Realistically, what would actually survive of our civilisation after 100,000 years?

Divers Just Found an Ancient Image of The Lighthouse of Alexandria. Beneath the sea at Alexandria, archaeologists found a bronze ring engraved with one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. For centuries, the enormous tower guided ships into Egypt’s busiest port. Earthquakes eventually reduced it to ruins. But this tiny image survived. Found among the submerged remains of a royal palace, it is the first known signet ring depicting the lighthouse. But who wore it, and what they used it to seal, remain unknown.

In 2018, researchers scanned more than 2,000 square kilometres of northern Guatemala using lasers fired from aircraft. They were looking for traces of the ancient Maya beneath the forest. But the results revealed something staggering: more than 60,000 structures. Homes. Palaces. Roads. Fortifications. Vast areas of modified farmland. Familiar archaeological sites turned out to be parts of a much larger, interconnected landscape. The trees had hidden the scale of what was there.

Divers just found Aboriginal stone tools beside a drowned freshwater spring, in landscapes swallowed by the ocean at least 9,000 years ago. Some stone originated approximately 23 kilometres away, demonstrating movement of valued materials across what is now seabed. Researchers believe this is part of a much larger submerged cultural landscape whose true scale remains unknown

In 1890, workers digging in a Russian peat bog uncovered a wooden figure covered in strange faces and geometric markings. It became known as the Shigir Idol. But nobody realised just how old it was. More than a century later, scientific dating placed it over 12,000 years in the past. Thousands of years before the pyramids, someone had carved this extraordinary object using stone tools. We still don’t know exactly what its markings meant. But its survival raises a bigger question. Stone survives. Wood usually rots. How much of the prehistoric world looks simple to us because its most extraordinary creations have disappeared?

In 1542, Francisco de Orellana took a small Spanish party down an Amazon tributary looking for food. But the current was too strong to return. They ended up travelling all the way to the Atlantic. What they encountered was extraordinary. Their chronicler described huge settlements, roads leading inland, abundant food and riverbanks so densely populated that one settlement seemed to follow another for miles. This was a landscape full of people. But later explorers found a very different Amazon. The enormous populations described in the account were nowhere to be seen. It was just jungle. For centuries, scholars dismissed the story as exaggeration or fantasy. But European diseases and colonisation had devastated Indigenous communities. The later explorers were seeing the aftermath. Now archaeology is revealing vast ancient settlement networks beneath the rainforest. Orellana’s expedition had glimpsed a world that was about to disappear.

This fossil is casting serious doubt on the Out of Africa theory. It’s part of a skull discovered in a Greek cave in the 1970s. Researchers initially thought it belonged to a Neanderthal. But a later analysis reached a startling conclusion. It appeared to be Homo sapiens. And it was at least 210,000 years old. Our species, in Europe, more than 150,000 years before the major migration out of Africa traced in our DNA. So how does that make sense? Well, we already had evidence of earlier journeys. Human fossils in Israel showed our species had ventured beyond Africa long before that major migration. But Greece was much further away. And this skull suggested a much earlier arrival. There is, however, a possible explanation. Your DNA tells the story of people who passed their genes down to you. But it can’t reveal every population that ever existed. Some may have travelled far, survived for thousands of years, then disappeared without leaving descendants alive today. Fossils can reveal those missing people. And perhaps that’s who this skull belonged to. An early wave of humans who left Africa, reached Europe… And became a branch of our family with nobody left to remember them.

The world's oldest shipwreck has just been discovered off the coast of Turkey Archaeologists dated it to 4,400-4,700 years old, which is around the same time that the Great Pyramid was being built.