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…
Category: Anthropology
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…
DNA from mysterious Asian mummies reveals their surprising ancestry
Mystery mummies from Central Asia have a surprising ancestry. These people, who displayed facial characteristics suggesting a European heritage, belonged to a local population with ancient Asian roots, a new…
Ancient giant orangutans evolved smaller bodies surprisingly slowly
Giant orangutans that once dwelled in mainland Southeast Asian forests belonged to a single species that gradually shrank in size over nearly 2 million years, a study suggests. Today, orangutans…
Ancient footprints suggest a mysterious hominid lived alongside Lucy’s kind
An individual from an enigmatic hominid species strode across a field of wet, volcanic ash in what is now East Africa around 3.66 million years ago, leaving behind a handful…
‘The Dawn of Everything’ rewrites 40,000 years of human history
The Dawn of EverythingDavid Graeber and David WengrowFarrar, Straus and Giroux, $35 Concerns abound about what’s gone wrong in modern societies. Many scholars explain growing gaps between the haves and…
A child’s partial skull adds to the mystery of how Homo naledi treated the dead
A child’s partial skull found in a remote section of a South African cave system has fueled suspicion that an ancient hominid known as Homo naledi deliberately disposed of its…
Ancient human visitors complicate the Falkland Islands wolf’s origin story
The enigmatic, now-extinct Falkland Islands wolf had human visitors on the remote archipelago up to 1,070 years ago. The find suggests that Indigenous people could have originally brought the foxlike…
Lasers reveal construction inspired by ancient Mexican pyramids in Maya ruins
At Teotihuacan, near Mexico City, three giant pyramids rise above the ancient city’s main street, the Avenue of the Dead. The smallest of these is the Temple of the Feathered…
The earliest evidence of tobacco use dates to over 12,000 years ago
Ancient North Americans started using tobacco around 12,500 to 12,000 years ago, roughly 9,000 years before the oldest indications that they smoked the plant in pipes, a new study finds.…
