Using a new equation based on today’s primates, scientists can take a few molar teeth from an extinct fossil species and reconstruct exactly how fast their offspring grew during gestation.
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Articles on Paleoanthropology
Displaying 1 - 20 of 22 articles
Ancient DNA from Neanderthal fossils in southern Siberia reveals a small community with close family ties – including a father and his teenage daughter.
A new study doubles the age of ancient DNA in sub-Saharan Africa, revealing how people moved, mingled and had children together over the last 50,000 years.
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.
Walking has taken a very long time to develop, with evidence of bipedalism among early humans in Africa roughly 4.4 million years ago.
Combining evidence from archaeology, geochronology and paleoenvironmental science, researchers identified how ancient humans by Lake Malawi were the first to substantially modify their environment.
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.
By studying the DNA of people who lived in East Asia thousands of years ago, scientists are starting to untangle how the region was populated.
The footprints of over 20 different prehistoric people, pressed into volcanic ash thousands of years ago in Tanzania, show possible evidence for sexual division of labor in this ancient community.
The hominin known as Lucy may not be the direct ancestor of humans.
A series of new studies sheds light on the population crash and extinction of the giant birds, lemurs and more that roamed the island until around A.D. 700-1000.
Why was one gene mutation that affects hair, teeth, sweat glands and breasts ubiquitous among ice age Arctic people? New research points to the advantage it provided for ancestors of Native Americans.
The early human ‘Cockney pearly kings and queens’.
We can’t observe the brain activity of extinct human species. But we can observe modern brains doing the things that our distant ancestors did, looking for clues about how ancient brains worked.
A century-old case of scientific fraud illustrates how hard it is to untangle the truth when access to new discoveries is limited.
New ways of using forensic science in anthropology have been developed to advance our understanding of the past.
David Attenborough’s latest BBC documentary indulges wishful thinking over evidence.
Cancer is a deadly disease and would have been particularly lethal before the recent development of effective treatments. So why didn’t it – or our susceptibility to it – die out long ago?
Another look at a skull unearthed in Malaysian Borneo 60 years ago can shed light on the mystery of how early humans moved throughout Southeast Asia thousands of years ago.
Not all technologies are created equal. Researchers devised a new model to explain why, after eons of nothing much new, we sometimes see an explosion of innovation in the archaeological record.
Top contributors
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Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Yale University
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Honorary Associate Professor, UNSW Sydney
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Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH), University of Wollongong
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Chancellor's Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, Indiana University
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Professor of Earth System Science, UCL
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Lecturer of Anthropology and Assistant Director of the Turkana Basin Institute, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)
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Paleoanthropologist, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Associate Professor of Anthropology, Binghamton University, State University of New York
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Associate Professor of Forensic Science, Northumbria University, Newcastle
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Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University
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Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biology, Stanford University
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Assistant Professor of History, UMass Amherst
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Professor of Public Engagement in Science, University of Birmingham
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Professor of Cultural Palaeoecology, Liverpool John Moores University
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Professor of Archaeological Theory and Method, University of Liverpool
