History and archaeology
The past as the evidence shows it: excavations, dating methods, ancient technology and the records historians rely on, including where scholars still disagree.
5 articles on Your Daily Science
AI in Archaeology: Real Discoveries or Hype?
What AI has actually found in archaeology, from carbonised Herculaneum scrolls to Nazca lines and Maya lidar, and where the claims still need checking.
The Vanishing Commissar: Photo Fakes Before Photoshop
Nikolai Yezhov ran Stalin's purges, then vanished from a photo beside him. How Soviet censors edited pictures by hand, and how the edits were found out.
The Piltdown Man Hoax: The Fake Fossil That Fooled Science
In 1912 a skull from a Sussex gravel pit was hailed as the missing link. It took 41 years to prove it a fake. How the Piltdown hoax worked and who did it.
The Antikythera Mechanism: An Ancient Greek Computer
Found in a shipwreck in 1901, a lump of corroded bronze turned out to be a 2,000-year-old machine for predicting the sky. How we know what it did.
Who Actually Built the Pyramids
Gang graffiti, a 4,500-year-old logbook, a workers' town and their tombs: the evidence that tells us who built the Great Pyramid, and how.