A 12-year-old Dorset child, Mary Anning, discovers at Lyme Regis a 21 ft (6.4m) fossil of an icthyosaur

French scientist Georges Cuvier introduces scientific palaeontology with his Research on the Fossil Bones of Quadrupeds

Egyptian hieroglyphs are deciphered by French Egyptologist Jean François Champollion, using the Rosetta stone

Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz completes his pioneering Poissons Fossiles ('Fossil Fish'), classifying more than 1500 categories

British archaeologist Henry Layard, in his first month of digging in Iraq, discovers the Assyrian city of Nimrud

Hormuzd Rassam discovers the magnficent lion-hunt reliefs in the palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh

The first Neanderthal man to be discovered is unearthed by quarry workers in the Neander valley, near Düsseldorf

A stele is found at Susa, in Iran, giving the text of the Code of Hammurabi

The US consul in Mexico, Edward Herbert Thompson, begins a very profitable excavation at the Mayan site of Chichén Itzá

A fossilized human jaw, probably at least 500,000 years old, is found near Heidelberg in Germany

Charles Dawson claims to have found the fossilized skull of an early man (named in his honour Eoanthropus dawsoni in a gravel pit at Piltdown

The first traces are found of a major but entirely forgotten civilization in the Indus valley

Howard Carter exposes a flight of steps in the Valley of the Kings and comes to a barrier bearing the name Tutankhamun

British archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovers the treasures of the royal cemetery at Ur

The fossilized tooth of a human, half a million years old and known now as Peking Man, is discovered at a site near Beijing

Archaeological treasures are discovered in an Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk

Schoolboys, out hunting, discover paintings in a cave at Lascaux after their dog falls into a hole

A rich hoard of Roman silver is unearthed near Mildenhall, in Suffolk

An Arab boy, herding goats in the Qumran desert, finds the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Exceptional Scythian remains are found in frozen burial mounds at Pazyryk, in the Altai region of Siberia

A prehistoric victim of strangling is found in Tollund Moss in Denmark, with part of the noose still round his neck

British scholar Michael Ventris deciphers Linear B, the script of Mycenae, proving it to be an early form of Greek

Improved methods of testing prove conclusively that Piltdown Man was constructed by Charles Dawson from a human skull and the jaw of an ape

Archaeologists at Olympia excavate the workshop of the Greek classical sculptor Phidias

Paintings discovered on stone slabs in a cave in Namibia are dated to about 28,000 years ago