Were our primeval ancestors skilled mariners who sailed thousand of miles to distant islands using language, or did they grunt at each other while holding onto tree trunks being blown randomly on the...
Scientists once could reconstruct humanity's distant past only from the mute testimony of ancient settlements, bones, and artifacts. No longer. Now there's a powerful new approach for illuminating...
A 10,000-year-old hunter had “dark to black” skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain’s oldest complete skeleton has revealed. The Cheddar Man fossil was unearthed in Gough’s Cave in Somerset...
Jan Apel / The Conversation Tracking the migration of humans isn’t easy , but genetics is helping us uncover new information at breathtaking speed. We know that our species originated in Africa and...
Strong allegations have come forward against a controversial theory suggesting that hominins were hacking away at animal bones and chipping out stone tools thousands of years ago in what is now...
“Little Red Riding Hood” is a fairytale most children have heard. But if you’re not familiar, it tells the story of a young girl who wears a red velvet hood and cape and travels alone through a...
A recent article in the journal Antiquity suggests that prehistoric people were hunting giant sloths in eastern Brazil about 23,000 years ago. This adds to an ever-growing body of research...
A prehistoric human skeleton found on the Yucatán Peninsula is at least 13,000 years old and most likely dates from a glacial period at the end of the most recent ice age, the late Pleistocene. A...
It has long been argued that Neanderthal derived DNA is found in all non-Africans. As a result, it has been assumed that Africans fail to carry Neanderthal ancestry… even though Neanderthal skeletons...
Egypt has been thought of by many as a quintessentially African civilization. There is, however, evidence that the ancient Egyptians may have been less African than modern Egyptians, at least...
Researchers should always be ready for the next big discovery, they never know where it may come from. Having an open mind and questioning peculiar finds is what sets things in motion. Take for...
Phys Org reports that in 1937, a 124,000-year-old Neanderthal thigh bone was discovered during excavations near the entrance of Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in southwestern Germany. After 80 years its...
There is increasing evidence that anatomically modern humans (AMH) left Africa 100,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence indicates that AMH were in Arabia, China, Crete, and Brazil over 100,000...
Recent archaeological evidence indicates that between 130,000 to 100,000 years ago there was an exit of anatomically modern humans out of Africa into the Americas and Eastern Eurasia. This view is...
People throughout history have taken pride in their ancestral roots, but new studies of migrations of people into Europe and elsewhere are showing that no one’s heritage is “pure.” Or if humanity’s...
Before the Persian Gulf existed, when the last ice age caused the ocean level to drop 90 meters (295 ft) below our current sea level, “100,000 km (62137 miles) of land in this part of the world was...
An amazing find at an Ice Age site in San Diego, California may dramatically alter the accepted timeline for when early humans first reached North America. 130,000-year-old bones and teeth of a...
A group of researchers studying 7700-year-old DNA found in a remote cave in Far East Russia suggest that the two women were related to people who live in this distant and bitterly cold corner of Asia...
The Popol Vuh, a corpus of mythological and historical narratives according to the Quiché-Maya people, and Izapa Stela 5, a carved stela found at the ancient Mesoamerican site of Izapa in Mexico,...
On a dark night, late in 1592, a group of Englishmen was massacred on the island of São Sebastião, off the southeast coast of Brazil. Most had deserted the infamous English privateer Thomas Cavendish...
Australia has one of the longest histories of continuous human occupation outside Africa. But who exactly were the first people to settle there? Such a question has obvious political implications and...
Using ancient DNA, researchers have created a unique picture of how a prehistoric migration route evolved over thousands of years – revealing that it could not have been used by the first people to...
(Read Part I) The "Golden Age" of artisan efforts at the Tarbat monastery did not last nearly as long as the monastery of Iona; the industrial locations were burned in a site wide fire in the eighth...
Situated on the edge of the Tarbat peninsula on the northeastern coast of Scotland, Portmahomack carries a legacy of a long buried Golden Age of religious industry that was devastatingly altered by...
