Search Content
-
News in Brief
A hole in an ancient cow’s skull could have been surgery practice
Ancient surgeons may have practiced dangerous skull-opening procedures on cows before operating on people.
A previously excavated cow skull from a roughly 5,400- to 5,000-year-old settlement in France contains a surgically created hole on the right side, a new study finds. No signs of bone healing, which start several days after an injury, appear around the opening. One or more people...
-
News
Sweet potatoes might have arrived in Polynesia long before humans
Sweet potatoes were domesticated thousands of years ago in the Americas. So 18th century European explorers were surprised to find Polynesians had been growing the crop for centuries. Anthropologists have since hypothesized that Polynesian seafarers had brought the tuber back from expeditions to South America — a journey of over 7,500 kilometers.
New genetic evidence instead suggests...
-
News
Finger fossil puts people in Arabia at least 86,000 years ago
A single human finger bone from at least 86,000 years ago points to Arabia as a key destination for Stone Age excursions out of Africa that allowed people to rapidly spread across Asia.
Excavations at Al Wusta, a site in Saudi Arabia’s Nefud desert, produced this diminutive discovery. It’s the oldest known Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa and the narrow strip of the Middle East that...
-
News
Ardi walked the walk 4.4 million years ago
A famous 4.4-million-year-old member of the human evolutionary family was hip enough to evolve an upright gait without losing any tree-climbing prowess.
The pelvis from a partial Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton nicknamed Ardi (SN: 1/16/10, p. 22) bears evidence of an efficient, humanlike walk combined with plenty of hip power for apelike climbing, says a team led by biological...
-
News
Modern chimp brains share similarities with ancient hominids
Groove patterns on the surface of modern chimpanzee brains throw a monkey wrench into proposals that some ancient southern African hominids evolved humanlike brain characteristics, a new study suggests.
MRIs of eight living chimps reveal substantial variability in the shape and location of certain features on the brain surface. Some of these brains showed surface creases similar to ones...
-
Science Ticker
Atacama mummy’s deformities were unduly sensationalized
By analyzing the genome of a tiny fetal mummy known as Ata, researchers have learned more about what led to its strange-looking deformities — and that Ata was not an it, but a she.
The 6-inch human mummy, found in 2003 in Chile’s Atacama Desert, contains genetic mutations associated with skeletal abnormalities and joint problems, researchers report online March 22 in Genome Research....
-
Letters to the Editor
Readers ponder children’s pretend play, planetary dust storms and more
Flight of fantasy03/22/2018 - 10:18 Anthropology, Technology, Planetary ScienceSimilar to their hunter-gatherer counterparts, many children in Western societies prefer play that mimics the things that adults do, Bruce Bower reported in “When it’s playtime, many kids prefer reality over fantasy" (SN: 2/17/18, p. 22). But fantasy play may still be valuable.
Reader Pat Rapp wondered about the implications of an experiment that showed that...
-
News
Ancient climate shifts may have sparked human ingenuity and networking
Dramatic shifts in the East African climate may have driven toolmaking advances and the development of trading networks among Homo sapiens or their close relatives by the Middle Stone Age, roughly 320,000 years ago. That’s the implication of discoveries reported in three papers published online March 15 in Science.
Newly excavated Middle Stone Age tools and red pigment chunks from...
-
News in Brief
Museum mummies sport world’s oldest tattoo drawings
Two human mummies housed at the British Museum in London for more than a century boast the world’s oldest known — and longest hidden — tattoos of figures and designs, a new investigation finds. These people lived in Egypt at or shortly before the rise of the first pharaoh around 5,100 years ago.
Radiocarbon analyses of hairs from the mummies date the bodies to between 3351 B.C. and 3017...
-
News
Humans don’t get enough sleep. Just ask other primates.
People have evolved to sleep much less than chimps, baboons or any other primate studied so far.
A large comparison of primate sleep patterns finds that most species get somewhere between nine and 15 hours of shut-eye daily, while humans average just seven. An analysis of several lifestyle and biological factors, however, predicts people should get 9.55 hours, researchers report online...