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Magazine
In the July 6 SN: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, stone tool dates face scrutiny, ocean plastic goes deep, records of Inca taxation, erosion spurred plate tectonics and more.
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News
A Greek skull may belong to the oldest human found outside of Africa
07/10/2019 - 13:00 Anthropology, Human EvolutionA skull found in a cliffside cave on Greece’s southern coast in 1978 represents the oldest Homo sapiens fossil outside Africa, scientists say.
That skull, from an individual who lived at least 210,000 years ago, was encased in rock that also held a Neandertal skull dating to at least 170,000 years ago, contends a team led by paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati of the University of...
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Essay
Ancient humans used the moon as a calendar in the sky
07/09/2019 - 08:00 Anthropology, Archaeology, Planetary ScienceThe sun’s rhythm may have set the pace of each day, but when early humans needed a way to keep time beyond a single day and night, they looked to a second light in the sky. The moon was one of humankind’s first timepieces long before the first written language, before the earliest organized cities and well before structured religions. The moon’s face changes nightly and with the regularity of...
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News in Brief
Ancient DNA reveals the origins of the Philistines
07/03/2019 - 14:00 Anthropology, GeneticsHard-won genetic clues from the bones of Philistines, a people known from the Old Testament for their battles with Israelites, have taken some of the mystery out of their hazy origins.
DNA extracted from the remains of 10 individuals buried at Ashkelon, an ancient Philistine port city in Israel, displays molecular links to ancient and modern populations in the eastern Mediterranean,...
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News
East Asians may have been reshaping their skulls 12,000 years ago
07/03/2019 - 06:00 Anthropology, ArchaeologyAncient tombs in China have produced what may be some of the oldest known human skulls to be intentionally reshaped.
At a site called Houtaomuga, scientists unearthed 25 skeletons dating to between around 12,000 years ago and 5,000 years ago. Of those, 11 featured skulls with artificially elongated braincases and flattened bones at the front and back of the head, says a team led by...
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News
Hominids may have been cutting-edge tool makers 2.6 million years ago
06/03/2019 - 15:00 Anthropology, ArchaeologyDiscoveries in East Africa of what may be the oldest expertly sharpened stone implements suggest that early members of the human genus, Homo, invented these tools by around 2.6 million years ago, researchers say. But their conclusions are controversial.
New finds at a site in Ethiopia called Ledi-Geraru fit a scenario in which various early Homo groups devised ways to sharpen handheld...
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News in Brief
Africa’s first herders spread pastoralism by mating with foragers
05/30/2019 - 14:00 Anthropology, Genetics, Human EvolutionAncient sheep, goat and cattle herders made Africa their home by hooking up with the continent’s native hunter-gatherers, a study suggests.
DNA analysis shows that African herders and foragers mated with each other in two phases, says a team led by archaeologist Mary Prendergast of Saint Louis University in Madrid. After entering northeastern Africa from the Middle East around 8,000...
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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-...