Research published in Science today reveals that the first individuals settling on new land are more successful at passing on their genes than those who did not migrate.
Unusual features of the human placenta may be the underlying cause of postpartum hemorrhage, the leading cause of maternal deaths during childbirth, according to evolutionary research at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Did climate change or humans cause the extinctions of the large-bodied Ice Age mammals (commonly called megafauna) such as the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth? Scientists have for years debated the reasons behind the Ice Age mass extinctions.
A research team used a combination of historical evidence and scientific modeling to listen to music as it would have sounded in the churches of Venice 400 years ago.
The manuscript seems straight out of fiction: a strange handwritten message in abstract symbols and Roman letters meticulously covering 105 yellowing pages, hidden in the depths of an academic archive.
The tip of a bone point fragment found embedded in a mastodon rib from an archaeological site in Washington state shows that hunters were present in North America at least 800 years before Clovis, confirming that the first inhabitants arrived earlier to North America than previously thought, says a team of researchers led by a Texas A&M University archaeologist.
While most studies have concluded that a cold climate led to the short lower legs typical of Neandertals, researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that lower leg lengths shorter than the typical modern human’s let them move more efficiently over the mountainous terrain where they lived. The findings reveal a broader trend relating shorter lower leg length to mountainous environments that may help explain the limb proportions of many different animals.
Changing human activities coupled with a dynamic environment over the past few centuries have caused fluctuating periods of decline and recovery of corals reefs in the Hawaiian Islands, according to a study sponsored in part by the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University. Using the reefs and island societies as a model social-ecological system, a team of scientists reconstructed 700 years of human-environment interactions in two different regions of the Hawaiian archipelago to identify the key factors that contributed to degradation or recovery of coral reefs.
A University of Iowa-led team of paleoanthropologists from the UI and the Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia has shed new light on the nature of Ice Age human evolution in Asia.
Cornell University researchers are utilizing the complete genome sequences of people alive today to shed light on events at the dawn of human history, such as the times of divergence of early human populations and of the “out of Africa” migration of the ancestors of modern Europeans, Asians, and other non-African groups.
After contractors uncovered an previously unknown cemetery, Indiana State University Associate Professor Shawn Phillips and 15 students stepped in to help and learn from the past.
The 1st Surface Metrology Seminar for the Americas will demonstrate how metrology tools can be used in archeology, biomedical sciences, food science, forensics, and other fields.
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a health-based approach to identifying groups at high risk of genocide, in a first-of-its-kind attempt to target international efforts to stop these mass killings before they start.
A quick glance through today’s news headlines seems to support the idea that humans by nature are aggressive, selfish and antagonistic. But researchers featured in a new book, edited by WUSTL professors Robert W. Sussman and C. Robert Cloninger, argue that humans are naturally cooperative, altruistic and social.
University of Arkansas archaeologists have found evidence for the continuity of civilization across a time period when civilizations throughout the Middle East and elsewhere were collapsing. Their work occurred at Tell Qarqur, an important archeological site in the Orontes River Valley in northwestern Syria.
Six years after Hurricane Katrina, the Mardi Gras Indians have rebounded and been transformed into a reenergized community where the youth are increasingly interested in carrying on the culturally rich traditions of these New Orleans tribes. This is the key finding of University of New Hampshire anthropology student Kendra Hanlon of Auburn, who spent the summer of 2011 in New Orleans researching the Mardi Gras Indians on a summer undergraduate research fellowship provided by UNH’s Hamel Center for Undergraduate Research.
New genetic evidence presented by a team led by Indiana University biology doctoral graduate Benjamin Blackman confirms the eastern United States as the single geographic domestication site of modern sunflowers.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins found that use over time and not just genetics informs the structure of jaw bones in human populations. The researchers say these findings may be used to predict the diet of an ancient population, even if little evidence exists in the fossil record. It can also make it easier for scientists to pinpoint the genetic relationship between fossils.
University of Utah scientists used chemical isotopes in ancient soil to measure prehistoric tree cover – in effect, shade – and found that grassy, tree-dotted savannas prevailed at most East African sites where human ancestors and their ape relatives evolved during the past 6 million years.
A well preserved "four-room house" from the period of the Kingdom of Israel has been uncovered at Tel Shikmona, Israel.
Remains of a Persian city and a Byzantine town have been exposed at the site.
A new technique developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute allows researchers to collect large amounts of biochemical information from nanoscale bone samples. Along with adding important new insights into the fight against osteoporosis, It could aid the archeological and forensic study of human skeletons.
The University of Cincinnati’s most recent research in Cyprus reveals the remnants of a Late Bronze Age (1500-750 B.C.) fortress that may have functioned to protect an important urban economic center in the ancient world.
A University of Arkansas professor and his colleagues have found the first direct evidence in the fossil record that Homo erectus ate a more diverse diet than its relative Homo habilis.
University of Maryland archaeologists are uncovering an unexpectedly rich haul of household materials from an historic African American home in Annapolis. Purchased in 1850 by one of the first African Americans to work for the Naval Academy, the house reveals how the family adapted a middle class lifestyle to the realities of post-Civil War Annapolis.
From the paleolithic diet to the raw food diet, many health-conscious Americans now want to eat the way they believe our ancient ancestors ate. But some of these dietary prescriptions make little sense for modern humans, a new book says.
An ambitious project to identify, explain and provide citations for the words written in cuneiform on clay tablets and carved in stone by Babylonians, Assyrians and others in Mesopotamia between 2500 B.C. and A.D. 100 has been completed after 90 years of labor, the University of Chicago announced June 5.
A new exhibition -- LOST EGYPT: ANCIENT SECRETS, MODERN SCIENCE -- at Baylor University explores how modern science and technology are uncovering the lives and culture of ancient Egyptians.
A University of Utah study shows that men hit hardest when they stand on two legs and punch downward, giving tall, upright males a fighting advantage. This may help explain why our ape-like human ancestors began walking upright and why women tend to prefer tall men.
A pattern of earthen berms, spread across a northern peninsula of the big island of Hawaii, is providing archeologists with clues to exactly how residents farmed in paradise long before Europeans arrived at the islands.
Physical anthropologist Chris Kirk has announced the discovery of a previously unknown species of fossil primate, Mescalerolemur horneri, in the Devil’s Graveyard badlands of West Texas.
The Titanic may be disintegrating, but if two Indiana University of Pennsylvania professors have their way, shipwrecks from the War of 1812 won’t face the same fate.
Dr. Katie Farnsworth, IUP Geoscience Department, and Dr. Ben Ford, Anthropology Department, are preparing for a June survey of the Black River Bay, in the northeast corner of Lake Ontario, to find and identify two shipwrecks. They received $14,888 from the National Geographic Society in support of their research project.
For decades, an early human relative nicknamed Nutcracker Man because of his big, flat molars and powerful jaw. But a new University of Utah study shows Nutcracker Man didn’t eat nuts -- a discovery that upsets conventional wisdom about early humanity’s diet.
Nearly three years after the discovery of the Capt. Kidd shipwreck Quedagh Merchant, the underwater site will be dedicated as a "Living Museum of the Sea" by Indiana U. and Dominican Republic authorities. Divers will be able to explore this and two other sites.
When Western Illinois University's University Television (UTV) Associate Director Roger Kent looked a bit closer at a picture that had been hanging in his office for a few years, he noticed what looked like a signature belonging to the nation's 16th president.
For thousands of years, the native peoples living along the world’s northernmost seas have forged an intimate relationship with their environment. The indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic Ocean’s Chukchi and Beaufort seas view themselves as tied to the sea, ice, and other elements of the natural world—even spiritually connected to the animals they hunt and regard as offerings toward the continued subsistence of their people and way of life.
Travel back millions of years to explore the latest findings in human evolution at a free public lecture hosted by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
Baylor University geology researchers, along with scientists from Texas A&M University and around the country, have found the oldest archaeological evidence of human occupation in the Americas at a Central Texas archaeological site located about 40 miles northwest of Austin.
Researchers excavating a creek bed in central Texas have found evidence suggesting humans settled in North America some two thousand years earlier than previously estimated. The findings are reported March 25 in Science.
A new study by Baylor University geology researchers shows that Native Americans’ land use nearly a century ago produced a widespread impact on the eastern North American landscape and floodplain development several hundred years prior to the arrival of major European settlements.
Evidence for a diversified sea-based economy among North American inhabitants dating from 12,200 to 11,400 years ago is emerging from three sites on California's Channel Islands.
To celebrate 75 years of discovery, the website hosts high-resolution photos of the Landmark from past to present, a history of the Landmark, recent news and an event schedule for 2011.
Asthma diagnosis and management vary dramatically around the world, said David Van Sickle, an honorary associate fellow at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, during a presentation today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Anthropologists from GW and NYU question claims that several prominent fossil discoveries made in the last decade are our human ancestors. With a more nuanced explanation of the fossils' place on the Tree of Life, the authors conclude that instead of being our ancestors, the fossils are more likely belong to extinct distant cousins.
In a paper recently published in Current Anthropology, SBU Professor John Shea disproves the myth that the earliest humans were significantly different from us.