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?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. 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 […]
The Betz Mystery Sphere: Alien Technology?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last reviewed: September 10, 2026. 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 […]
The Kingoodie Artifact: A Nail in Ancient Rock
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. 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 […]
The Wolfsegg Iron: A Natural Formation or Artifact?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last reviewed: September 10, 2026. 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 Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca Head: Roman in Pre-Columbian America?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. 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 […]
The Maine Penny: Evidence of Norse in America
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last reviewed: September 10, 2026. 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, […]
The Acámbaro Figures: Julsrud’s Clay Dinosaurs and the Case Against Them
By Sloane Reeve · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. 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 […]
The Giant Stone Spheres of Costa Rica
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. 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 […]
The Ica Stones: Proof of Dinosaurs and Humans Coexisting?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. 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 […]