China 146,000-Year-Old Advanced Stone Tools: Re-Dating Ice-Age Human Cognition
A May 2026 paper in the Journal of Human Evolution redated the stone-tool floor at the Lingjing site in Henan Province, central China, to roughly 146,000 years ago, pushing prepared-core toolmaking in East Asia back by about twenty thousand years and assigning the work to Homo juluensis — an archaic human relative formally named only […]
The Ubaid Lizardmen Figures: Representations of Gods or Aliens?
Some artifacts are quiet. They sit in storerooms behind tags from a 1929 excavation season, and only the specialists who handle them remember what they are. The ophidian figurines of southern Mesopotamia are quiet objects: ten or fifteen centimeters of low-fired clay, slender bodies, reptilian heads, almond eyes, traces of bitumen still clinging to the […]
The Betz Mystery Sphere: Alien Technology?
Some artifacts arrive at the historian’s bench already wrapped in their own legend; the work is to remove the wrapping carefully enough that the object underneath can be seen for what it is. The Betz sphere is one of those artifacts. For a few weeks in the spring of 1974 a polished metal ball pulled […]
The Kingoodie Artifact: A Nail in Ancient Rock
In 1844, a Scottish quarryman split a block of Old Red Sandstone at Kingoodie Quarry near Inchture, and a corroded iron nail came out with the rock. Sir David Brewster reported the find to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that same year. The fact of the find is real. The popular gloss, […]
The Wolfsegg Iron: A Natural Formation or Artifact?
The Wolfsegg Iron, sometimes called the Salzburg Cube, has spent more of its life in fringe literature than in the museum case it originally entered. A workman struck it out of a block of brown coal in the autumn of 1885, and within a few years a respectable mining engineer was lecturing on it as […]
The Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca Head: Roman in Pre-Columbian America?
A small terracotta head, no larger than a walnut, surfaced beneath a Mesoamerican pyramid in 1933 and has refused to settle into any single chronology since. The Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head measures roughly three centimeters across and bears, to many trained eyes, the bearded profile of a Roman provincial figurine. Whether it crossed the Atlantic before Columbus […]
The Maine Penny: Evidence of Norse in America
What the Maine Penny Is, and Why a Single Coin Carries So Much Weight The Maine Penny is a small silver Norwegian coin, struck during the reign of King Olaf Kyrre of Norway between 1067 and 1093, recovered in 1957 from a Native American shell midden on the coast of Maine. It is the only […]
The Acámbaro Figures: Julsrud’s Clay Dinosaurs and the Case Against Them
What Are the Acámbaro Figures? The Acámbaro Figures are a collection of roughly thirty-three thousand small ceramic figurines accumulated from July 1944 onward by the German hardware merchant and amateur antiquarian Waldemar Julsrud (1875-1964) in the town of Acámbaro, Guanajuato, in central Mexico. The collection is best known for the subset of figurines that read, […]
The Giant Stone Spheres of Costa Rica
In the lowland deltas of southern Costa Rica, more than three hundred near-perfect stone spheres rest in fields, museum lawns, and the floors of houses where they have been used as garden ornaments since the 1930s. They are the work of the Diquís culture, carved between roughly 600 and 1530 CE, and they constitute one […]
The Ica Stones: Proof of Dinosaurs and Humans Coexisting?
What Are the Ica Stones? The Ica Stones are roughly twenty thousand engraved andesite cobbles assembled from the early 1960s onward in Ica, a coastal-desert province about three hundred kilometres south of Lima, Peru, and exhibited in a private museum opened in 1996 by the physician and amateur antiquarian Javier Cabrera Darquea (1924-2001). The collection […]