Beavers may seem like a recent arrival to the Netherlands, with their growing presence in recent years. The species became extinct there in the 19th century and was reintroduced in 1988. But before that beavers were widespread for thousands of years. "It really is a native species," says Brusgaard. "In our research we wanted to look at how people dealt with the beaver's presence in the past. There was no good picture of that until now."

Together with fellow archaeologist Shumon Hussain (Aarhus University), Brusgaard analyzed previous excavations in the Netherlands, southern Scandinavia, the Baltic region and Russia. These showed that beavers were a much larger part of the human diet and landscape of northern Europe than had previously been thought.

Hunter-gatherers hunted beavers in the Middle and Late Stone Age for their meat, fur and castoreum, and used their bones and teeth to make tools. Beavers were one of the most common mammals at some archaeological sites in the Netherlands according to research recently published in The Holocene.

Pioneering early farmers who arrived on the Baltic coast 6,000 years ago may have taken up fishing after observing indigenous hunter-gatherer communities, a major new study has found.

Previous studies of prehistoric cooking pots in areas including Britain, Spain, France and Portugal have indicated that people completely stopped cooking fish once they started farming crops and animals, even in coastal areas.

In stark contrast, the new research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by academics at the University of York in collaboration with the British Museum, has found that farmers who arrived on Northern Europe's Baltic coast adopted a mixed diet that embraced both fish and domesticated animal products.

A piece of rock with mysterious markings that lay largely unstudied for 4,000 years is now being hailed as a "treasure map" for archaeologists, who are using it to hunt for ancient sites around north-western France.

The so-called Saint-Belec slab was claimed as Europe's oldest map by researchers in 2021 and they have been working ever since to understand its etchings—both to help them date the slab, and to rediscover lost monuments.

The ancient map marks an area roughly 30 by 21 kilometers and Pailler's colleague, Clement Nicolas from the CNRS research institute, said they would need to survey the entire territory and cross reference the markings on the slab.

That job could take 15 years, he said.

Cannibalism was common in northwest Europe between 14,000 and 19,000 years ago, when a population of prehistoric people known as the Magdalenians used it in their rituals to dispose of the dead, a new study finds.

But cannibalism seems to have ended when the Magdalenians were supplanted by another group of prehistoric people known as the Epigravettians, who instead buried their dead.

An ancient necklace from a child’s grave in Jordan reveals the Neolithic culture’s social intricacies, highlighting the importance of adornments and suggesting complex societal dynamics of the period. Final physical reconstruction of the necklace, today exposed at the new museum of Petra in Jordan.

During the Upper Paleolithic, lions become an important theme in Paleolithic art and are more frequent in anthropogenic faunal assemblages. However, the relationship between hominins and lions in earlier periods is poorly known and primarily interpreted as interspecies competition. Here we present new evidence for Neanderthal-cave lion interactions during the Middle Paleolithic. We report new evidence of hunting lesions on the 48,000 old cave lion skeleton found at Siegsdorf (Germany) that attest to the earliest direct instance of a large predator kill in human history. A comparative analysis of a partial puncture to a rib suggests that the fatal stab was delivered with a wooden thrusting spear. We also present the discovery of distal lion phalanges at least 190,000 old from Einhornhöhle (Germany), representing the earliest example of the use of cave lion skin by Neanderthals in Central Europe. Our study provides novel evidence on a new dimension of Neanderthal behavioral complexity.

Amazon review from c. 1750 BC

The development of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and the Middle East led to a substantial increase in violence between inhabitants. Laws, centralized administration, trade and culture then caused the ratio of violent deaths to fall back again in the Early and Middle Bronze Age (3,300 to 1,500 BCE). This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers from the Universities of Tübingen, Barcelona and Warsaw. Their results were published in Nature Human Behaviour.

Archaeologists excavating an ancient necropolis in northeastern France have discovered an unlooted, unopened Roman-era sarcophagus dating to the second century A.D. The tomb likely holds the remains of an elite woman, archaeologists said.

Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth's atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival.

That's the assertion made by an international group of scientists in one of four related research papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. The papers are the latest results in the investigation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the idea that an anomalous cooling of the Earth almost 13 millennia ago was the result of a cosmic impact.