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.
Homo naledi had a brain less than half the size of our own. Yet the new research claims it had cognitive abilities far beyond what we might expect.
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.
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.