Taking advantage of extraordinary advances in the study of ancient DNA, researchers from Fudan and Xiamen Universities in China completed a detailed facial reconstruction of a Chinese emperor who...
Researchers have created the world's largest ancient human gene bank by analyzing the bones and teeth of almost 5,000 humans who lived across Western Europe and Asia up to 34,000 years ago. By...
Mongol Emperor Genghis Khan (1162 – 1227 AD) was not just an infamously ruthless warrior, and founder of the largest contiguous empire in history, but was also a prolific father as well, siring so...
Tiwanaku – one of the largest Pre-Columbian settlements and archaeological sites, located in western Bolivia, near Lake Titicaca, has hotly debated origins. Even its name, or what would have been...
A new study published in the journal Science Advances offers evidence to support the theory of local origins of the Etruscans, an advanced Iron Age peoples in central Italy. For the study, scientists...
The archipelago nation of Japan has been occupied since the Upper Paleolithic period (36,000 BC), and dual genomic Japanese ancestry has been the dominant theory, up until now. A new study carried...
Around 360 BC, in his dialogues of Timaeus and Critias , the Greek philosopher Plato introduced an incredible story, a tale of an enigmatic island civilization which has since captivated the...
A team of scientists in Israel have made the news for having made the rather obvious discovery that humans “have been super-predators for 2 million years.” However, this is the dumbed down media take...
Researchers have sequenced the oldest known DNA in the world. Using material from the Early and Middle Pleistocene sub-epochs, the ancient DNA analysis shatters the record for the world’s oldest...
In 1533, a famous Portuguese trading vessel called the Bom Jesus went missing on its way to India. It sank off the coast of present-day Namibia while it was filled with more than 40 tons of precious...
The Xiongnu, the first nomadic empire in Asia, left no known written records to explain their origins, making this an intriguing ancient genetic mystery. But a new study has cast light on how the...
Archaeologists and anthropologists know that the Caribbean was one of the last parts of the Americas settled by humans, but a new study of DNA has revealed when, how, and where the original Caribbean...
The Dead Sea scrolls have been analyzed up close revealing the origins of the animal skins upon which they were written. Discovered in the Qumran Caves , near the Dead Sea, in 1946, the Dead Sea...
When the human genome was first discovered, it revealed some amazing genetic secrets – modern humans are way more complicated than we originally thought. During a long evolution , humankind picked up...
The concept known as “genetic memory” is much less studied and far more controversial than what we know as “regular” memory. Whilst there are a multitude of other examples in animals (see: Gallagher...
Genetic research has revolutionized our understanding of Switzerland’s prehistoric past. A group of researchers have carried out a study of genomes from individuals who lived in the Late Neolithic...
A new botanical scientific study on ginkgo trees highlights the species’ hyper-charged defenses and apparent escalation towards “immortality.” Native to China , G inkgo biloba , also known as the...
Scientists have proven inbreeding brought about severe facial deformations and collapsed of one of Europe’s most powerful historical dynasties . The royal European Habsburg family sat on the throne...
Scientists reveal modern Scots have strong genetic links with their Dark Age ancestors. “ We're a' Jock Tamson's bairns” (We are all Jock Tamson’s children) is an old Scottish phrase meaning all...
A dental trait found in the Xiahe Denisovan jawbone as well as in some ancient and modern human populations now provides a rare opportunity to track the geographical reach and perhaps even the final...
The current thinking on the origins of the Japanese population holds that the original inhabitants, the Jomon people , were met about 2,500 years ago by a separate group coming mainly from the Korean...
History can tell us a lot about the Crusades , the series of religious wars fought between 1095 and 1291, in which Christian invaders tried to claim the Near East. But the DNA of nine 13th century...
New research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America ( PNAS ) entitled “Unravelling ancestry , kinship, and violence in a Late...
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...