Ben Marwick, University of Washington; Bo Li, University of Wollongong, and Hu Yue, University of Wollongong
A fresh look at museum artifacts fills in a gap in the Asian archaeological record and refutes the idea that an advanced technique was imported from the West by early modern humans.
Jo McDonald, The University of Western Australia and Peter Veth, The University of Western Australia
They were looking to study rock art at a remote desert site but what they found showed people had been using the place almost since the first people arrived in Australia.
Archaeologists have dug deeper at an old dig site on an Indonesian island, revealing more stone tools made by the ancient inhabitants of the place. But who they were remains a mystery.
New tools add to an emerging view of the past as a turbulent “Game of Thrones” style scenario, with distinct early human ancestors living in Eurasia before Homo sapiens arrived.
We can’t observe the brain activity of extinct human species. But we can observe modern brains doing the things that our distant ancestors did, looking for clues about how ancient brains worked.
Scientists are hoping that ancient stone tools found on a family farm in Kenya will add to a clearer picture of the first appearance, duration and variation of prehistoric technologies found so far.
New fossil finds show the first large-bodied inhabitants of an isolated Indonesian island evolved to Hobbit-size, but they always remembered how to make and use stone tools.
Jason E. Lewis, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York) and Sonia Harmand, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)
Stone tools excavated in Kenya date back 3.3 million years – making them about a million years older than the oldest known fossils from our own hominid genus Homo. Who made and used these tools?