The oldest known footprint of our species, lightly ringed with chalk. It appears long and narrow because the trackmaker dragged their heel.
Charles Helm
We need deep-time African urban history and theories to make sense of contemporary urban life and anticipate its future possibilities in African terms.
Kissing may seem natural, but it remains unclear whether it’s a universal human act, or a cultural one.
PeopleImages.com - Yuri A / Shutterstock
Ancient rituals and games possess characteristics like repetition, structure and the use of symbolic objects that aid students in understanding the world.
An artist’s depiction of the temple at La Chapelle-des-Fougeretz as it would have looked in the first century AD.
Marie Millet, INRAP
There are arguments over the future of red deer on the Scottish island of South Uist but archaeological expertise can help people live alongside wild animals.
The view from the Arnhem Land escarpment over the floodplains that contain a hidden landscape.
Ian Moffat
Ancient microbes likely produced natural products their descendants today do not. Tapping into this lost chemical diversity could offer a potential source of new drugs.
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Brian Anthony Keeling, Binghamton University, State University of New York and Rolf Quam, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Scientists had figured a fossil found in Spain more than a century ago was from a Neandertal. But a new analysis suggests it could be from a lost lineage of our species, Homo sapiens.
Nicole Boivin, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History; Li Tang, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History; Michael Petraglia, Griffith University, and Shevan Wilkin, University of Zurich
Researchers looked at the skeletal remains of 40 people, and found evidence of dairy consumption across a wide swathe of early Tibetan society.
Human evolution is typically depicted with a progressive whitening of the skin, despite a lack of evidence to support it.
Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov/Wikimedia Commons
From Aristotle to Darwin, inaccurate and biased narratives in science not only reproduce these biases in future generations but also perpetuate the discrimination they are used to justify.
Archaeologists excavate inside and outside Little Muck Shelter, in the Mapungubwe National Park, South Africa.
Photo: Tim Forssman
European colonists chronicled their version of how Indigenous peoples lived with horses. New collaborative research adds scientific detail to Indigenous narratives that tell a different story.
How are people today related to those who lived centuries ago in the Swahili civilization?
The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs/Flickr
The first ancient DNA sequences from peoples of the medieval Swahili civilization push aside colonialist stories and reveal genetic connections from the past.
Around 400 local children have been involved in this archaeological project in Cardiff, Wales.
Vivian Paul Thomas
Since 2011, professional and amateur archaeologists in Cardiff have been unearthing prehistoric artefacts. But last summer, they began to discover something even more extraordinary.
The inscription “He is Odin’s Man” is in a round half circle over the head of a man.
Arnold Mikkelsen/The National Museum of Denmark
The rectangular stone structures known as mustatils were used thousands of years ago for sacrificing animals to an unknown deity – perhaps in response to ancient climate change.