Recent research suggests that humankind’s origins lay outside of Africa. This is the nature of science: a paradigm that cannot be questioned on a regular basis becomes a dogma.
Maeve, age 8, has a question that has stumped many scientists over the years. And that’s because it’s a surprisingly tricky question to answer. It depends a bit on what you mean by ‘person’.
Bones and texts showed how decades of strenuous hikes led to higher levels of osteoarthritis in workers’ knees and ankles in an ancient Egyptian village.
A rush of ancient DNA projects in Africa has presented the curators of archaeological skeletons with ethical issues because research requires the destruction of human bone.
The Moschops fossil was discovered in South Africa in 1911 and a new study of a complete skull shows how its dense braincase protected the brain and sense organs during head-to-head combat.
The evidence of a much earlier presence of humans in Indonesia was found more than 100 years ago. But only now has the age of the fossil teeth been accurately dated.
The location of a dinosaur find on a remote Queensland sheep station was lost for almost 80 years. But the site was rediscovered, and details are now emerging about the make up of the new dinosaur.
With no identifiable body parts, it’s hard to know how these fossilized creatures lived. A new approach models how the ocean’s water would interact with their unique shapes – hinting at their lifestyle.
Fossils of the lowly frog indicate that the evolution of South Africa’s west coast winter rainfall pattern is more complex, and possibly occurred much later, than previously thought
Large birds once lived across Australia, only to become extinct around the time that giant marsupials and other megafauna died out during the Pleistocene “ice ages”.
As an intellectual history of the disciplines of paleontology and paleoanthropology, Kuljan’s book is especially adept at narrating the interwoven connections between science and power.