New scientific theory based on ancient proteins suggests that genes did not arise as we believed and that life could have started elsewhere.

Life on Earth may have learned to breathe oxygen long before oxygen filled the skies. MIT researchers traced a key oxygen-processing enzyme back hundreds of millions of years before the Great ...

Ancient face engravings reappear out of the Negro River after historic drought and could rewrite ancient Amazonian origins.

Even when Earth was locked in a global deep freeze, its climate may have kept moving. Ancient rocks reveal seasonal and decade scale cycles beneath the ice during Snowball Earth.

Tiny zircon crystals are revealing that Earth’s earliest history may have included surprisingly complex tectonic activity.

Roughly 21 kilometers off Peru’s southern coast, the Chincha Islands hold vast deposits of seabird guano accumulated over ...

The geoid (the surface of equal gravitational potential of a hypothetical ocean at rest) serves as the classical reference ...

A new study provides a clearer timeline for one of the most significant prehistoric sites worldwide for the study of human ...

About 56 million years ago, Europe and North America began pulling apart to form what became the ever-expanding North Atlantic Ocean. Vast amounts of molten rock from Earth's mantle reached the ocean ...

The medieval tunnel was dug into loess and cut directly through a trapezoidal ditch associated with the Baalberge culture (4th millennium BC), a landscape already reused for burials in later ...

Ancient stones from the Lighthouse of Alexandria are being brought back to light after 1,600 years underwater. Recovered ...

At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the artist Nick Cave collected thousands of objects to mount an exhibition on memory and history. His giant mammoth sculptures are potent, timely symbols of ...