New research shows that the environment is a key factor in mapping the prehistoric routes that humans took when they headed out of Africa towards Europe. More favorable climates enticed Homo sapiens...
The giant beasts and ancient megafauna that roamed Southeast Asia 100,000 years ago died because of climate change. A team of scientists from Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, has published...
A strand of Neanderthal DNA inherited by modern humans has been linked to your likelihood of falling severely ill with Covid-19 , but not everyone is convinced. The Neanderthal gene is only found in...
Archaeological excavations at the Lapa do Picareiro cave in Portugal have revealed Palaeolithic stone tools that are rewriting the history of the settlement of Europe by modern humans. The find...
The discovery of a milk tooth from a Neanderthal child has been hailed as a major breakthrough. The tiny tooth possibly belonged to one of the last Neanderthals to have lived in Europe and is...
A new method for analyzing modern and archaic human DNA has thrown up some fascinating results. It appears that modern humans ( Homo Sapiens ) mated earlier and more frequently with an archaic human...
A spectacular Meso-Paleolithic site has been found in the Negev Desert in Israel. Artifacts from this desert site are enhancing archaeologists’ understanding of how modern humans made their way into...
On August 29th 2018 The Smithsonian Institute announced “Climate records gathered from stalagmites in Romanian caves show two extremely cold dry periods correspond with the disappearance of...
Neanderthals are generally classified by palaeontologists as the species Homo neanderthalensis , but some consider them to be a subspecies of Homo sapiens ( Homo sapiens neanderthalensis ). The first...
Evidence of the earliest use of the bow and arrow by humans outside of Africa has been discovered in Sri Lanka , dating back around 45,000 to 48,000 years ago. The Upper Paleolithic Period began...
In Germany, a team of experts have made a very important discovery. They have established that an ancient wooden artifact is a throwing stick (or ‘killing stick’). This is allowing them to understand...
Do you remember those school science posters that depicted human evolution with a primate standing up and becoming a modern human? Of course you do, but you may not have noticed that these posters...
Saint Louis University Africa is the homeland of our species and harbors greater human genetic diversity than any other part of the planet. Studies of ancient DNA from African archaeological sites...
The evolution and spread of Homo sapiens is perhaps one of the greatest mysteries in all of science. Until recently, it was believed that the origins of the species and the ancestors of every person...
In 1924, a 3-year-old child’s skull found in South Africa forever changed how people think about human origins. The Taung Child, our first encounter with an ancient group of proto-humans or hominins...
A study on the history of facial expressions has discovered humans developed friendly facial expressions to attract less-aggressive, selected breeding partners, as a result of ‘self-domestication’...
Nick Longrich / The Conversation 300,000 years ago, nine human species walked the Earth. Now there’s just one. The Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis , were stocky hunters adapted to Europe’s cold...
Fire starting is a skill that many modern humans struggle with in the absence of a lighter or matches. The earliest humans likely harvested fire from natural sources, yet when our ancestors learned...
Just one week after it was announced that the inhabitants of the Qesem Cave, located 12 kilometers east of Tel Aviv in Israel, perhaps practiced swan shamanism as much as 420,000 years ago, comes...
Fossil animal droppings, charcoal from ancient fires and bone fragments litter the ground of one of the world's most important human evolution sites, new research reveals. The latest evidence from...
They walked and perhaps played along the beach in a prehistoric world; we know this as archaeologists have discovered hundreds of Neanderthal footprints in France— with most of them left by children...
The Stone Age is the longest period of human history, lasting from 2.6 million years ago to about 5,000 years ago. It is also the period of human history that is the least well known relative to...
A Denisovan finger fossil is revealing secrets about this extinct Stone Age race. A decade ago, scientists excavating Denisova Cave , an ancient archaeological site in southern Siberia, discovered...
Stone tools uncovered in Mongolia by an international team of archaeologists indicate that modern humans traveled across the Eurasian steppe about 45,000 years ago, about 10,000 years earlier than...
