and whitefish, along with other aquatic creatures.

The rural Arctic communities – many of whom are Alaska Native peoples – that live in these regions would be especially affected, since they rely on the rivers and their fish to survive.

But for the Brooks Range region, those impacts are yet to be seen – at least for now.

"While we are not seeing massive fish die-offs, and we're not aware of drinking water quality issues currently harming villages, the numbers of observations are still concerning," Evinger says.

"Many watersheds – hundreds of them – have acid rock drainage inputs. These rivers are pretty much untouched, and yet this is happening here. It's a new reality of climate change."

The research has been published in AGU Advances.

Fossil found on Welsh beach ends 'confusion' over 200-million-year-old fish teeth

Paul Pigott; Adam Hale - BBC Wales
Tue, September 29, 2026

Jonathan Bow, pictured with his son, says he was happy to have "contributed to science" [Amgueddfa Cymru]

An amateur fossil hunter's discovery of a 200-million-year-old fish jawbone has helped solve two centuries of "confusion" over the origins of fossils across Europe, palaeontologists say.

Fossilised teeth found in rock around the Bristol Channel, along with other examples around Europe, had previously been grouped together as one type of large ancient fish called Severnichthys.

But the bone found on the Welsh side of the channel by Jonathan Bow turned out to be the first found there to belong to a different type.

It has helped experts discover that fossils in museums across the continent had been wrongly grouped and were actually made up of two different species - Saurichthys and Birgeria.

The Saurichthys bone discovered at Lavernock by Bow, and which helped experts make their breakthrough, will go on display at National Museum Cardiff later in 2026.

The jaw on the beach [Jonathan Bow]

Bow, from Bridgend, said he had been walking along the beach in the Vale of Glamorgan at low tide in the spring of 2012 when he had spotted "what looked to be a jaw".

He said it "was like nothing I'd ever spotted on the beach before", having been a fossil hunter for about 10 years.

"I was super excited because I thought it was going to be a miniature crocodile, something brand new," he said.

For many years he had no idea what it was as experts were unsure, but in 2022 University of Bristol lead researcher Jacob Quinn came to see Bow's collection and went on to research the jaw.

While a fish jaw was not what Bow had hoped for, he said "it felt good" to have been part of the team that had "contributed to science".

"I've been collecting for quite some time over the years and it was interesting," he said.

It is now believed the teeth come from two Triassic era fishes, the Birgeria (top) and the Saurichthys [Amgueddfa Cymru]

Researchers from Amgueddfa Cymru - Museum Wales worked with State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart and the University of Bristol, where the fossil had been sent for detailed inspection.

They discovered it belonged to a Saurichthys - a predator fish that lived in shallow tropical seas during the Late Triassic period.

"Many teeth from Saurichthys were once mistaken for those of an amphibian, and that misunderstanding continued well into the 20th Century," said Museum Wales curator Cindy Howells.

"This lovely little jaw caused great confusion when it was first found as it bore no resemblance to any known species," she said.

Quinn said the fossils found in the Bristol Channel had come from storms that had happened 200 million years ago.

"It is remarkable that such a delicate fossil survived," she said.

"Although British Triassic fossils have been studied for over 200 years, this is the first bone from Saurichthys ever found in these rocks."

The discovery led to the publication of a scientific paper that compared the fossil with those across Europe.

By comparing the new snout with museum specimens from Britain and Europe, it provided clear evidence that fossils originally thought to be Severnichthys were actually a combination of two separate species.

The name Severnichthys had been used for individual teeth and a few small bones that existed in many museum collections. These were even thought to be from amphibians well into the 20th Century, rather than the fish that experts now know they were.

"These predators lived in a shallow tropical sea filled with small limestone islands," paper co-author Dr David Whiteside said of the two species.

"Saurichthys was probably a fast and agile hunter, while Birgeria was larger and more powerful, likely feeding on a wider variety of prey."

Another co-author, Dr Sam Cooper, said: "These fish have a remarkably complicated history.

"It's amazing that a single fossil, found by Jonathan Bow during a spring tide, has helped clear up nearly 200 years of confusion."

Africa's oldest known defensive wall outside Egypt discovered, and it's 4,000 years old

Tom Metcalfe
Tue, September 29, 2026 


Key takeaways

Archaeologists have unearthed 4,000-year-old defensive walls in Morocco, the oldest structures of their kind in North Africa outside the Nile Valley.

The largest defensive wall at Oued Beht. Archaeologists think its base was constructed about 4,000 years ago. | Credit: G. Lucarini, Oued Beht Archaeological Project

Archaeologists have unearthed 4,000-year-old defensive walls in Morocco that are the oldest structures of their kind in North Africa outside the Nile Valley.

The discovery expands what's known about the human development of this region of northwestern Mediterranean Africa, known as the Maghreb, particularly about the adoption of agriculture.

"For more than a century, the Maghreb was treated as a blank space in the story of Mediterranean later prehistory," Giulio Lucarini, an archaeologist at Italy's National Research Council, told Live Science in an email.

But the new research shows that the gap resulted from a lack of scientific knowledge about the region. ("Maghreb" is Arabic for "the West" and refers to Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.) For instance, only recently did ancient DNA research reveal that hunter-gatherers from Europe may have voyaged across the Mediterranean to the Maghreb around 8,500 years ago.

"Four thousand years ago, communities here were reshaping their landscape and building defences on a scale never documented before in the region, at a time when societies across the Strait of Gibraltar were also changing," he said. "We are only beginning to understand how these developments on the two shores [the Maghreb and Europe] relate to each other."

The Oued Beht archaeological site surrounded by defensive structures, with the modern Moroccan village of Aït Siberne in the background. | Credit: A. Garcia-Molsosa and T. Wilkinson, Oued Beht Archaeological Project

Lucarini is the first author of the new research, which describes the latest discoveries at Oued Beht in Morocco, in a river valley about 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of the capital, Rabat.


Many of the same researchers were involved in last year's discovery of the remains of a prehistoric village at Kach Kouch, about 120 miles (190 km) north, in Morocco's Rif Mountains near the Strait of Gibraltar.
"A work like this is not improvised"

The study, published Sept. 7 in the journal Libyan Studies, describes the discovery of an ancient defensive system of ditches and ramparts at Oued Beht by archaeologists from Italy, Morocco and England.

Key to the system are several defensive walls ‪—‬ in particular, a heavily fortified wall on the southern side of the site. The archaeologists think the base of the wall was built between 3,500 and 4,000 years ago, from clay, ash, silt and stones, to defend a settlement there from attacks.

The defenses imply the settlement was worth defending, and the archaeologists suggested it was an early farming hub with livestock, cultivated crops and large storage facilities. Their discoveries at the site include dozens of bell-shaped pits that the team thinks were used to store grain.


"A work like this is not improvised," Lucarini said. "It requires planning, choosing the right spot in the topography, and mobilising and coordinating labour over time."

The region is an ancient river valley that connected inland areas with the Atlantic Ocean. | Credit: A. Garcia-Molsosa and T. Wilkinson, Oued Beht Archaeological Project

The number of pits indicate that the site's storage capacity was much larger than the needs of the people living there. "These facilities may have served a much wider community, perhaps drawing on a whole surrounding territory," he said.

But who might have attacked the site is unclear. "We don't know exactly what they were protecting themselves from," Lucarini said. "Rather than 'invaders,' it may reflect growing competition over land and resources, control of movement through the landscape, and perhaps more formalised leadership."
Links between North Africa and Europe

The discoveries at Oued Beht are important for the reconstruction of prehistory in this part of the world, representatives from Italy's National Research Council said in a statement.

They show that "the communities of the north-western Maghreb in the second millennium BC were … capable of conceiving and carrying out major construction works on a scale that had not previously been documented," Lucarini said in the statement.

The recent archaeological discoveries in Morocco reflect finds from prehistoric Iberia, on the northern side of the Strait of Gibraltar: "There, African ivory and ostrich eggshell have long pointed to contacts with North Africa, and now we are beginning to see the African side of that relationship," Lucarini told Live Science.

Yet there were differences. Contemporary sites in Iberia are large, fortified hilltop settlements with planned architecture, abundant bronze metalwork and rich burials that reveal marked social hierarchies. But the defensive system at Oued Beht seems to have been much smaller.

"What the discovery shows is not that the two shores looked alike," Lucarini said. "It shows that communities in the north-western Maghreb were also investing in large collective works and in the control of strategic places at a time when the western Mediterranean was changing."

The discoveries at Oued Beht are important because they demonstrate the complexities and capabilities of early North African peoples, said Iman Nagy, a northeast African landscape archaeologist at UCLA who was not involved in the study.

"Oued Beht is especially interesting because it challenges us to reconsider the Maghreb's place in Mediterranean prehistory," Nagy told Live Science in an email. "Discoveries like this challenge diffusionist models that assume substantial architecture or social complexity must have arrived from elsewhere."

Face of earliest human seen for first time

Sarah Knapton
Tue, September 29, 2026 



Dress him in modern clothes and he'd fit right in today, said one of the researchers - MDPI.com/Heritage journal


The face of the earliest human ever found has been reconstructed after 300,000 years.

In the 1960s, a human-like fossilised skull was discovered during mineral extraction in Jebel Irhoud, western Morocco, and archaeologists initially thought it belonged to a Neanderthal.

But a reappraisal in 2017 showed it was the earliest Homo sapiens ever recorded, dating to around 315,000 years ago - a time before humans had ventured out of Africa.

Now experts have recreated the facial features of the man, and he looked surprisingly similar to modern humans.


Cicero Moraes, a world leader in forensic facial reconstruction, who led the research, said: "If he were dressed in modern clothes in the middle of a crowd, he would likely pass unnoticed at first glance."

Only a closer look would reveal slight deviations, he said, including a more "robust" brow and greater facial projection.

The skull used in the recreation is one of a select few found at a site in Morocco - MDPI.com/Heritage journal

How face was recreated...

To recreate the face, a global group of experts used a 3D digital reconstruction of the Jebel Irhoud skull produced by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

They added soft tissue and anatomical details based on datasets of people from Africa.

The team found subtle differences in face shape compared to modern humans, including a more prominent chin, a wider nose and a larger head circumference.

Two versions of the face were produced in the research, one in greyscale to highlight the underlying anatomy and a full-colour bust, complete with dark skin and hair.

Although the skull reveals no evidence of skin tone, hair or eye colour, the team added in dark hair and a beard. These were considered "plausible traits" for someone from North Africa around 315,000 years ago, based on previous studies of archaic and modern humans.

A greyscale version of the face, without hair and beard, was produced - MDPI.com/Heritage journal

...and how it compares to modern men

The team also calculated brain volume and found a value of 1,230 cm3 - very close to the average for modern adult males, which is 1,234 cm3.

It suggested brain size has barely changed in 300,000 years.


Prof Francesco Galassi, an anatomist from Italy's University of Pavia and one of the authors of the study, said: "It is always a fantastic experience to see the completed face and observe how much it resembles – and yet differs from – today's population.

"It is impossible not to wonder what his daily life was like, how he solved his problems, and what went through his mind."

Researchers warned there are no known remains of soft-tissue from Homo sapiens of the time, so it is possible the muscle configurations were different from modern humans, leading to an altered appearance.

However they argue the skull imposes constraints on musculature and tissue, so the man's face is unlikely to have looked significantly different from the reconstruction.

To date, excavations have uncovered 22 hominid fossil bones at Jebel Irhoud, representing at least five individual Homo sapiens, comprising three adults, an adolescent and a child.

Stone tools, including scrapers, flakes and piercers were also found, as well as evidence the group used fire.

Animal bones near the fossils showed signs of butchery, suggesting the humans ate large and small game including wildebeest, gazelles, zebra, and ostrich eggs.

The research was published in the journal Heritage.

Polar oceans transformed as warming melts ice habitats: research

AFP
Wed, September 30, 2026


Some of the more dramatic effects from global warming are taking place in the poles, which occupy around 20 percent of the global ocean surface. (Olivier MORIN)


Climate change is increasingly reshaping the polar oceans, with Arctic waters warming rapidly, sea ice shrinking and wildlife losing habitat at both ends of the planet, an annual report said Wednesday.

The Copernicus Ocean State Report depicts profound changes across the world's seas, from record-breaking heatwaves in the Mediterranean and Black seas to shifts in marine ecosystems and increasingly acidic waters.

"The message is very clear. The ocean is changing rapidly," said Pierre Bahurel, director general of Mercator Ocean International, which runs the European Union's Copernicus Marine Service.

Some of the more dramatic effects from global warming are taking place in the poles, which occupy around 20 percent of the global ocean surface.

The Arctic's combined sea surface and sea-ice surface temperature rose 4.2C between 1982 and 2024, or around 1C per decade, according to the 10th annual oceans report.

By comparison, global sea surface temperatures have been increasing by 0.12C per decade.

In the Kara Sea north of Siberia, temperatures have climbed by 6.7C since 1982, or 1.68C per decade.

As temperatures rise, Arctic sea ice has shrunk by nearly half a million square kilometres per decade since 1979, equivalent to losing an area the size of Spain every 10 years.

The retreating ice exposes Arctic coastlines to waves, worsening coastal erosion and raising risks for coastal communities and infrastructure, the report warned.

"The Arctic sea ice has been declining since the early 80s, leaving around 60 percent of coastal infrastructure vulnerable to erosion and sea level rise," Karina von Schuckmann, director of the oceans report, said in a media briefing.


Ice loss in Antarctica, meanwhile, is threatening penguin populations on the frozen continent.

Record-low Antarctic sea ice in 2022 coincided with the first-ever recorded large-scale breeding failure of emperor penguins, the report said.

Emperor penguins rely on stable sea ice to live, hunt and breed and their chicks can perish if they fall in freezing water before developing waterproof feathers.

In April, emperor penguins were upgraded from "near threatened" to "endangered" by the IUCN, the global authority on threatened wildlife.

More than 90 percent of emperor penguin colonies could be near-extinct by 2100 if sea ice loss persists at its current rate.

lt-aag/np/giv

Trump’s border wall construction cut into an ancient ground carving older than Stonehenge

Suzanne Gamboa
Tue, September 29, 2026 




The site of the fish-shaped intaglio damaged by border wall construction contractors at Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. (Courtesy Russ McSpadden / Center for Biological Diversity)


An ancient ground carving that was severely damaged by the administration's border wall construction was created before Stonehenge and Egypt's oldest pyramid, according to recently publicized research.

The Las Playas Intaglio, a giant fish carved into the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, is now considered the oldest example in the Americas of a geoglyphic, the ancient art form that is carved into or drawn on the ground.

In April, contractors hired by the Trump administration to make way for a second wall along the Arizona-Mexico border "scraped" a 50-foot swath through the ancient carving, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, which documented the damage

The intaglio on the ground of the ancestral homeland of the Tohono O'odham and other Indigenous tribes is estimated to be about 2,000 years older than Egypt's first pyramid and to have been created about 1,500 years before the first construction of Stonehenge and 4,000 years before Peru's Nazca Lines, researchers have found.


The formerly 272-foot carving had originally been thought to be about 1,000 years old. But the latest research dates the art's creation to at least 6,500 years ago, and possibly as much as 7,500 years ago.

That age emphasizes "the significance of this site and the parallel great misfortune resulting from its damage," the researchers said in an article published in The SAA Archaeological Record.



A comparison of images of the site of the fish-shaped intaglio (geoglyphic) before and after the border wall construction. (Courtesy Russ McSpadden / Center for Biological Diversity)

"This discovery makes an already devastating loss even more profound. It's a cultural and historical atrocity," Russ McSpadden, Southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.



A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said in an email to NBC News that the contractor "inadvertently disturbed" the site and that CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott has been "engaged directly with tribal leadership to determine appropriate next steps."

"The remaining portion of the site has been secured and will be protected in place. CBP is conducting a thorough review of construction protocols and strengthening communication procedures to ensure this does not happen again," the spokesperson stated, adding that the agency is "committed to respecting and safeguarding cultural heritage throughout all border infrastructure projects."

The damage to that site and construction on other parts of Tohono O'odham land and sacred Indigenous areas has strained the tenuous relationship between the tribal nation and the government. The tribe is appealing a federal judge's decision refusing to block the administration's border wall construction through its reservation.

While the intaglio's site is irreparably damaged, the Tohono O'odham people are trying to stop the government from plowing through Quitobaquito Springs, a desert water source in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument that is also considered a sacred site and holds endangered species.

In order to build the border wall and barriers, the Department of Homeland Security invoked authority granted in the Secure Fence Act of 2006 to waive numerous laws protecting the environment, water, cultural, historical and religious sites.

The Tohono O'odham Nation has long worked with CBP, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, on border security, helping to keep drug traffickers and others from using its land for criminal activity.

The tribe's reservation straddles the U.S.-Mexico border, and its members have permission to move between the two countries with ID checks. About 3,000 of its members are in Mexico, according to the tribal nation.

The Center for Biological Diversity stated in a news release that conservation advocates and tribal nations have long warned that border wall and secondary border barrier plans could cut through sensitive habitat and cultural sites across the region.

Wall construction in other parts of the border has sparked other lawsuits and opposition from landowners, Native American tribes, local governments, conservation groups, business owners and others.

In Texas, a tribal nonprofit for the Lipan Apache and an outdoor recreation business have opposed the border wall construction, alleging DHS is not authorized to violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which they say it would do by destroying or cutting off access to sacred sites.

A federal judge ordered a temporary halt to construction in Big Bend National Park in response to the lawsuit, but construction continues on other parts of the rugged, undeveloped and remote region outside state and federal parkland.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com