A large-scale study of fossil human teeth from Ice Age Europe reveals that climate change had a significant impact on prehistoric human populations. Using the largest dataset of human fossils from...
The notorious plague outbreak known as the Black Death was one of the most epic mass casualty events in human history, as it may have killed off up to one-third of the European population in the 14th...
A new study is challenging the long-held belief that the ancient inhabitants of Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, caused their own societal collapse through environmental mismanagement. Instead...
Approximately one million years ago, the Earth was populated by a few hundred thousand or so ancient human ancestors. But about 900,000 years ago there was a sudden and dramatic crash in this...
The Bronze Age in Britain lasted from circa 2500 BC to 700 BC. Prehistoric Britain in this period was marked by complex tool making using copper and bronze. Britain’s Bronze Age was also...
A new archaeological study in Japan, published in the August issue of Journal of Archaeological Science , has produced evidence supporting the idea that population growth can lead to an increase in...
Angkor Wat was the enormous capital city of the Khmer Empire , located in modern day Cambodia . Now, a new study has attempted to understand the Khmer exodus, whereby the ancient mega-city of almost...
Most people who have the Rh blood type are Rh-positive. There are also instances, however, where people are Rh-Negative. Health problems may occur for the unborn child of a mother with Rh-Negative...
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...
Scientists are claiming current theories “over-simplify” how the Americas were populated. Many of us were once taught that the Americas were void of humans until around 13,000 years ago. Authors like...
Historians down the ages have examined the ebb and flow of populations in ancient societies. But most of these examinations have tended to focus on male dominated events – the wars, the politics, and...
A new study could re-write the history of Ireland in the Middle Ages . It shows that the Irish population was in serious decline until the coming of the Vikings . This could change historians’ views...
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...
By Rowan McLaughlin / Emma Hannah / The Conversation The early medieval period in Ireland (400-1200 AD) was a time of key importance. It was a turning point in European history and the origin of much...
A new genetic study of ancient individuals in the Americas and their contemporary descendants finds that two populations that diverged from one another 18,000 to 15,000 years ago remained apart for...
A 2015 study suggests that European “exploration” of the world resulted in the collapse of yet another indigenous people previously thought to have died out pre-contact: the Rapa Nui of Easter Island...
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...
Scientists claim that a genetic analysis of the 11,500-year-old remains of an infant girl from Alaska has shed new light on the populating of the Americas. The new finds suggest that the “Last...
Beginning around 90,000 years ago, during an interglacial period, Anatomically Modern Humans were able to take advantage of the favorable climatic conditions and migrate throughout Africa and into...
It’s entered modern lore as a nightmare scenario for planet Earth: A huge asteroid or comet or a swarm of smaller comet fragments hits Earth and causes a major catastrophe. Now, scientists think they...
By the age of 10, most children in the United States have been taught all 50 states that make up the country. But centuries ago, the land that is now the United States was a very different place...
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...
The Khoisan, an indigenous population in Namibia, may once have comprised the majority of living humans on the planet, for much of the past 150,000 years. The Khoisan population declined about 22,000...
Anew study of mitochondrial DNA sequences published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution has found that Neanderthals came close to extinction during the last Ice Age in Western Europe,...
