Scientists from the University of Portsmouth examining the evolutionary roots of language say they’ve discovered chimp vocal development is not far off from humans.
A new study led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn College, and the Catalan Institute of Paleontology Miquel Crusafont has reconstructed the well-preserved but damaged skull of a great ape species that lived about 12 million years ago.
LEXINGTON, Ky. (Oct. 12, 2023) — The Herculaneum scrolls are among the most iconic and inaccessible of the world’s vast collection of damaged manuscripts. Since being burned and carbonized by the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE, they’ve been deemed “unreadable.” For more than 2,000 years, wisdom from the only library to survive from ancient times remained locked away.
By: Bill Wellock | Published: October 12, 2023 | 9:00 am | SHARE: Napoleon Bonaparte was a towering figure in history. He seized power in the aftermath of the French Revolution, remade the country and conquered much of Europe. A single exile was not enough to keep him from threatening a long-standing power structure on the continent.
The development of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and the Middle East led to a substantial increase in violence between inhabitants. Laws, centralized administration, trade and culture then caused the ratio of violent deaths to fall back again in the Early and Middle Bronze Age (3,300 to 1,500 BCE).
The hunt for the world’s most ancient mammals descended into academic warfare in the seventies, researchers from the University of Bristol have discovered.
An international team of scientists have discovered a huge spike in radiocarbon levels 14,300 years ago by analysing ancient tree-rings found in the French Alps.
University of Illinois anthropology professor Lisa Lucero argues in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that ancient Maya reservoirs, which used aquatic plants to filter and clean the water, “can serve as archetypes for natural, sustainable water systems to address future water needs.” The Maya built and maintained reservoirs that were in use for more than 1,000 years, providing potable water for thousands to tens of thousands of people in cities during the annual, five-month dry season and in periods of prolonged drought.
New analysis of the remains of victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, contradicts the widespread belief the flu disproportionately impacted healthy young adults.
New research reaffirms that human footprints found in White Sands National Park, New Mexico, date to the Last Glacial Maximum, placing humans in North America thousands of years earlier than once thought.
As Netflix prepares to release a new streaming miniseries, "The Fall of the House of Usher," Ashley Reed, an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, discusses author Edgar Allan Poe’s legacy and the evolving impacts of his work on literature and film.
Multidisciplinary artist Dinorá Justice examines the place of women in traditional landscapes across the canon, in “Dinorá Justice: The Lay of the Land.”
Archaeometallurgists have been debating the exact origin of tin used in the Bronze Age for 150 years. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, and in the Bronze Age it was used to make a range of goods including swords, helmets, bracelets, plates and pitchers.
It’s an Ice Age mystery that’s been debated for decades among anthropologists: Exactly when and how did the flow of Homo sapiens in Eurasia happen? Did a cold snap or a warming spell drive early human movement from Africa into Europe and Asia?
An international research team led by maritime archaeologist Staffan von Arbin of the University of Gothenburg has studied what might be Europe’s oldest shipboard cannon. The cannon was found in the sea off Marstrand on the Swedish west coast and dates back to the 14th century.
Weather data from several ships bombed by Japanese pilots at Pearl Harbor has been recovered in a rescue mission that will help scientists understand how the global climate is changing.
The passenger pigeon. The Tasmanian tiger. The Baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin. These rank among the best-known recent victims of what many scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction, as human actions are wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise disappear.
Researchers discover how molecules in ancient glass rearrange and recombine with minerals over centuries to form a patina of photonic crystals – ordered arrangements of atoms that filter and reflect light in very specific ways - an analog of materials used in communications, lasers and solar cells
In the United States, tens of millions of people live behind levees, but historically disadvantaged groups are more likely to live behind subpar levees and have fewer resources to maintain critical levee infrastructure, a new study reveals.
African American Studies professor Bobby J. Smith II examines how the Civil Rights Movement included struggles around food in his book “Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.” The book is the inaugural title in the Black Food Justice series by the University of North Carolina Press.
The discovery that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs of the Late Jurassic was made possible by recently discovered fossils of theropods such as Tyrannosaurus rex and the smaller velociraptors. In a way, you could say that dinosaurs are still with us and seen tweeting from your own backyard! Below are the latest research headlines in the Birds channel on Newswise.
New study conducted by Hebrew University researchers Shahaf Leshem, Eldad Keha, and Prof. Eyal Kalanthroff has uncovered insights into the enduring psychological effects of the 2014 Israel-Gaza military conflict.
A team of researchers have found a shared penchant for sewing reflective shell beds onto clothing and other items across three Indonesian islands that dates back to at least 12,000 years ago.
Research team used advanced sequencing technology to analyze Ötzi’s genome to obtain a more accurate picture of the Iceman’s appearance and genetic origins.
University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists have discovered and documented the largest known single dinosaur track site in Alaska. The site, located in Denali National Park and Preserve, has been dubbed “The Coliseum” by researchers.
A system of ancient ceramic water pipes, the oldest ever unearthed in China, shows that neolithic people were capable of complex engineering feats without the need for a centralised state authority, finds a new study by UCL researchers.
Paleoclimate evidence shows that around 1.1 million years ago, the southern European climate cooled significantly and likely caused an extinction of early humans on the continent, according to a new study led by UCL researchers.
It's that time of year again. For media working on stories about the seasonal return to school, here are the latest features and experts in the Back-To-School channel on Newswise.
A new DNA study has nuanced the picture of how different groups intermingled during the European Stone Age, but also how certain groups of people were actually isolated.
As a historian, Tufts Professor Kendra Field is dedicated to making African American history more accessible to the public. In her latest project in public history, Field is chief historian of 10 Million Names, a recently launched research project of American Ancestors, the oldest genealogical organization in the nation.
A first-of-its-kind analysis of historical DNA ties tens of thousands of living people to enslaved and free African Americans who labored at an iron forge in Maryland known as Catoctin Furnace soon after the founding of the United States.
The study, spurred by groups seeking to restore ancestry knowledge to African American communities, provides a new way to complement genealogical, historical, bioarchaeological, and biochemical efforts to reconstruct the life histories of people omitted from written records and identify their present-day relatives.
A Florida State University historian and director of the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution has earned a prestigious fellowship from the Newberry Library to research how early 19th-century European political culture was influenced by competing discourses on capitalism.
Florida Public Archaeology Network, a program of #UWF, has received a $99,968 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative.
An international research study led by the University of Vienna (Austria) and the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) in Barcelona (Spain), recently published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, provides a better insight into the evolutionary history of gorillas.
In a new study published in JMIRx Bio, one of JMIR Publications’ new overlay journals, scientist Floe Foxon explores whether the Loch Ness Monster, a creature in Scottish folklore, could be a giant eel. Using previous estimates of the monster’s size to predict the probability of encountering a large eel of a similar size, the study found that giant eels could not account for sightings of larger animals in Loch Ness, a freshwater lake in the Scottish Highlands.
More than just 20th Century American summer nostalgia: Michael Zalot of Cedar Crest College collects, studies and catalogs hundreds of popular arcade and amusement-park game tokens that once served as a micro-economy of exchange.
A new study from Tel Aviv University and Tel-Hai College solves an old mystery: Where did early humans in the Hula Valley get flint to make the prehistoric tools known as handaxes?
A team led by Prof. WANG Wei from the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IBCAS) has unraveled the evolutionary history of the Arctic flora. The study was published in Nature Communications.
No, oxygen didn’t catalyze the swift blossoming of Earth’s first multicellular organisms. The result defies a 70-year-old assumption about what caused an explosion of oceanic fauna hundreds of millions of years ago.
Many Americans can trace some lines of their family tree back to the 1600s. However, African Americans descended from enslaved Africans, who began arriving in North America in 1619, lack ancestral information spanning several centuries.
University of Oregon archaeologists have found evidence suggesting humans occupied the Rimrock Draw Rockshelter outside of Riley, Oregon more than 18,000 years ago.
A team of astrophysicists at the University of Toronto (U of T) has revealed how the slow and steady lengthening of Earth’s day caused by the tidal pull of the moon was halted for over a billion years.
A large formation of granite discovered below the lunar surface likely was formed from the cooling of molten lava that fed a volcano or volcanoes that erupted early in the Moon’s history – as long as 3.5 billion years ago.