Human beings evolved to nurture – and that drive can extend to children who aren’t your own and even to members of other species.
Ancient military innovations – like the bit and bridle that enabled mounted horseback riding – changed the course of history.
Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin/British Museum via WikimediaCommons
Did ancient technological advancements drive social innovation, or vice versa? Studying cause and effect in the ancient world may seem like a fool’s errand, but researchers built a database to do just that.
De nouvelles preuves confirment que des différences culturelles intergroupes, notables et anciennes, ont façonné les dernières étapes de l'évolution humaine en Afrique.
Ranger David Wongway on Angas Downs, Northern Territory.
Wikimedia Commons/JennyKS
The characterisation of Aboriginal worlds at 1788 is the central debate between Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu and Peter Sutton and Kerryn Walshe’s Farmers or Hunter-gatherers.
A group of drummers playing traditional Yoruba drums.
Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP via Getty Images
Cecília Tomori, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing
Around the globe, 823,000 child deaths could be prevented annually with appropriate breastfeeding. Formula makers continue to defy a 40-year-old international code on marketing their product.
Are the descriptions of war passed down by ancient historians accurate? A site in Sicily provided a rare chance to fact-check stories told about two battles from more than 2,400 years ago.
Today the shoreline of Lake Malawi is open, not forested the way it was before ancient humans started modifying the landscape.
Jessica Thompson
Combining evidence from archaeology, geochronology and paleoenvironmental science, researchers identified how ancient humans by Lake Malawi were the first to substantially modify their environment.
Prehistoric hand paintings at the Cave of Hands in Argentina, thought to be over 10,000 years old.
R.M. Nunes/Shutterstock
It’s possible that low oxygen levels in caves produced hallucinations – but that doesn’t explain the majority of prehistoric art.
Museums across the U.S., including at Harvard University, collected human remains, which were often displayed to the public.
Smith Collection/Gado/Archive Photos via Getty Images
Proposed legislation would identify and protect African American cemeteries. But it wouldn’t cover the remains of thousands of Black people in museum collections.
New evidence suggests that contrary to long-held beliefs, women were also big-game hunters.
(Shutterstock)
Anthropologists believed that before the implementation of agriculture, men hunted and women gathered, but new evidence suggests that this might not have been the case.
Medical volunteers have been a common sight in African countries like Zambia since the colonial era.
Engraving from The Illustrated London News, volume 96, No 2654, March 1, 1890/Getty Images
Five centuries before Columbus arrived, migrants were spreading across North America, carrying their culture with them and mixing with those they encountered in new places.
Tsimane children look out over the Maniqui River, in the Bolivian Amazon.
Michael Gurven
Michael Gurven, University of California, Santa Barbara e Thomas Kraft, University of California, Santa Barbara
‘Normal’ body temperature has declined in urban, industrialized settings like the US and UK. Anthropologists find the trend extends to Indigenous people in the Bolivian Amazon – but why?
Drilling 139 meters down to volcanic rock provided scientists with a million-year environmental record.
Human Origins Program, Smithsonian
A new environmental record for a prehistoric site in Kenya helped researchers figure out how external conditions influenced which of our ancient ancestors lived there, with what way of life.