Articles about mysteries & discoveries across every continent and era, oldest first.
A camp under a Chilean bog, dated to about 14,500 years ago, put people in South America before the Clovis hunters. Later claims reach 23,000 years.
· 12,500 BCDried feces from an Oregon cave carried DNA a 2008 study dated to 12,300 radiocarbon years. Rebuttals, a 2012 recheck and a 2020 lipid study followed.
· 12,300 BCA Natufian woman of about 45 was buried at Hilazon Tachtit, Galilee, 12,400–12,000 cal BP, with over 50 tortoise shells, a leopard pelvis and a human foot.
· 10,000 BCRadiocarbon dates on 24 mud-wasp nests over and under 21 Gwion figures gave 11,500 to 12,700 years in 2020. A kangaroo painting dated in 2021 is older.
· 10,000 BCHunter-gatherers raised Göbekli Tepe's T-pillar rings about 9500 BC, before farming reached the region. Excavators now call it a settlement with rituals.
· 9500 BCKathleen Kenyon found an 8.2-meter stone tower at Jericho in the 1950s. Four named scholars still give four different reasons for why it was built.
· 8000 BCLime-plaster statues on reed frames, buried in two pits at 'Ain Ghazal near Amman and lifted in 1983 and 1985, then conserved in London and Washington.
· 6750 BCA skull found in the Columbia River in 1996 led to a lawsuit, a 2015 genome study and a 2016 law that sent Kennewick Man to five tribes in 2017.
· 6500 BCAn excavator operator found gold near Varna in October 1972. The cemetery has been counted at 270, 294, 312 and 315 graves and dated two ways.
· 4600 BCRaphael Pumpelly dug the two mounds at Anau in 1904 in two-foot levels, found wheat and barley chaff, and argued that drying oases sent people outward.
· 4500 BCTwo hikers found a body at 3,210 meters on the Tisenjoch on September 19, 1991. A survey put it 92.56 meters inside Italy; an X-ray found an arrow.
· 3300 BCMineral grains in the Altar Stone match rock in northeast Scotland, 750 km away. The sarsens came from 25 km north, the bluestones from west Wales.
· 2500 BCPowder from 61 skeletal samples at the Rakhigarhi cemetery gave one usable ancient genome. Cell published it on September 5, 2019, with no Steppe ancestry.
· 2500 BCA 2026 Ministry of Culture post calls Dholavira's ten-sign gypsum inscription the world's oldest-known signboard, at a city ASI excavated under R.S. Bisht.
· 2500 BCAbout 4,000 Indus texts survive, averaging five signs, with no bilingual text and no agreed language, so no decipherment has been accepted since the 1870s.
· 2500 BCThirteen rammed-earth pillars at Taosi, Shanxi, dug in 2003–04, were read as a sunrise observatory of the 21st century BC. A 2025 paper queries it.
· 2100 BCArkaim reserve records say dam work began in November 1986; a 1987 survey found a ringed Bronze Age settlement, and the reservoir was canceled in April 1991.
· 2000 BCA Soviet expedition found the Gonur oasis in Turkmenistan's Karakum desert in 1974. Its Bronze Age city traded with the Indus; its dates are disputed.
· 2000 BCIn 1934 Folke Bergman counted 120 coffins by the Small River. A 2021 Nature study of 18 genomes found the Tarim mummies had no western ancestry.
· 1900 BCArthur Evans dug at Knossos from 1900 to 1931 and rebuilt the palace in reinforced concrete, "a real godsend" to him, "controversial" to the Ashmolean.
· 1700 BCErlitou in Henan has palaces, a bronze foundry and grid roads from about 1900 to 1500 BC, and no writing to say whether its rulers were the Xia.
· 1700 BCA 32-centimeter bronze disc inlaid with gold stars, looted from the Mittelberg in 1999, seized in Basel in 2002 and dated to about 1600 BC.
· 1600 BCSchliemann began digging Grave Circle A at Mycenae on August 7, 1876, and wired the king in French. The "face of Agamemnon" line is not in his 1878 book.
· 1550 BCPottery, rice husks and two skeletons from Ritidian Beach Cave date the first crossing to the Marianas to about 1500 BC and point to the Philippines.
· 1500 BC
