Peer-reviewed scientific journal (QSR) covering the Quaternary period, including palaeoclimate, sea-level change, environments and human prehistory.
Archaeologists and Murujuga rangers have documented two seabed sites off Western Australia that were drowned by rising seas at least 9,000 years ago. More than 20 stone artefacts were recovered, and the study says they could be considerably older.
Reality
Hannah Farrell's team at Haifa University used a 700,000-year-old straight-tusked elephant molar to reconstruct wetland and oak woodland in northern Israel. The tooth covers a few years of one animal's life at one site, so the evidence fits a wet stopover on the route out of Africa.
Reality
Hannah Farrell's team used a 700,000-year-old elephant molar from Israel's Gesher Benot Ya'aqov to reconstruct woodland and wetland around early toolmakers. The idea that the wet valley eased travel along the Africa-Eurasia land bridge is the authors' inference from one site and one elephant.
Reality
Southampton and OGS have mapped 5,000 years of drowned coastline in the northern Adriatic from sediment cores and new geophysical data. The fastest published rate is a peak inside a much slower millennial average.
Reality
A Quaternary Science Reviews study redates Jebel Katefeh-1 to 60,000-50,000 years ago and reads its prepared flakes as Neanderthal work, at a median likelihood of 78 percent.
Reality
A statistical study of tool shapes puts Neanderthals in the Saudi desert about 55,000 years ago. The inference is careful, the climate story is tidy, and the skeletal evidence is nonexistent.
Reality