Archaeology
- Archaeology
A technique borrowed from ecology hints at hundreds of lost medieval legends
An ecology-based statistical approach may provide a storybook ending for efforts to gauge ancient cultural diversity.
- 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.
- Archaeology
A taste for wild cereal sowed farming’s spread in ancient Europe
Balkan groups collected and ate wild cereal grains several millennia before domesticated cereals reached Europe.
- Archaeology
Gold and silver tubes in a Russian museum are the oldest known drinking straws
Long metal tubes enabled communal beer drinking more than 5,000 years ago, scientists say.
- Animals
Part donkey, part wild ass, the kunga is the oldest known hybrid bred by humans
Syria’s 4,500-year-old kungas were donkey-wild ass hybrids, genetic analysis reveals, so the earliest known example of humans crossing animal species.
- 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
Arctic hunter-gatherers were advanced ironworkers more than 2,000 years ago
Swedish excavations uncover furnaces and fire pits from a big metal operation run by a small-scale society, a new study finds.
- 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
‘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.
- Genetics
DNA from mysterious Asian mummies reveals their surprising ancestry
Ancient DNA indicates that an enigmatic Bronze Age group consisted of genetic, but not cultural, loners.
