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Magazine
In the May 11 & 25 SN: High-tech cricket farming, AI learns from Minecraft, looking for lithium, a new hominid species is named, signs of life in dead pig brains, Cherokee cave texts decoded, water molecules on the moon and more.
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News
Fossil teeth push the human-Neandertal split back to about 1 million years ago
05/15/2019 - 14:00 Anthropology, Human EvolutionPeople and Neandertals separated from a common ancestor more than 800,000 years ago — much earlier than many researchers had thought.
That conclusion, published online May 15 in Science Advances, stems from an analysis of early fossilized Neandertal teeth found at a Spanish site called Sima de los Huesos. During hominid evolution, tooth crowns changed in size and shape at a steady rate,...
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News
A jawbone shows Denisovans lived on the Tibetan Plateau long before humans
05/01/2019 - 13:00 Anthropology, Human EvolutionDenisovans reached what’s now called “the roof of the world” at least 160,000 years ago.
Found in a Tibetan Plateau cave, a partial lower jawbone represents a Denisovan who is the oldest known hominid to reach the region’s cloud-scraping heights, researchers report online May 1 in Nature.
The fossil suggests that these perplexing, extinct members of the human lineage weathered the...
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Reviews & Previews
‘Cities’ reveals common ground between ancient and modern urban life
04/16/2019 - 05:00 Archaeology, AnthropologyCitiesMonica L. SmithViking, $30
Ancient Rome’s Monte Testaccio and modern Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market reveal a lot about the nature of cities. Monte Testaccio is a hill made of broken pottery in the middle of Rome. Around 2,000 years ago, people tossed empty wine and olive oil vessels onto what was then a garbage heap. Tokyo’s vast seafood emporium, also known as Toyosu Market,...
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News
A new hominid species has been found in a Philippine cave, fossils suggest
04/10/2019 - 13:00 Anthropology, Human EvolutionA new member of the human genus has been found in a cave in the Philippines, researchers report.
Fossils with distinctive features indicate that the hominid species inhabited the island now known as Luzon at least 50,000 years ago, according to a study in the April 11 Nature. That species, which the scientists have dubbed Homo luzonensis, lived at the same time that controversial half-...
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Letters to the Editor
Readers seek answers to stories about shingles, Neandertal spears and more
Life after shingles04/07/2019 - 07:00 Health, Anthropology, EarthIn “With its burning grip, shingles can do lasting damage” (SN: 3/2/19, p. 22), Aimee Cunningham described the experience of Nora Fox, a woman whose bout with shingles nearly 15 years ago left her with a painful condition called postherpetic neuralgia. Fox hadn’t found any reliable treatments, Cunningham reported.
Fox praised Science News for our portrayal of...
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News in Brief
Foreigners may have conquered ancient Egypt without invading it
04/02/2019 - 11:57 AnthropologyCLEVELAND — A mysterious foreign dynasty that ruled ancient Egypt for about a century gained power not by force, as often thought, but by marrying into royalty, new evidence suggests.
Hyksos people, thought to have come from somewhere in West Asia, reigned as Egypt’s 15th dynasty from around 3,650 to 3,540 years ago. Although later, homegrown Egyptian pharaohs described these people as...
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News
The first known fossil of a Denisovan skull has been found in a Siberian cave
03/29/2019 - 11:01 Anthropology, Human EvolutionCLEVELAND — A palm-sized section of a braincase is the first Denisovan skull fossil ever found.
Discovered in two pieces in Siberia’s Denisova Cave in August 2016, the find joins only a handful of fragmentary fossils from these mysterious, extinct hominids. Mitochondrial DNA, a type of genetic material typically inherited from the mother, extracted from the skull pegged it as Denisovan,...
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Letters to the Editor
Readers respond to classroom robots, soil erosion and more
Robot revolution?03/27/2019 - 07:00 Robotics, Anthropology, HealthEducational robots could help students learn new skills and good study habits. But researchers still have a lot to learn about the potential risks involved when young kids keep close company with such robots, Maria Temming reported in “Robots are becoming classroom tutors. But will they make the grade?” (SN: 2/16/19, p. 16).The story reminded reader A. Bogart of Isaac...
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News
The rise of farming altered our bite and changed how people talk
03/14/2019 - 14:00 Language, Anthropology, Human EvolutionHumankind’s gift of gab is not set in stone, and farming could help to explain why.
Over the last 6,000 years or so, farming societies increasingly have substituted processed dairy and grain products for tougher-to-chew game meat and wild plants common in hunter-gatherer diets. Switching to those diets of softer, processed foods altered people’s jaw structure over time, rendering certain...
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Reviews & Previews
‘Skeleton Keys’ unlocks the history and mysteries of bones
03/08/2019 - 06:00 Animals, Anthropology, CellsSkeleton KeysBrian SwitekRiverhead Books, $26
At this very moment, voracious cells are eating away at your bones. Not to worry, though — that’s just a normal part of bone maintenance in healthy adults. The formation of new bone cells balances out the removal of old bone cells. Although bone-making cells rev up when a bone breaks or disease sets in, eventually bone-eating cells kick...