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…
Category: Humans
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…
Nudge theory’s popularity may block insights into improving society
Imagine removing a branch of the U.S. government, say the Supreme Court. What are the myriad ways that such an upheaval might reshape people’s lives? Policy makers and researchers probably…
A gene therapy for hemophilia boosts levels of a crucial clotting protein
A gene-based therapy is potentially a step closer to becoming a one-time treatment for men with hemophilia. The life-threatening genetic disorder hinders the body’s ability to form blood clots. In…
‘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” —…
