Michael Marshall

Malta's first settlers arrived from mainland Europe 1,000 years earlier than thought

Ancient rocks reveal there were several humid spells in Arabia’s past, which might have given early hominins a route out of Africa long before our genus migrated

Cuneiform, the oldest identified writing system, defied deciphering – until 1857. What happened then makes a terrific read, in Joshua Hammer's The Mesopotamian Riddle

It’s incredibly tricky to pin down the origin of the language that led to the words spoken everywhere between Spain and India

Batteries for electric vehicles are notoriously difficult to recycle, but growing demand for the rare metals they contain is leading to innovative new ways of retrieving them from used power cells

Stone tools are considered the first form of technology devised by ancient humans – but they might not have been invented from scratch

Recordings of brain activity in budgerigars reveal sets of brain cells that represent different sounds like keys on a keyboard – a structure never seen before in any bird brain

Bone fragments from a cave in northern Spain suggest there were multiple hominin species living in western Europe around a million years ago

Farming arose on multiple continents among populations with radically different cultures and environments and with no means of communicating with each other – how did it crop up independently at about the same time?

Hominins may have learned how to make bone tools by adapting the techniques they mastered for stone ones

By far the oldest evidence of humans living in dense forests comes from a site in Ivory Coast, where stone tools and plant remains reveal a human presence stretching back 150,000 years

Preserved wooden spears from hundreds of thousands of years ago seem to have been suitable for throwing, not just close-range attacks

Grave warnings have been issued about the dangers of creating life forms using mirror-image molecules. How worried should we be?

Fossils and genetics are starting to point to life emerging surprisingly soon after Earth formed, when the planet was hellishly hot and seemingly uninhabitable

Today, the upheavals of plate tectonics continually reshape Earth. When this began is much disputed