When did the savanna give way to the crash pad?

What is home? This is a deceptively simple question. Is it the place where you were born? Is it where you happen to live right now? Does it have to be a dwelling, or can it be a spot on the landscape, or even a state of mind?

For archaeologists tracing human origins, these are challenging questions. Yet answering them provides key insights into our evolution from hominids at the mercy of our surroundings to humans in control of them. Having a sense of home, as we understand it today, is a product of symbolic thinking, a capacity that makes us unique among animals, including our own ancestors.

Intimations of home likely began in early hominids' need for shelter. Australopithecus species, to which the famous 3-million-year-old Lucy belonged, often sheltered in trees, where they may have sought cover under dense clumps of leaves in the way in which great apes do today when it rains. Much later, about 400,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers, probably belonging to the species Homo heidelbergensis, constructed a camp on a beach at Terra Amata, now a suburb of the French city Nice. One large hut was about 30 feet long, and consisted of an oval palisade of saplings stuck in the ground, reinforced with a ring of stones, and presumably brought together to form a roof. Just inside a break in the ring where the doorway was, a campfire had burned in a hearth.

It is hard to not think that these early humans felt at home in this basic structure. Some might even argue that the crucial element was not the shelter itself but the hearth, where the flames would have formed a center of attention and social activity. In this limited sense, feelings of home were evidently there from the very beginning.

The Terracotta Warriors, along with other life-size sculptures built for the First Emperor of China, were inspired by Greek art, new research indicates.

About 8,000 Terracotta Warriors, which are life-size statues of infantryman, cavalry, archers, charioteers and generals, were buried in three pits less than a mile to the northeast of the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor. He unified the country through conquest more than 2,200 years ago. Pits containing sculptures of acrobats, strongmen, dancers and civil servants have also been found near the mausoleum.

Now, new research points to ancient Greek sculpture as the inspiration for the emperor's afterlife army. [See Photos of the Terracotta Warriors & Greek Art]

Built on the site of a 7th century monastery and founded around 1200, St Cadoc's in Llancarfan, Vale of Glamorgan is, from the outside, just another beautiful small Welsh village church.

But inside, conservators have uncovered some stunning 15th century wall paintings to the delight of locals, visitors and experts alike.

After the discovery of a thin red line of paint on the wall, a team of experts were brought in to investigate what else was lurking behind the 20 layers of limewash added over five centuries.

A real-life Atlantis which sunk off the coast of Egypt nearly 1,200 years ago has now been brought back to the surface with the help of 3D.

The city of Heracleion, home of the temple where Cleopatra was inaugurated, was one of the most important trade centres in the Mediterranean area before it disappeared into what is now the Bay of Aboukir.

Heracleion was discovered in 2001, and after more than a decade of excavation, researchers have now been able to create a map depicting life in the ancient trade hub.

Mount Vesuvius, a volcano near the Bay of Naples in Italy, is hundreds of thousands of years old and has erupted more than 50 times. Its most famous eruption took place in the year 79 A.D., when the volcano buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii under a thick carpet of volcanic ash. The dust "poured across the land" like a flood, one witness wrote, and shrouded the city in "a darkness...like the black of closed and unlighted rooms." Two thousand people died, and the city was abandoned for almost as many years.

When a group of explorers rediscovered the site in 1748, they were surprised to find that--underneath a thick layer of dust and debris--Pompeii was mostly intact. The buildings, artifacts and skeletons left behind in the buried city have taught us a great deal about everyday life in the ancient world.

In Russia, in the Caucasus mountains, not far from the cities Tzelentzchik, Touapse, Novorossiysk and Sochi, there are hundreds of megalithic monuments. The Russians call them dolmens. Russian and foreign archaeologists have not yet discovered their use. All these megalithic dolmens you see below in the pictures are dated from 10,000 years to 25,000 years ago, according to the website Kykeon. Other archaeologists put the age of these megalithic structures at 4000 to 6,000 years old.

Thousands of prehistoric megalithic monuments are known throughout the world. Some of the least known outside the former Soviet Union, however, are those in the Caucasus. These dolmens cover the Western Caucasus on both sides of the mountain ridge, in an area of approximately 12.000 square kilometers of Russia and Abkhazia.

It has long been known that ancient Vikings buried dead slaves with their masters, but new isotopic research of ancient skeletal remains is providing at least one researcher with more evidence of how these people lived their lives - more notably what their diets were like.

Elise Naumann, a PhD candidate in archeology at the University of Oslo in Norway, has made several remarkable discoveries using the skeletons that were exhumed at Flakstad in Lofoten. Her research is based on a total of ten individuals, of which at least three were found in double and triple graves and were headless. Her findings are published in the January 2014 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The isotope analyses, combined with analyses of ancient DNA, gave suggestive evidence that the headless skeletons were slaves who were decapitated before being buried with their masters.

This discovery says a lot about the great differences between people in the society of the time. "Life was undoubtedly difficult and brutal for the majority of people. Only a very few were privileged," wrote Mari Kildahl, a journalist with the University of Oslo.

Naumann noted, however, that there is nothing new about the fact that slaves during the Viking era were buried with their masters, often bound hand and foot and beheaded before burial.

What is new, Naumann explains, is how the analytical methods used and their results have offered fresh insights into the society and people of the past. The isotopic analyses have given researchers new information about the diet and health of these people who lived more a thousand years ago. Analyses of the ancient DNA also yield knowledge about genealogy and genetics.

Researchers have read strands of ancient DNA teased from the thigh bone of an early human that died 400,000 years ago in what is now northern Spain.

The genetic material was pieced together from a clutch of cells found in bone fragments - the oldest human remains ever to yield their genetic code.

The work deepens understanding of the genetics of human evolution by some 200,000 years, raising hopes that researchers can build a clearer picture of the earliest branches of the human family tree by studying the genetic make-up of fossilised remains dug up elsewhere.

"This is proof of principle that it can be done," said Matthias Meyer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "We are now very eager to explore other sites of a similar age."

The thigh bone was among the remains of at least 28 early human ancestors found at the bottom of a vertical shaft in a cave complex in the Atapuerca mountains in northern Spain. The Sima de los Huesos, or "pit of bones", lies 30m underground and half a kilometre from the cave system's nearest current entrance.

The oldest stone-tipped projectile weapons date to 280,000 years, study says.

The oldest known stone-tipped projectiles have been discovered in Ethiopia. The javelins are roughly 280,000 years old and predate the earliest known fossils of our species, Homo sapiens, by about 80,000 years.

These javelins are some 200,000 years older than previous examples of similar weapons, suggesting that modern humans and their extinct relatives had the know-how to create these sorts of complex thrown projectiles much earlier than often thought.

Scientists investigated stone tools unearthed at the Gademotta Formation on the flanks of an ancient, large collapsed volcanic crater in central Ethiopia's Rift Valley.

"Today, the area represents a ridge overlooking one of the four lakes in the vicinity, Lake Ziway," said researcher Yonatan Sahle, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

During much of the Middle Pleistocene, about 125,000 to 780,000 years ago, "the area was overlooking an even bigger paleolake - a megalake composed of today's four separate lakes." Antelope and hippo remains have been recovered from the grassy, forested site.

The oldest artifacts at the site are roughly 279,000 years old. In comparison, the earliest known fossils of Homo sapiens, previously discovered at sites elsewhere in Ethiopia, are about 200,000 years old.

Pointed artifacts with damage suggesting they were used in spears are common at the site. The researchers focused on 141 such obsidian artifacts.

Archaeologists have found some of the most curious canine burials ever unearthed in Egypt - two well preserved dogs buried in pots some 3,000 years ago.

Nicknamed Houdini and Chewie, the dog pots were discovered at Shunet ez Zebib, a large mud-brick structure located at Abydos - one of Egypt's oldest standing royal monuments. The site was built around 2750 B.C and was dedicated to Khasekhemwy, a second dynasty king.

It is also known for the the thousands of ibis burials in jars that had been recovered in the dunes nearby, and for the interments of other animals, mostly raptors and canines.

"The site provided a very secure structure, with conveniently soft, sandy fill that was easy for quick burials within a sacred space," Salima Ikram, professor of Egyptology at The American University in Cairo, wrote in a recently published Festschrift in honor of Dieter Kessler, a renowned scholar in the field of animal cults and Egyptian religion.