Peter Veth, The University of Western Australia; David W. Zeanah, California State University, Sacramento; Fiona Hook, The University of Western Australia; Kane Ditchfield, The University of Western Australia, and Peter Kendrick, The University of Western Australia
Barrow Island off the coast of Western Australia holds a unique record of First Nations people. For millennia, they lived on vast plains that are now drowned by the sea.
What happened to the Neanderthals?
frantic00 via Shutterstock.com
What could the extinction of Neanderthals tell us about our own species? An archaeologist explains in The Conversation Weekly podcast.
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
A close look at 7,000-year-old grinding stones left in ancient firepits shows wandering herders in northern Saudi Arabia carried heavy tools for working on bones, plants and rocks.
Animals that shared the landscape with humans disappeared as the ice age ended.
Mauricio Antón/Wikimedia Commons
A forensic technique more often used at modern crime scenes identified blood residue from large extinct animals on spearpoints and stone tools used by people who lived in the Carolinas millennia ago.
Archaeologists excavate inside and outside Little Muck Shelter, in the Mapungubwe National Park, South Africa.
Photo: Tim Forssman
Shared designs for stone tools across southern Africa show early humans had wide social connections before beginning to migrate to the rest of the world.
The Grotte Mandrin rock shelter saw repeated use by Neanderthals and modern humans over millennia.
Ludovic Slimak
Stone artifacts and a fossil tooth point to Homo sapiens living at Grotte Mandrin 54,000 years ago, at a time when Neanderthals were still living in Europe.
Knowing that our North African ancestors were making handaxes helps scientists to understand how our human ancestors spread across the African continent.
Would we see Neanderthals (right) as human if they were around today?
wikipedia
Combining evidence from archaeology, geochronology and paleoenvironmental science, researchers identified how ancient humans by Lake Malawi were the first to substantially modify their environment.
The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than any other place on Earth.
Kevin Xu Photography via Shutterstock
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.
Archaeological discoveries in a jungle cave in central Indonesia suggest humans arrived there 18,000 years ago and decided to stay a while, hunting in the jungle and building canoes.
Tool made out of horse bone.
UCL Institute of Archaeology
Capuchin monkeys in Brazil use big stones to crush the shells of nuts they want to eat. An experiment in the field investigated how these monkeys prepare to use new, unfamiliar tools.
Representative stone tools (handaxes) recorded in the study area.
Author Supplied