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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...