Anthropology

Anthropology

Droughts gave early humans survival skills for later travels

Droughts were actually good times for early humans, helping to develop skills for survival in other parts of the world, Lisa Grossman reports in a blog from the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing's New Horizons in Science meeting.

Anthropology

Pygmies’ short stature linked to high death rates

Island-dwelling pygmies provide contested evidence that body size shrinks as mortality rates climb.

Anthropology

DNA points to India’s two-pronged ancestry

Two ancient populations laid the genetic foundation for most people now living in India, a new DNA study suggests.

Anthropology

Stone Age twining unraveled

Plant fibers excavated at a cave in western Asia suggest that people there made twine more than 30,000 years ago.

Anthropology

Humanity’s upright gait may have roots in trees

A comparison of wrist bones from African apes and monkeys indicates that human ancestors began walking by exploiting the evolutionary legacy of ancient, tree-climbing apes.

Health & Medicine

Chimpanzees die from primate version of HIV

A new study links the simian immunodeficiency virus to serious AIDS-like illness in a wild population.

Anthropology

Maize may have fueled ancient Andean civilization

A chemical analysis of skeletons from Peru’s Andes Mountains suggests that cultivation of key crop made building a prehistoric civilization possible.

Health & Medicine

Of ‘science’ and fetal whaling

Japan had been sacrificing a large number of pregnant whales in the name of science.

Animals

Extensive toolkits give chimps a taste of honey

Chimps living in central Africa’s dense forests make and use complex sets of tools to gather honey from beehives, further narrowing the gap between the way humans and chimps use tools.

Anthropology

Hobbit foot, hippo skulls deepen ancestral mystery

Hobbit fossils pose puzzling evolutionary questions for scientists in two new studies, one of hobbit foot bones and another of brain size in extinct pygmy hippos.

Anthropology

African pygmies may be older than thought

A new DNA analysis indicates that pygmy hunter-gatherers and farming groups in Africa diverged from a common ancestral population around 60,000 years ago.

Animals

Chimps ambidextrous when digging wells

A survey of water-collection holes dug on the banks of an African river by wild chimpanzees indicates that, unlike people, these apes don’t have a preference for using either the right or left hand on manual tasks.