While most digs continue to make extraordinary finds using the time-tested techniques and tools of archaeology, it's clear that newer technologies are changing what we know about the past. Ancient DNA, ground-sensing technology, and even artificial intelligence played a part in discoveries made in 2024. Here are some of the year’s biggest archeological stories.
1. Lost Cities of the Amazon
The Amazon rainforest may look like a place of plenty, but growing food in this part of the world is hard. So it made sense that no one had ever found traces of ancient cities in the forest. That is until people started to spot strange shapes from the sky. In 2024, archeologists found the oldest urban settlements in the Amazon. LIDAR—a type of ground-sensing technology that can see through trees—uncovered over 6,000 interconnected earthen platforms in Ecuador that date back 2,000 years. These systems are like those built by the Maya in Guatemala and Mexico.
2. Hundreds More Nazca Lines
Aliens didn't make the Nazca lines. But artificial intelligence—or AI—sure makes them easier to find. The Nazca lines are a collection of hundreds of geometric earthworks in southern Peru. Some look like landing strips and run for kilometers. Others are shaped like animals or people. Pottery shards near these sites suggest they were made by pre-Columbian people between 100 B.C. and A.C. 1400. People have known about the existence of around 400 Nazca lines thanks to surveys that started in the 1940s. Archeologists added hundreds more to the mix in 2024 thanks to the scanning power of AI, which identified 303 more shapes in the region over just six months.
3. Pompeiian DNA
The eruption of Mt Vesuvius back in 79 buried Pompeii and its residents in a thick layer of ash. Archeologists who rediscovered corpses lying side-by-side in the 1800s—or more accurately, the space left in the ash where their corpses decomposed—imagined who these people might have been to each other. Well, the first DNA sequenced at Pompeii can tell you what they're not. That mother with a child? That’s a man and an unrelated infant. Those two sisters who died in each other's arms? Again, no relation.
4. Cave Paintings Keep Getting Older
The world's oldest cave art is in Indonesia. At least, it is for now. Continuing the trend of finding older and older cave art, scientists announced in 2024 that a painted scene of people hunting pig-like animals found in a cave on the island of Sulawesi is at least 51,200 years old. This beats out the last contender for oldest cave art, a drawing of pigs also found in a cave in Indonesia, by around 5,000 years. An even older date was proposed for a stencil drawing found in Spain in 2018, but its extreme age—over 60,000 years-old—has since come into question.
5. World's Oldest Cheese
Cheese is a way to make milk last longer. But it's unlikely that ancient people expected it to last this long. Two decades ago, archeologists uncovered mummies inside tombs in northwestern China. Around the mummies' necks was a strange substance: 3,500-year-old cheese. DNA analysis revealed that it was kefir, a type of soft cheese that these people made from goat milk. Kefir probably helped ancient people deal with the problem of lactose intolerance and make the best use of their goat herds.
6. Bronze-Age Mariners
Robots deployed by an oil and gas company earlier this year made a surprising discovery off the coast of Israel. Nearly 2 kilometers below the sea surface lies a nearly perfectly preserved Canaanite shipwreck that sunk 3,300 years ago. All bronze-age boats so far were discovered near the coast, which led archeologists to think that ancient Mediterranean seafarers stuck near land during their travels. This discovery suggests they may have been more adventurous: using the stars to navigate in deep water far from the coast.
7. Sunken Remains of World War II
Finding shipwrecks isn't just for scientists. Ocean exploration companies helped rediscover several World War II-era ships. Off the coast of California, underwater drones photographed the remains of the Stewart. This destroyer was seized by the Japanese in Indonesia in 1942 and was later recovered at the end of the war. It was sunk by the U.S. Navy off the coast of California in 1946. Meanwhile, the final resting place of the USS Harder—a submarine that sank in 1944 in the South China Sea with 79 sailors aboard—was found by the Lost 52 project, which aims to locate all 52 submarines lost during the war.
8. Oldest Human Genomes Pin Down When We Met Neanderthals
Almost everyone on Earth has a small amount of Neanderthal DNA. That's because early humans leaving Africa probably met our sister species in the Middle East and had children with them before spreading around the world. DNA sequenced from the remains of people who lived in Europe around 45,000 years ago reveals they had mixed with Neanderthals just a few thousand years ago—meaning our meeting happened sometime between 49,000 and 45,000 years ago.
