-
Magazine
In the Dec. 8 SN: Parkinson’s gut connections, beaver ecosystem engineering, Greenland’s hidden impact crater, the kilogram redefined, figurative cave art in Borneo, Dione’s stripes and more.
Search Content
-
News
‘Little Foot’ skeleton analysis reignites debate over the hominid’s species
12/12/2018 - 06:00 Human Evolution, AnthropologyA nearly complete hominid skeleton known as Little Foot has finally been largely freed from the stony shell in which it was discovered in a South African cave more than 20 years ago. And in the first formal analyses of the fossils, researchers say the 3.67-million-year-old Little Foot belonged to its own species.
In four papers posted online at bioRxiv.org between November 29 and...
-
News
A 5,000-year-old mass grave harbors the oldest plague bacteria ever found
12/06/2018 - 11:00 Genetics, Anthropology, MicrobiologyA long-dead Scandinavian woman has yielded bacterial DNA showing that she contracted the earliest known case of the plague in humans.
DNA extracted from the woman’s teeth comes from a newly identified ancient strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, the oldest ever found. The woman’s bones, which date from 5,040 to 4,867 years ago, were found nearly 20 years ago in a...
-
News in Brief
A Bronze Age game called 58 holes was found chiseled into stone in Azerbaijan
11/16/2018 - 13:12 Archaeology, AnthropologyDENVER — A dotted pattern pecked into stone at a remote Eurasian rock-shelter represents a Bronze Age game that was thought to have existed at that time only in Mesopotamia, Egypt and other Near Eastern regions.
The game is known as 58 holes, or Hounds and Jackals. Archaeologist Walter Crist of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City described his surprising discovery of...
-
News
Skull damage suggests Neandertals led no more violent lives than humans
11/14/2018 - 13:00 Anthropology, Human EvolutionNeandertals are shaking off their reputation as head bangers.
Our close evolutionary cousins experienced plenty of head injuries, but no more so than late Stone Age humans did, a study suggests. Rates of fractures and other bone damage in a large sample of Neandertal and ancient Homo sapiens skulls roughly match rates previously reported for human foragers and farmers who have lived...
-
News in Brief
Neandertal teeth reveal the earliest known signs of lead exposure
11/02/2018 - 10:56 Anthropology, Evolution, HealthTraces of lead found in the molars of two young Neandertals found in southeast France provide the earliest recorded evidence of lead exposure in hominids.
Like tiny time capsules, chemical signatures in the 250,000-year-old chompers chronicle specific times — mostly during the winter months — when the two individuals were exposed to the element as children, researchers report online...
-
News in Brief
People in the Pacific Northwest smoked tobacco long before Europeans showed up
10/29/2018 - 15:00 Archaeology, AnthropologyAncient pipes and pipe fragments found at five archaeological sites along the Snake and Columbia rivers in Washington contain evidence of tobacco use, new research shows. The finds suggest that indigenous people there smoked tobacco-filled pipes long before Europeans brought the plant west.
Chemical traces of nicotine, tobacco’s key ingredient, on the artifacts date to around 1,200 years...
-
News
The way hunter-gatherers share food shows how cooperation evolved
09/21/2018 - 13:31 Anthropology, EvolutionEast African Hadza hunter-gatherers are neither generous nor stingy. But the groups they live in are. That pattern highlights a flexible and underappreciated form of cooperation that may have helped humans go from mobile bands to industrialized states, researchers say.
Some camps share food more than others, but Hadza circulate among all camps rather than clustering in the most...
-
News in Brief
Butchered bird bones put humans in Madagascar 10,500 years ago
09/12/2018 - 14:00 Anthropology, Human EvolutionHumans made their mark on Madagascar around 6,000 years earlier than previously thought, scientists say. Those early migrants hunted massive, flightless birds once native to the island off southeast Africa, leaving butchery marks on the bird bones that enabled the new timeline.
Cuts and fractures on three previously unearthed leg and foot bones from one of Madagascar’s extinct elephant...
-
News in Brief
German skeletons hint that medieval warrior groups recruited from afar
09/05/2018 - 14:00 Genetics, Anthropology, ArchaeologyPower systems transcended kinship in medieval Europe. A burial site in southern Germany contains members of a powerful warrior family who journeyed widely to find recruits to join the household and support a post-Roman kingdom, a new study suggests.
Thirteen individuals interred at Niederstotzingen belonged to the Alemanni, a confederation of Germanic tribes that were conquered by and...
-
News
A fossil mistaken for a bat may shake up lemurs’ evolutionary history
08/21/2018 - 11:00 Anthropology, AnimalsIn one published swoop, an ancient fossil fruit bat has turned into a lemur. If that transformation holds, it suggests that lemur ancestors made two tricky sea crossings from Africa to Madagascar, not one as researchers have often assumed.
A new fossil analysis finds that the ancient species Propotto leakeyi, which lived in East Africa between 23 million and 16 million years ago, was not...