Lucky 9000-Year-Old Finds From Rabbit Hole Re-write Prehistory of “Dream Island”
Chance finds dating back 9000 years tell new story of Skokholm Island, Pembrokeshire. Chance finds of prehistoric stone tools and fragments of pottery, picked up…
Anthropology
Archaeologists Uncover Evidence From Monumental Tombs of Domesticated Dogs in Ancient Arabian Peninsula
Dog bones dated between circa 4200 and 4000 BCE discovered. A team of archaeologists in north-west the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has uncovered the earliest…
Screams of “Joy” Are Often Mistaken for “Fear” When Heard Out of Context
The first in-depth look at the human ability to decode the range of emotions tied to the acoustic cues of screams. People are adept at…
Earliest Homo Populations in Africa Had Primitive Ape-Like Brains – Just Half the Size of Today’s Humans
The human brain as we know it today is relatively young. It evolved about 1.7 million years ago when the culture of stone tools in…
Oldest Modern Human Genome Reconstructed Using DNA From 45,000-Year-Old Skull
The fossil skull of a woman in Czechia has provided the oldest modern human genome yet reconstructed, representing a population that formed before the ancestors…
Humans Were Apex Predators for Two Million Years – Our Stone Age Ancestors Mostly Ate Meat
Researchers at Tel Aviv University were able to reconstruct the nutrition of stone age humans. In a paper published in the Yearbook of the American…
Archaeologists Use AI for Modern Analysis of Rock Art
Machine Learning Opens New Doors in Archaeology Rock art of human figures created over thousands of years in Arnhem Land has been put through a…
Crystals Reveal Early Humans in the Kalahari 105,000 Years Ago Were As Innovative as Their Coastal Neighbors
Archaeological evidence in a rock shelter at the edge of the Kalahari Desert, South Africa, is challenging the idea that the origins of our species…
Ancient Genetics Trace the Origin and Decline of the Legendary Scythians
Because of their interactions and conflicts with the major contemporaneous civilizations of Eurasia, the Scythians enjoy a legendary status in historiography and popular culture. The…
DNA Analysis of Victims of 6,200-Year-Old Massacre Reveals Oldest Documented Site of Indiscriminate Mass Killing
In previous research, ancient massacre sites found men who died while pitted in battle or discovered executions of targeted families. At other sites, evidence showed…
Mural Painted More Than 2,500 Years Ago Depicts Salt as an Ancient Maya Commodity at a Marketplace
The first documented record of salt as an ancient Maya commodity at a marketplace is depicted in a mural painted more than 2,500 years ago…
“Plain of Jars” – Solving the Mystery of the Laos Megalithic Jars
New research conducted at the UNESCO World Heritage listed ‘Plain of Jars’ in Laos has established the stone jars were likely placed in their final…
Indiscriminate Killing Revealed in Genetic Analysis of Ancient Massacre
Genetic analysis provides clarity and also prompts further questions around an ancient massacre in Potočani, Croatia, in a study published on March 10, 2021, in…
New Research Shows Neanderthals Had the Capacity to Perceive and Produce Human Speech
Neanderthals — the closest ancestor to modern humans — possessed the ability to perceive and produce human speech, according to a new study published by…
An Ancient Economy: Chumash Indians Used Currency 2,000 Years Ago
Archaeologist argues the Chumash Indians were using highly worked shell beads as currency 2,000 years ago. As one of the most experienced archaeologists studying California’s…
Archaeologists Discover Neanderthals and Homo sapiens Used Identical Nubian Technology
Long held in a private collection, the newly analyzed tooth of an approximately 9-year-old Neanderthal child marks the hominin’s southernmost known range. Analysis of the…
On the Origin of Our Species: Untangling Ancestry in the Evolution of Homo sapiens
Experts from the Natural History Museum, The Francis Crick Institute, and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Jena have joined together…
Grasshoppers and Roadblocks: Indigenous People Fight COVID-19 in Rural Mexico With Little Government Support
On the outskirts of some small Indigenous communities in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, a few volunteer guards keep watch along roads blocked by makeshift…