While we may be attracted by the headlines of “Oldest Human Fossil Discovered” and “New Human Ancestor Found”, the idea that we’re on the route to unearthing an actual, single point in time and space...
Have you ever heard of dire wolves? You’ll probably say “Yes” if you are a fan of the TV show Game of Thrones . This canine species appears in the iconic TV series, where it is known as a ‘direwolf’...
Ashkenazi Jews are a Jewish ethnic group who have their earliest ancestors from the indigenous tribes of Israel…at least on one side of the family tree. A study published in 2013 in Nature...
In 2008 a team of archaeological excavators digging in the Stajnia Cave near Mirów in Poland, unearthed deeply-ancient tools among the remains of Neanderthal hunters. This discovery represented the...
Oceania was the last region to be settled by humans and the last part of Oceania to be settled by humans was Polynesia. Polynesians are famous for their voyages to remote islands in distant parts of...
Researchers believe that Neanderthals had a lower pain threshold than modern humans. A study has shown that because of genetic mutations our extinct relatives were more sensitive to pain. We...
New evidence is emerging about the links between Polynesian and South American populations in the Pacific before the arrival of the Europeans . The theory that South Americans first colonized Easter...
Using human population genetics, ancient pathogen genomics, and isotope analysis, a team of researchers assessed the population history of the Lake Baikal region, finding the deepest connection to...
This week it was announced that a new genetic study published in the journal Nature shows that the genomes of over 27,000 Icelanders display an admixture of modern human and Neanderthal DNA, along...
When the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, using DNA collected from ancient bones, it was accompanied by the discovery that modern humans in Asia, Europe and America inherited approximately 2%...
Scholars have been studying Rome for hundreds of years, but it still holds some secrets - for instance, relatively little is known about the ancestral origins of the city's denizens. Now, an...
Most people accept that anatomically modern humans first arose in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago, but the location where that monumental evolutionary event took place on the continent has been less...
DNA testing has proven that three people who were found in a mass-grave in Russia dating back 800 years ago belonged to an elite family. Reading the words ‘Russia’ and ‘mass-grave’ in the same...
The origins of modern Europeans are shrouded in mystery and wracked by controversy. Archaeologists and linguists have long debated the origins of the Indo-European language family as well as the...
A new Tel Aviv University study suggests that the genetic profiles of two extinct mammals with African ancestry - woolly mammoths, elephant-like animals that evolved in the arctic peninsula of...
When the journalist Roger Lewin in 1987 dubbed the common maternal ancestor of all people living today “ Mitochondrial Eve ,” he evoked a creation story —that of a woman who was the mother of us all...