Rising temperatures approximately 1.4 million years ago might have assisted the migration of hominins out of Africa and into Europe, a new study suggests. Dr. Jordi Agustí and colleagues have...
Poisons are ubiquitous in the plant and animal world – some snakes and frogs are venomous, and various trees and plants are lethally toxic. This was well-known by our ancient ancestors, and they...
To the layperson genetics can seem like a foreign language. Phylogenetic trees look somewhat like schematics for electronic circuit boards. I can read neither. However, if one can manage to decipher...
Scientific debate regarding the demise of the Neanderthals has been ongoing for decades with many experts proposing factors such as climate change, competition for resources, of lack of intelligence...
Evidence for burial rituals has been found dating back 100,000 years and since then numerous examples of funerary customs have been from the ancient world, from Egyptian mummification to bodies...
Last week, we reported on a new study published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology that revealed that Neanderthals were no strangers to good parenting. Their research indicated that Neanderthal...
Members of the Mah Meri tribe of Malaysia have just completed their annual ancestor-worship ceremony, an elaborate ritual involving dancers with intricately-carved masks who perform the historic Main...
Neanderthals were once considered to be subhuman brutes with low intelligence and capable of communicating through little more than a series of grunts. However, research fuelled by a fascination into...
The Hopewell culture describes a widely dispersed set of related Native American populations that flourished along The Ohio River Valley from 200 BC to 500 AD. The culture is characterised by its...
Mungo Man is the name given to the remains of the oldest anatomically modern human found in Australia to date and one of the oldest Homo sapien skeletons outside of Africa. Initially dated at 60,000-...
Last year, ground-breaking research revealed conclusive evidence that Neanderthals bred with modern humans (Homo sapiens), a fact disputed for many years. The first ever complete mapping of a...
Archaeologists believe they have found the birthplace of British civilisation , and it is underneath a £15-a-night caravan park in Norfolk, England. Discoveries at the site include one million-year-...
Last month we reported on the incredible accomplishment of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who mapped the Neanderthal genome to the same level of detail that...
This year, huge strides were made in unravelling some of the mysteries of our ancient ancestors. For example, in the first ever analysis of a virtually complete Neanderthal genome, scientists were...
The results of an extensive analysis of a 50,000-year-old toe bone belonging to a Neanderthal woman, which was unearthed in a cave in 2010, have been long awaited. Now, after much anticipation, the...
Researchers have discovered a 1.5 million-year-old fossil that possesses an anatomical feature that is believed to be vital for making and using complex tools . The implication is that our human...
In yet another revealing study showing that Neanderthals were not that different from modern humans, researchers have found proof that our ancient relatives buried their dead intentionally . Evidence...
New research has shown that Stone Age humans in Britain and France selected their ‘real estate’ in order to achieve the perfect diet. Ancient humans chose to live on islands in the flood plains of...
A new landmark study has revealed the oldest known human DNA ever to be found, dating back approximately 400,000 years – substantially older than the previous earliest human DNA from a 100,000-year-...
Archaeologists in Italy have found a collapsed rock shelter which has revealed that Neanderthals kept an organised and tidy home with separate spaces for preparing food, sleeping, making tools and...
According to a new study due to published in the Journal of Human Evolution, a group of fossils belonging to early humans that were discovered at Koobi Fora in the Turkana Basin of East Africa have...
A new study published in the journal PLOS ONE has revealed a discovery that serves to challenge a number of adamant and self-assured scientists who have refused to believe that pre-human species had...
Nearly a decade ago, a group of cave explorers stumbled upon a large collection of Neanderthal remains in the El Sidrón cave system in north western Spain. In new research presented to the Royal...
A new study presented to the Royal Society meeting on ancient DNA in London last week has revealed a dramatic finding – the genome of one of our ancient ancestors, the Denisovans, contains a segment...
