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…
Category: Archaeology
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…
‘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…
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.…
‘Ghost tracks’ suggest people came to the Americas earlier than once thought
Footprints left behind by prehistoric people may be some of the strongest evidence yet that humans arrived in the Americas earlier than previously thought. Over 60 “ghost tracks” —…
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…
Lidar reveals a possible blueprint for many Olmec and Maya ceremonial sites
An unexpected architectural tradition linked many Olmec and Maya societies of Mesoamerica, an ancient cultural area that ran from central Mexico to Central America. Starting as early as around 3,400…
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…
Vikings lived in North America by at least the year 1021
Vikings inhabited North America exactly 1,000 years ago, a new study finds. Counting tree rings reveals that wooden objects previously found at an archaeological site on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula were…
