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Cranial fragments discovered in China can't be pinned down to any known human species. Some speculate it might be Denisovan.
*nods geologically*
To this day, menopause remains a puzzling concept.
A new study seems to suggest that an old but controversial hypothesis may be true. Humans might have first arrived in North America 24,000 years ago.
Our early ancestors may have comprised social groups similar to those seen in gorillas today.
One foot in front of the other.
Best enjoyed with a stone fork from a bark plate.
Digs at one of the most amazing anthropological sites in the world come across something big.
Spectacular images of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon have emerged, but conservationists and indigenous populations fear that the villagers are in grave danger.
Up to now, we didn't even think they knew which were theirs.
Right in the middle of nowhere, ancient humans ventured to start a new life.
'This will look fabulous in the cave's wall.'
The monkeys cut the stones for a whole different reason, though. Ok, maybe they're not that smart.
A prehistoric walk in the park
Modern archaeology is a lot like crime scene investigation.
This isn't the final word, though.
How did people get to America, and when? A new, 'pioneering and neat' study may have some answers.
In 1912, palaeontologist Arthur Smith Woodward and the amateur antiquarian Charles Dawson made a stunning announcement, which turned out to be a hoax.
Big-eyed Neanderthals were successful due to this feature, not in spite of.
Short, round skulls were the norm then.
Not a modern-day disease after all.
Looks like happy hour isn't just a human thing.
Researchers discovered a gruesome find.
A new study from Yale University mapped urban centers from 3700 B.C. to 2000 A.D. It's an amazing ride!
University of Rochester researchers developed a new evolutionary model that suggests human intelligence developed to meet the demands of our infants, in a self-reinforcing cycle: bigger brains led to shorter pregnancies, requiring parents to have even bigger brains.
Deep inside the Bruniquel Cave in France, a set of man-made structures 336 meters from the entrance lie as evidence to the former populations which inhabited the cave. These are among the oldest structures created by humans, and they have quite a story to tell about some of our ancestors. Until now, the earliest dated structures go back to […]
People of European descent carry as much as 4 percent Neanderthal DNA, but the Y chromosome passed down from father to sons is entirely missing in the modern population. Scientists now think they know why.
Last week, a team published results showing that some areas in South-East Asia carry significant Denisovan DNA and now, another team has published a map of that DNA spread.
The relationship between ancient humans and Neanderthals was proven to be much more intricate than previously believed.
Researchers working in Spain have made a surprising finding: Neanderthals emerged much earlier than previously believed, perhaps as far as half a million years ago.
Imagine spending half of your day chewing food like our cousins, the chimpanzees. You'd never get anything done. Strikingly, human teeth have evolved to become smaller over the past million years or so. This begs the question: how did we become such efficient eaters? There are two answers. For one, human ancestors started eating higher quality food (meat) and, secondly, they employed food processing. By applying tool use to anything outside slicing and cutting meat, these early ancestors may have opened the flood gates of innovation.
This suggests that humans and Neanderthals interbred about 50,000 years earlier than previously thought. The implications are staggering considering humans left Africa to settle Europe and Asia about 65,000 years ago. How was this possible? Researchers suggest that this gene flow comes from modern humans who left Africa even earlier -- maybe the very first wave.
The smaller humans who lived on the Flores Island in Indonesia until 12,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens but a different species, a new study confirms.
The Easter Island is one of the biggest mysteries in human history. How people got there and where they came from, how they built the huge moai statues and why, and what brought their demise are still unsolved questions. But at leas for the latter, we may be getting a bit closer to the truth. The previously […]
It all started when archaeologists working in Germany made a surprising discovery, uncovering the bodies of children and of one adult man who was buried, strangely, standing upright. The cemetery was dated to 8,500 years, being one of the oldest – if not the oldest – ever found on the continent. The cemetery dates from the […]
New models show that 2 million years ago, early humans couldn’t have survived on a diet based on nuts and other hard foods. In 2012, a study garnered international attention when it claimed that early human ancestors survived on a diet of hard foods mixed in with tree bark, fruit, leaves and other plant products. But […]
Augmenting the simple bow and arrow marked a significant shift in human cognitive abilities.
War may have emerged even before humans settled down.
According to an English-Portuguese duo, the origin of some of the most beloved stories may go back much further than we thought.
Volcanic eruptions have fascinated and frightened people for millennia, and many have tried to describe them in different ways. Whether it was through paintings, text or documentaries, we’ve all seen volcanoes described in one way or another. But for people 30,000 years ago, that was a much more difficult challenge. Now, researchers believe they have […]
A new paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examines women's efforts to guard their mates from sexual competition -- especially other ovulating females.
Archaeologists working in the arctic have found evidence that ancient humans made it to the arctic some 45,000 years ago.
More than twice the age of the Stonehenge, the Shigir Idol has been recently dated to 11,000 years ago, which makes it the oldest wooden object in existence by far. The idol is also covered with some drawings which may actually be a written language that no one understands.
Partial femur bones found in the renowned Red Deer Cave seems to show that other species of humans overlapped with our own species during the ice age.
Recent fossils unearthed in the Chinese province of Daoxian come to unravel the story of humanity’s spread as we know it today. The find consists of 47 teeth, belonging to modern humans, but what’s really important is their age – they have been dated to 80,000 years ago. This number doesn’t fit with the “Out of Africa” migration theory, holding that humans originate and have spread from the horn of the continent all around the world. The theory as we know it can’t explain human presence in the area for another 20,000 years.
The complete genetic code book of a person who lived 4,500 years ago in Ethiopia was completed by US researchers. Although much older genomes have been sequenced, like those of 38,000 year-old Neanderthals, samples from African forefathers have proven difficult to sequence as the DNA is often destroyed by accelerated decay, driven by tropical conditions. As such, this is the first time a complete genome retrieval was performed from an ancient human in Africa. In this light, the findings are very important: they suggest even older DNA could be retrieved - maybe even millions of years back to the age of other species of the homo genus.
The human inovation process is more of a slow, steady climb than a sum of great leaps, a new University of Reading study shows. Our minds tend to innovate by adding small improvements through trial and error report the scientists, who studied one of the most important cultural events in human history - the migration of the Bantu-speaking farmers in Africa some 5,000 years ago. Mark Pagel, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University, led the study.
A daring team of researchers squeezed themselves through a long vertical chute and descended some 40 meters beneath the surface. It was here inside the Rising Star cave, located in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northwest of Johannesburg in South Africa, that the researchers discovered one of the most important collection of hominins in the world - 1,500 bone fragments belonging to 15 skeletons. The remains clearly belonged to a human ancestor, and the team involved claims we're talking, in fact, about a totally new hominin.
Basques - an ethnic group from modern day Spain - were thought to be direct descendants of hunter-gatherers who had managed to remain isolated during the initial wave of migration of early farmers in Western Europe. A comprehensive genetic analysis performed by scientists at Uppsala University suggests the Basques are more related to early farmers than hunter gatherers. Instead, what likely happens is that these early farmers kept to themselves and resisted breeding with later migratory waves.
A new study shows that evolution's burden is distinctly visible on our shoulders - literally. Our shoulders are surprisingly similar to those of orangutans, as opposed to those of our closest relatives, chimp. This may have an important significance on our evolution.
