Some anthropologists question how much rare activities like big-game hunting could have affected how our species evolved. Instead they’re looking at daily activities like carrying water or firewood.
The changes that came with the transition from foraging to farming paved the way for disease.
Nastasic/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images
Cassava’s many assets would seem to make it the ideal crop, except for one drawback: It’s highly poisonous. Human ingenuity has made cassava edible for millennia.
Burial with a horse at the Rákóczifalva site, Hungary (8th century AD).
Sándor Hegedűs, Hungarian National Museum
The Avars dominated southeastern central Europe for hundreds of years, leaving one of the richest archaeological heritages in Europe. Now scientists are using DNA to reveal details of their societies.
Each subtle cultural or personal twist to a fermented dish is felt by your body’s microbial community.
microgen/iStock via Getty Images
From kimchi to kombucha and sauerkraut to sourdough, many traditional food staples across cultures make use of fermentation. And these variations are reflected in your microbiome.
Blue Lagoon at Jiigurru (Lizard Island Group) where the first pieces of pottery were found.
Sean Ulm
Pottery made more than 1800 years ago by Aboriginal communities on Jiigurru in the Lizard Island group in the Great Barrier Reef is the oldest ever found in Australia.
Voeltzkow’s chameleon was rediscovered in Madagascar in 2018.
Martin Mandák/iNaturalist
There are hundreds of lost tetrapod species across the globe and their number are increasing decade-on-decade. This study aims to find out why some are rediscovered, while others are not.
Gifts are usually given reciprocally.
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Forensic anthropologists are specialized scientists who analyze the skeletal remains of the recently deceased to help authorities figure out who the person was and what happened to them.
In small-group, subsistence living, it makes sense for everyone to do lots of jobs.
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Female bodies have an advantage in endurance ability that means Paleolithic women likely hunted game, not just gathered plants. The story is written in living and ancient human bodies.
A general view of Wadi Gharandal riverine wetland, along the Jordan Rift Valley, showing palm trees concentrated at the centre of the wadi near the active spring.
Mahmoud Abbas
In the largest study of its kind, researchers have used DNA from a 6,700-year-old cemetery in France to reconstruct the lives of everyday Neolithic people.
Ghassan Hage has made a singularly powerful contribution to our understanding of Australian and global racism, and the politics of domination and resistance.
A facial reconstruction of one of the Sutherland Nine, a woman named Saartje.
Reconstruction by Dr Kathryn Smith/Professor Caroline Wilkinson
Hopefully more curators and custodians of repositories of human skeletal remains will attempt to redress some of the wrongs of the past.
‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ comes out in theatres on June 30. The fifth in a series over 42 years, many of its originating ideas are taken from 19th-century racist archaeology. Will this iteration be different?
(Walt Disney Pictures)
The final Indiana Jones movie is coming out June 30. The fifth in a series over 42 years, many of its ideas are taken from 19th-century orientalist and racist archaeology.
Conditions in rural England around the turn of the 20th century offer a case study for cultural evolution researchers.
Heritage Images/Hulton Archive via Getty Images
People with a common history – often due to significant geographic or social barriers – often share genetics and language. New research finds that even a dialect can act as a barrier within a group.