Archaeologists wasted no time in 2024, digging up incredible finds, such as the remains of an ancient temple in Greece and golden tongues in ancient Egyptian burials, and then analyzing them to learn more about our past.

Meanwhile, people studying human evolution found precious clues about our extinct relatives. For instance, they discovered that 1.4 million-year-old stone tools, the earliest in Europe, weren’t made by modern humans. And they learned that Neanderthals, our closest extinct relatives, buried their dead differently from how Homo sapiens treated the dead.