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Ancestors

9000 year-old mask that was recovered.

Stone Mask from the Dawning of Ancient Societies Found in Israel

The Israel Antiquities Authority has announced the recovery from looters of a very rare Neolithic mask made from stone. The item was originally discovered this year in Hebron, on the West Bank. This...
Picture taken at the site of the discovery of ancient tools in China.

New Find Indicates Humans Left Africa Earlier than Believed

Ancient tools and bones have been discovered in China by archaeologists that suggest early humans left Africa and arrived in Asia earlier than previously thought. The artifacts show that our earliest...
Llullaillaco boy’s mummy in Salta Province, Argentina.

Cocaine Laden Mummified Children Vindicate Football Champion

The coca plant is native to western South America and is grown in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru and the chewing of coca with lime in rituals and to relieve altitude sickness, goes...
Skull from Roman Dead exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands

The Dead Tell Us of a Diverse Londinium

Rebecca Redfern / The Conversation Our knowledge about the people who lived in Roman Britain has undergone a sea change over the past decade. New research has rubbished our perception of it as a...
Sunset looking across Port Warrender to the Mitchell Plateau on the Kimberley coast. It is in Wunambal Gaambera country

How to get to Australia … more than 50,000 years ago

The Conversation Over just the past few years, new archaeological findings have revealed the lives of early Aboriginal Australians in the Northern Territory’s Kakadu potentially as early as 65,000...
 Matabele land and the Victoria Falls: a naturalist's wanderings in the interior of South Africa, from the letters and journals of the late Frank Oates / edited by C.G. Oates. 1881

The Masebe Mountains in Africa Speak Their Ancient Names

Africa is a continent where its people are in spiritual communication with the soul of the land, as typically illustrated in the Masebe Nature Reserve in the Limpopo province of South Africa...
Rock art in central Northumberland, northern England. (Author provided)

What Neolithic Rock Art Can Tell Us About the Way Our Ancestors Lived 6,000 Years Ago

The British and Irish countryside is often celebrated for its wealth of unique places of heritage, significance and interest. But not many people know that this heritage includes thousands of ancient...
An ankle bone from 52 million years ago suggests that the earliest primates, the ancestors of humans, were great at leaping from tree to tree. Credit: Douglas Boyer, Duke University

Why Your Ancestors Would Have Aced the Long Jump

This tiny ankle bone belonged to one of the earliest members of the primate family tree. The 52-million-year-old fossil suggests that the first primates were expert leapers. Discovered more than 30...
Researcher Elspeth Hayes with Mark Djandjomerr and traditional owner May Nango extracting comparative samples at a cave adjacent Madjedbebe. Credit: David Vadiveloo / Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation

New Findings in Australia Have Shocking Ramifications for Human Occupation, Species Extinction and Out of Africa Theories

A group of archaeologists in Australia has discovered the world's oldest stone axes with a ground edge. This discovery is extremely significant as it pushes Australia's human history back to 65,000...
Pietro Perugino's use of perspective in this fresco at the Sistine Chapel (1481–82) helped bring the Renaissance to Rome

Do Your Eyes Fool You? Ancient Vision and a New Reality — How to See and Draw Like the Ancients

From the beginning of time, those among us we now call artists have tried to capture in two dimensions what they saw of the real, three-dimensional world in which they lived. Almost from the very...
Prehistoric Man.

Are Humans Just Self-Domesticated Apes?

One of the greatest mysteries is the origin of the human mind. Why are humans so different from other animals? Why do we have languages, religions, complex political and economic systems, and...
Paleolithic Jewelry: Still Eye-catching After 50,000 Years

Paleolithic Jewelry: Still Eye-catching After 50,000 Years

By Tamara Zubchuk | The Siberian Times Beads made from ostrich eggs buried in the Siberian cave around 2,000 generations ago reveal amazing artistic (and drilling) skills of our long-ago ancestors...
Neanderthal

Ancient Human History More Complex Than Previously Thought, Researchers Say

Relationships between the ancestors of modern humans and other archaic populations such as Neanderthals and Denisovans were likely more complex than previously thought, involving interbreeding within...
Smarter Brains Are Blood-Thirsty Brains

Smarter Brains Are Blood-Thirsty Brains

A University of Adelaide-led project has overturned the theory that the evolution of human intelligence was simply related to the size of the brain -- but rather linked more closely to the supply of...
Imaginative depiction of the Stone Age, by Viktor Vasnetsov.

Just a Few Men Controlled Reproduction in Prehistory and Dominate World Genetics Today

A new genetic study of male ancestry shows there were periods in human prehistory when just a few elite men controlled reproduction. For example, one man about 190,000 years ago was the ancestor of 1...
A reconstruction of a male of our evolutionary cousin the Neanderthals (Modified from an image by Cicero Moraes).

A Golden Age of Ancient DNA Science Begins

If I had taken a straw poll among anthropologists 10 years ago asking them how far genetic research would come in the next decade, I doubt anyone would have come close to predicting the big impact...
Detail of the Laxe dos Carballos  at Campo Lameiro, Galicia, Spain

A Walk Amongst the Petroglyphs of Galicia: Prehistoric Designs Trace Life and Times of Bronze Age Europeans

From the Upper Palaeolithic and down through the Neolithic, the Chalcolithic and into the Bronze Age, our ancestors in western Europe left behind traces of their thoughts and beliefs through rock art...
A reconstructed Neanderthal skeleton, right, is displayed next to a modern human skeleton at the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Neanderthals Mated with Modern Humans Much Earlier than Previously Thought, Study Finds

Using several different methods of DNA analysis, an international research team has found what they consider to be strong evidence of an interbreeding event between Neanderthals and modern humans...
Ancient European hunters face an Uro (European bison).

8000 Years of European Evolution Disclosed by Genome Study

Through the analysis of 230 samples of prehistoric genome, scientists believe they have identified the genes that gave rise to the European Neolithic revolution - with the transition from hunting and...
The archaeological team, including a likely descendant of the prehistoric California people being studied, re-created one of the burials in an image.

Ancient California burials show a macabre way to honor the dead

Different societies approach death in a great variety of ways. One community in California about 3,000 to 4,000 years ago honored their dead by burying the deceased headless in some cases or with...
Virtual reconstruction of two-million-year-old ear.

Scientists unravel how ancient hominids heard the world

How did the world sound to our ancient human relatives two million years ago? While we obviously don’t have any sound recordings or written records from anywhere near that long ago, we do have one...
Comparison between the skull of a modern human (left) and a Neanderthal (right).

Scientists from Atapuerca Revolutionizing Human Evolution

Once again, the findings of the now famous Pit of Bones , one of the most important sites in the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain), seems to "force us to revolutionize" human evolution as we have...
Researchers said in 2010 these animal bones, found in sediment dated about 3.4 million years ago, had been deliberately cut, apparently by a creatures of a pre-human hominin species, Australopithecus.

Pre-human ancestors may have used tools to butcher animals 3.4 million years ago

Some animals, including chimpanzees, crows, elephants, sea otters and dolphins, are known to use tools to extract food from their environment and for other functions. But what really sets people...
A DNA molecule that is methylated on both strands on the center cytosine. DNA methylation plays an important role for epigenetic gene regulation in development and cancer

Ancient Ancestors Had More DNA Than We Do Now: Have we Devolved?

Adding to the number of unsolved mysteries regarding the ancient origins of humanity and the biology of our species, scientists have discovered that we have less DNA now than our ancient ancestors...

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