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Caves

Feast your eyes on the blind Somalian cavefish, which has—like mammals—mysteriously lost the ability to use light to fix damaged DNA.

Blind Cavefish Shed Light on the Dark Days of Mammalian Evolution

Like mammals, these cave-dwelling creatures have discarded a solar-powered system that repairs UV-damaged DNA

The ghost of a bagpiper is rumored to haunt the caves below Culzean Castle

Cool Finds

Hidden Medieval Door Leading to Smugglers’ Caves Discovered Underneath Scottish Castle

Culzean Castle, a towering fortress overlooking the cliffs of Ayrshire, sits atop a labyrinthine network allegedly used by smugglers, ghosts and fugitives

New Research

Climate Change Likely Iced Neanderthals Out Of Existence

Climate records gathered from stalagmites in Romanian caves show two extremely cold dry periods correspond with the disappearance of Neanderthals

Islandiana lewisi, found in a single cave in southern Indiana

Cool Finds

New Spider Species Discovered In Indiana Cave

The translucent sheet-weaving spider shows that scientists haven’t yet found everything in our own backyard

New Research

Ancient Humans Weathered the Toba Supervolcano Just Fine

New studies suggest the largest eruption in the last 2 million years didn’t push humanity to the edge of extinction as previously hypothesized

Cave art found in India

New Research

Did Cave Acoustics Play a Role in the Development of Language?

In a new paper, researchers hypothesize that the location of cave art and sounds early humans heard might be linked

At La Pasiega in Spain, the scalariform, or ladder shape, composed of red horizontal and vertical lines (center left) dates to older than 64,000 years.

New Research

Were Neanderthals the Earliest Cave Artists? New Research in Spain Points to the Possibility

Archaeologists pushed back the date of cave paintings at three sites to 65,000 years ago—20,000 years before the arrival of humans in Europe

Cool Finds

World’s Largest Underwater Cave System Discovered in Mexico

The 215-mile sunken freshwater labyrinth is a trove of ancient Maya artifacts

A bat undergoing a UV light treatment

New Research

UV Light Could Help Stop the Bat-Killing White Nose Syndrome

Research shows the fungus is susceptible to UV light. The problem is getting bats into the tanning beds

Sculptors Cave 3D Animation

Take a Virtual Tour of a Mysterious Pictish Cave in Scotland

Archaeologists have created a 3D model of the fascinating, but hard-to-access Sculptor’s Cave

Winding Ice Age Cave Discovered Beneath Montreal

The cave stretches for more than 600 feet and splinters off into a number of different passageways

Puerto Rico

Archaeologists Date Pre-Hispanic Puerto Rican Rock Art for the First Time

A new analysis looks at the thousands of images found in caves on Mona Island, a spiritual hub for the Taino culture

The Cavern Grotto restaurant is located 21 stories underground.

Dine 21 Stories Underground in This 345-Million-Year-Old Cavern

Cavern Grotto, a new restaurant in Arizona, opens inside the largest dry cavern system in the country

The olm, or cave dragon, is the largest cave-adapted animal in Europe. These strange creatures spend their entire lives in caves, and face threats from pollution runoff from agriculture and chemical plants on the surface.

Future of Conservation

Cave Dragons Exist—And Saving Them Could Be Key to Protecting Drinking Water

New DNA techniques are letting researchers track down the largest, strangest cave animals in the world

Some of the cave dwellings in Old Khndzoresk.

Armenia

Explore an Ancient Cave City in Armenia

Residents lived in Old Khndzoresk up until the 1950s

The skull of Neo, one of the bodies found in the Lesedi Chamber

New Research

Ancient Human Cousin May Have Lived Alongside Early Homo Sapiens

Homo naledi may have been much younger—and more advanced—than previously thought

Vindija Cave in Croatia where some of the samples were collected

New Research

Scientists Extract DNA From Ancient Humans Out of Cave Dirt

The new technique promises to transform the study of the hominid family tree

Reconstruction of the Tham Lod woman who lived 13,600 years ago

New Research

Researchers Work to Take the Bias Out Of Facial Reconstruction

Instead of relying on European-centric data sets, researchers used a global database to help image a 13,600-year-old woman from Thailand

Later Stone Age paintings

New Research

New Technique Shows San Rock Art Is 5,000 Years Old

Using a highly refined form of carbon dating, researchers were able to date the pigments in art in Botswana, Lesotho and South Africa

New Research

Artifacts Found in Indonesian Cave Show Complexities of Ice Age Culture

Pendants and buttons as well as carvings suggest the inhabitants of Wallacea were as advanced as Europeans during the Ice Age

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