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Artists impression of the bird with a third toe 41 per cent longer than the second toe. Source: Zhongda Zhang/Current Biology
12 July, 2019 - 17:20 ancient-origins

Unique Bird With Bizarrely Long Toe Found Fossilized in Amber

Meet the ancient bird that had toes longer than its lower legs. Researchers have discovered a bird foot from 99 million years ago preserved in amber that had a hyper-elongated third toe. The study,...
A new study explores why humans are ‘the fat primates.’ Source: Vadym / Adobe Stock
27 June, 2019 - 20:50 ancient-origins

What Made Humans 'The Fat Primate'? (It’s Far Deeper Than Diet)

Blame junk food or a lack of exercise. But long before the modern obesity epidemic, evolution made us fat too. "We're the fat primates," said Devi Swain-Lenz, a postdoctoral associate in biology at...
Nuclear explosion( victor zastol'skiy/Adobe Stock)
14 June, 2019 - 21:27 jim willis

Archaeology Uncovering the Great Forgetting

For 13 days in October of 1962, our civilization was poised on the edge of nuclear destruction. American president John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev engaged in a faceoff. The world...
Representation of the bipedal hominins Homo erectus, one of Homo sapiens’ ancestors. Source: ratpack223 /Adobe Stock
30 May, 2019 - 14:05 ancient origins

Did Supernovae Inspire Our Hominin Ancestors to Walk Upright?

Did ancient supernovae induce proto-humans to walk on two legs, eventually resulting in Homo sapiens with hands free to build cathedrals, design rockets and snap iPhone selfies? A paper published...
300,000-year-old fossils of as many as 16 individual human ancestors have been found in a collapsed cave in China. Here is a reconstruction of a skull found at the site. Source: Wu Xiujie and Erik Trinkaus
25 May, 2019 - 22:11 Ed Whelan

Pleistocene Skull and 300,000 Years of Evolution Secrets Found in a Chinese Cave

In China, paleontologists have announced a very important discovery of human fossils and artifacts. They have uncovered a large number of fossils of early relatives of modern humans in a cave. The...
Charred food remains from hearths were discovered, left by ancient humans eating starch. Source: PetarPaunchev / Adobe.
21 May, 2019 - 01:41 ancient-origins

Earliest Evidence for a Cooked Starch Paleo Diet

New discoveries made at the Klasies River Cave in South Africa's southern Cape, where charred food remains from hearths were found, provide the first archaeological evidence that anatomically modern...
Finger bone fragment containing Denisovan DNA. Source: Thilo Parg / CC BY-SA 3.0.
18 May, 2019 - 18:49 Glenn Dahlem

Did the Denisovans Walk to North America?

For a people from whom one 41,000 year old finger bone fossil from a nine year old girl, along with a bracelet she wore, were (until recently) the only authenticated known artifacts, the mysterious...
16 May, 2019 - 22:27 ancient-origins

Tooth Study Has Modern Humans Splitting From Neanderthals 400,000 Years Earlier Than Thought

Neanderthals and modern humans diverged at least 800,000 years ago, substantially earlier than indicated by most DNA -based estimates, according to new research by a UCL academic. The research,...
Neanderthal. Source: procy_ab / Adobe Stock
23 April, 2019 - 22:54 Mark Maslin

All About Neanderthals – The Surprising Facts

Current evidence suggests that Neanderthals and humans shared a last common ancestor sometime between 765,000 and 550,000 years ago. We speculate that this ancestor was H. heidelbergensis . The story...
The Solid Muldoon was supposedly a prehistoric ‘petrified human body’ unearthed in 1877.
23 April, 2019 - 14:02 dhwty

Solid Muldoon: Petrified Prehistoric Man was an Elaborate and Daring Hoax

The Solid Muldoon is the name given to a supposedly petrified prehistoric man that was ‘discovered’ in 1877. This ‘ petrified body’ was unearthed by William Conant at Muldoon Hill, a small hill not...
Penablanca, Cagayan Province, Philippines, near the entrance to the limestone Callao Cave where there is evidence of a new human species. Source: Michael / Adobe. Inset: A foot bone from Homo luzonensis. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali)
18 April, 2019 - 14:00 ancient-origins

How Much Evidence is Enough to Declare a New Species of Human from a Philippines Cave Site?

The announcement of a new species of ancient human (more correctly hominin) from the Philippines , reported today in Nature , will cause a lot of head-shaking among anthropologists and archaeologists...
Cthulhu fossil reconstruction of Sollasina cthulhu. Source: Elissa Martin / Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
10 April, 2019 - 18:59 ancient-origins

'Cthulhu' Fossil Reconstruction Reveals Monstrous Relative of Modern Sea Cucumbers

An exceptionally-preserved fossil from Herefordshire in the UK has given new insights into the early evolution of sea cucumbers, the group that includes the sea pig and its relatives, according to a...
What Peregocetus, the legged ancient whale might have looked like.
6 April, 2019 - 01:31 ancient-origins

Ancient Whale with Four Legs Found Along the Coast of Peru

Cetaceans , the group including whales and dolphins , originated in south Asia more than 50 million years ago from a small, four-legged, hoofed ancestor. Now, researchers reporting the discovery of...
Man walking in a sea cave at sunset, illustration painting. New research on the Denisovans provides more insight on their lives and population spread.
3 April, 2019 - 22:53 Andrew Collins

A Trove of New Denisovan Discoveries Revealed At A Recent Anthropological Conference

The annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists held at the end of March in Cleveland, Ohio, was eagerly awaited by those with an interest in human origins as it would be...
The Stoned Ape theory proposes magic mushrooms helped the Homo erectus evolve quickly.
3 April, 2019 - 19:02 Sarah P Young

The Stoned Ape Theory and the Dawn of Human Consciousness: Did Our Prehistoric Ancestors Evolve by Getting High?

The origins of behavioral modernity and what exactly makes us human are topics which have fascinated people for hundreds of years. There is a plethora of theories as to which archaic human ancestor...
Homo erectus pekinensis, forensic facial reconstruction.
13 February, 2019 - 01:57 ancient-origins

A Snapshot of Our Mysterious Ancestor Homo erectus

By Ian Moffat / The Conversation If you bumped into a Homo erectus in the street you might not recognize them as being very different from you. You’d see a certain “human-ness” in the stance, and his...

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