Anthropology

Chemistry

One forensic scientist is scraping bones for clues to time of death

The bones of more than 100 cadavers are shedding light on a more precise and reliable way to determine when someone died.

Genetics

Africa’s oldest human DNA helps unveil an ancient population shift

Long-distance mate seekers started staying closer to home about 20,000 years ago.

Archaeology

Homo sapiens may have reached Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought

Archaeological finds in an ancient French rock-shelter suggest migrations to the continent started long before Neandertals died out.

Archaeology

‘Origin’ explores the controversial science of the first Americans

A new book looks at how genetics has affected the study of humans’ arrival in the Americas and sparked conflicts with Indigenous groups today.

Anthropology

Homo sapiens bones in East Africa are at least 36,000 years older than once thought

Analyses of remnants of a volcanic blast push the age of East Africa’s oldest known H. sapiens fossils at Ethiopia’s Omo site to 233,000 years or more.

Archaeology

Clovis hunters’ reputation as mammoth killers takes a hit

Early Americans’ stone points were best suited to butchering the huge beasts’ carcasses, scientists contend.

Archaeology

Neandertals were the first hominids to turn forest into grassland 125,000 years ago

Neandertals’ campfires, hunting and other activities altered the land over 2,000 years, making them the first known hominids to impact their environs.

Anthropology

2021 research reinforced that mating across groups drove human evolution

Fossils and DNA point to mixing and mingling among Homo groups across vast areas.

Anthropology

Ancient footprints suggest a mysterious hominid lived alongside Lucy’s kind

A previously unknown hominid species may have left its marks in muddy ash about 3.66 million years ago in what is now East Africa.

Anthropology

Ancient giant orangutans evolved smaller bodies surprisingly slowly

Fossil teeth from Chinese caves indicate that a single, ancient orangutan species gradually trimmed down over nearly 2 million years.

Anthropology

‘The Dawn of Everything’ rewrites 40,000 years of human history

A new book recasts human social evolution as multiple experiments with freedom and domination that started in the Stone Age.

Anthropology

A child’s partial skull adds to the mystery of how Homo naledi treated the dead

The isolated discovery of a Homo naledi child’s skull fragments and teeth plays into idea that small-brained species ritually placed the dead in caves.