People living along southeastern Europe’s Danube River around 11,500 years ago never planted a crop but still laid the foundation for the rise of farming in that region some 3,000…
Author: ID
Gold and silver tubes in a Russian museum are the oldest known drinking straws
Eight silver and gold tubes held in a Russian museum have long been thought to have been either ceremonial staffs or canopy supports. In reality, the long tubes are the…
Part donkey, part wild ass, the kunga is the oldest known hybrid bred by humans
From mules to ligers, the list of human-made hybrid animals is long. And, it turns out, ancient. Meet the kunga, the earliest known hybrid animal bred by people. The ancient…
Clovis hunters’ reputation as mammoth killers takes a hit
An amateur archaeologist exploring a dried-out, ancient stream channel called Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico, made a startling discovery in 1929. He came across chiseled stone points strewn among…
Arctic hunter-gatherers were advanced ironworkers more than 2,000 years ago
Hunter-gatherers who lived more than 2,000 years ago near the top of the world appear to have run ironworking operations as advanced as those of farming societies far to the…
Neandertals were the first hominids to turn forest into grassland 125,000 years ago
Neandertals took Stone Age landscaping to a previously unrecognized level. Around 125,000 years ago, these close human relatives transformed a largely forested area bordering two central European lakes into a…
2021 research reinforced that mating across groups drove human evolution
Evidence that cross-continental Stone Age networking events powered human evolution ramped up in 2021. A long-standing argument that Homo sapiens originated in East Africa before moving elsewhere and replacing Eurasian…
Smoke from Australia’s intense fires in 2019 and 2020 damaged the ozone layer
Towers of smoke that rose high into the stratosphere during Australia’s “black summer” fires in 2019 and 2020 destroyed some of Earth’s protective ozone layer, researchers report in the March…
How light from black holes is narrowing the search for axions
The search for a hypothetical subatomic particle that could signal new physics just narrowed a bit — thanks to the light swirling around a gargantuan black hole in another galaxy.…
How a scientist-artist transformed our view of the brain
The Brain in Search of ItselfBenjamin EhrlichFarrar, Straus and Giroux, $35 Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal is known as the father of modern neuroscience. Cajal was the first to…
