David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, has been named co-recipient of the 2017 Dan David Prize in archaeology and natural sciences.
A longtime Cal Poly Pomona anthropology professor who studies violence among prehistoric people in California has been published in a prestigious journal.
Researchers from Canada, the U.S. and Italy uncover evidence that people in the Upper Paleolithic Period used stone spatulas to decorate the bodies of the dead with ochre
An investigation into the evolution of human walking by looking at how chimpanzees walk on two legs is the subject of a new research paper published in Journal of Human Evolution.
Close friendships facilitate the exchange of information and culture, making social networks more effective for cultural transmission, according to new UCL research that used wireless tracking technology to map social interactions in remote hunter-gatherer populations.
Shocking is one word Jill Pruetz uses to describe the behavior she witnessed after a chimp was killed at her research site in Senegal. The fact that chimps would kill a member of their own community is extremely rare, but the abuse that followed was completely unexpected.
An international team of anthropologists has uncovered a 38,000-year-old engraved image in a southwestern French rockshelter—a finding that marks some of the earliest known graphic imagery found in Western Eurasia and offers insights into the nature of modern humans during this period.
Writing this week (Jan. 10, 2017) in the journal eLife, a team led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Caitlin Pepperell and McMaster University's Hendrik Poinar provides insight into the everyday hazards of life in the late Byzantine Empire, sometime around the early 13th century, as well as the evolution of Staphylococcus saprophyticus, a common bacterial pathogen.
Surprisingly, the theater is situated outside the city walls and appears to have formed part of a large sanctuary. Accordingly, it may not have functioned as a regular Roman theater, but rather played an important role in religious ceremonies to one of the gods of the sanctuary
Among the oldest items to be found on Creighton University’s campus is a receipt for barley that clocks in at just under four-and-a-half millennia of existence.
Archaeologists from the University of Birmingham have found “compelling evidence” of new pharaonic tombs at Qubbet el-Hawa in Aswan, Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities has revealed.
A new study explores why humans walk with a heel-to-toe stride, while many other animals -- such as dogs and cats -- get around on the balls of their feet.
New research led by the University of Southampton, England, shows Neanderthals kept coming back to a coastal cave site in Jersey (UK) from at least 180,000 years ago until around 40,000 years ago.
Paleontologists at the University of Washington report that an extinct mammal relative harbored a benign tumor made up of miniature, tooth-like structures. The tumor, a compound odontoma, is common to mammals today. But this animal lived 255 million years ago, before mammals even existed.
The wild faba – today, fava – bean is believed to be extinct. Dr. Elisabeth Boaretto has identified the oldest known faba beans – about 14,000 years old. Understanding how the wild fabas survived can help scientists grow hardier fava crops today. Favas are a major source of nutrition in many parts of the world
Female lemurs with normal color vision, as well as their cohabitating colorblind group members, may have selective advantage over lemur groups whose members are all colorblind, according to anthropologists at The University of Texas at Austin.
An analysis of 2,000-year-old human remains from several regions across the Italian peninsula has confirmed the presence of malaria during the Roman Empire, addressing a longstanding debate about its pervasiveness in this ancient civilization.
“This is only the second time that the name Judea has appeared in any inscription from the Roman periods,” note Prof. Assaf Yasur-Landau and Dr. Gil Gambash of the University of Haifa
Evidence preserved in the internal skeletal structure of the world-famous fossil, Lucy, suggests the ancient human species frequently climbed trees, according to a new analysis by scientists from The Johns Hopkins University and The University of Texas at Austin.
Since the discovery of the fossil dubbed Lucy 42 years ago this month, paleontologists have debated whether the 3 million-year-old human ancestor spent all of her time walking on the ground or instead combined walking with frequent tree climbing.
In a remote area of north-central Tanzania, men leave their huts on foot, armed with bows and poison-tipped arrows, to hunt for their next meal. Dinner could come in the form of a small bird, a towering giraffe or something in between. Meanwhile, women gather tubers, berries and other fruits.
A quest to understand if and how life can endure in extreme cold— on Earth and, perhaps one day, on Mars — is sending a team of Georgetown University researchers to Antarctica to search for, and then sequence, ancient bacteria.
A Wichita State University anthropology professor and his students are learning first-hand what it takes to painstakingly uncover what could be one of the oldest mammoth tusks ever found in Kansas.
Florida State University Associate Professor of Anthropology Tanya Peres and graduate student Kelly Ledford write in a paper published today that Native Americans were raising and managing turkeys far before the first Thanksgiving.
A subtle change occurred in our evolutionary history 100,000 years ago which allowed people who thought and behaved differently - such as individuals with autism - to be integrated into society, academics from the University of York have concluded.
The discarded bone of a chicken leg, still etched with teeth marks from a dinner thousands of years ago, provides some of the oldest known physical evidence for the introduction of domesticated chickens to the continent of Africa, research from Washington University in St. Louis has confirmed.Based on radiocarbon dating of about 30 chicken bones unearthed at the site of an ancient farming village in present-day Ethiopia, the findings shed new light on how domesticated chickens crossed ancient roads — and seas — to reach farms and plates in Africa and, eventually, every other corner of the globe.
On the fourth floor of the University of Michigan's Museum of Natural History, in a large gallery set aside for temporary exhibits, a room has been built to display the remains of an ice age mammoth pulled from a farmer's field near Chelsea on Oct. 1, 2015.
Upper Paleolithic humans may have hunted cave lions for their pelts, perhaps contributing to their extinction, according to a study published October 26, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Marián Cueto from the Universidad de Cantabria, Spain, and colleagues.
New uranium series analysis of chief's tomb suggests island's monumental structures are earliest evidence of a chiefdom in the Pacific -- yielding new keys to how societies emerge and evolve.
With recent studies proving that almost everyone has a little bit of Neanderthal DNA in them----up to 5 percent of the human genome--- it's become clear our ancestors not only had some serious hominid 'hanky panky' going on, but with it, a potential downside: the spread of sexually transmitted infections, or STIs.
We all know that the way someone sees the world, and the way it really is, are not always the same. This ability to recognize that someone’s beliefs may differ from reality has long been seen as unique to humans. But new research on chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans suggests our primate relatives may also be able to tell when something is just in your head. The study was led by researchers of Duke University, Kyoto University, the University of St. Andrews and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
A scientific team led by researchers at Harvard Medical School, University College Dublin, and the Max Planck institute for the Science of Human History, and including Binghamton University Associate Professor of Anthropology Andrew D. Merriwether, analyzed DNA from people who lived in Tonga and Vanuatu between 2,500 and 3,100 years ago, and were among the first people to live in these islands. The results overturn the leading genetic model for this last great movement of humans to unoccupied but habitable lands.
Recent research from the Pampas region of Argentina supports the hypothesis that early Homo sapiens arrived in the Americas earlier than the Clovis hunters did, 13,000 years ago.
A George Washington University researcher has identified a 6,200-year-old indigo-blue fabric from Huaca, Peru, making it one of the oldest-known cotton textiles in the world and the oldest known textile decorated with indigo blue.
Geography and ecology are key factors that have influenced the genetic makeup of human groups in southern Africa, according to new research discussed in the journal GENETICS, a publication of the Genetics Society of America. By investigating the ancestries of twenty-two KhoeSan groups, including new samples from the Nama and the ≠Khomani, researchers conclude that the genetic clustering of southern African populations is closely tied to the ecogeography of the Kalahari Desert region.