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Category: Anthropology

These chimpanzees began the bloodiest ‘war’ on record. No one knows why

These chimpanzees began the bloodiest ‘war’ on record. No one knows why

Carl Zimmer reports: Since 1995, scientists have tracked a huge group of chimpanzees living in the forests of Uganda. The sustained research, featured in the 2023 documentary “Chimp Empire,” has led to profound insights about our closest living relatives and, by extension, our own ancestors. In one line of research, the scientists studied deep bonds among male chimpanzees in the Ngogo group, named for a hill in the Kibale National Park where they live. The males spend years hunting together…

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Why ‘Man the Hunter’ continues to die and return

Why ‘Man the Hunter’ continues to die and return

Vivek V Venkataraman writes: The most iconic image of human evolution comes not from science, but from cinema. In the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), apes shuffle across a desolate, windswept plain, scrounging for meagre pickings. One is mauled by a leopard. Then a large black monolith appears, whipping the apes into a frenzy and bestowing upon them a new form of intelligence. As Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra swells, one ape takes up a…

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When Attenborough was welcomed by the mountain gorillas

When Attenborough was welcomed by the mountain gorillas

  David Sillito writes: It is the most memorable moment of Sir David Attenborough’s broadcasting career. A short sequence of his encounter with a group of playful mountain gorillas in a forest clearing in Rwanda. “There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know,” he tells the camera, as a female gorilla observes him from just a few feet away. The footage for his 1979 Life on Earth series…

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Could the oldest human story really be 100,000 years old?

Could the oldest human story really be 100,000 years old?

Mihai Andrei writes: For as long as humans have existed, they have looked to the sky. There are thousands and thousands of different myths and legends linked to stars and constellations, but one radical new idea says that one such story could be incredibly old. The legend is linked to the Pleiades, a set of stars that many cultures call the “Seven Sisters”. But look at them with the naked eye and you’ll only see six; so where’s the seventh…

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New study challenges theories about when people may have arrived in the Americas

New study challenges theories about when people may have arrived in the Americas

Science reports: Three decades ago, most archaeologists were certain that people first arrived in the Americas no earlier than about 13,000 years ago. The evidence came from well-dated spearheads with characteristic fluted bases known as Clovis points, named for the city in New Mexico near the archaeological site where they were first identified in 1929. But the so-called “Clovis first” hypothesis appeared to crack for good in 1997, when a cadre of archaeologists visited a site called Monte Verde in…

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Ancient artifacts hint at earliest protowriting

Ancient artifacts hint at earliest protowriting

Science reports: In a series of caves at the base of the Swabian Alps in southwestern Germany, archaeologists have uncovered bone flutes, tools to make rope and clothes, the oldest known Venus figurines, and hundreds of handheld objects etched with intricate geometric designs. These engraved items, first discovered in the 1860s, were carved from mammoth ivory and bones of cave lions, cave bears, and other animals now long extinct. According to an analysis published online today in the Proceedings of…

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We cooperate to survive, but if no one’s looking, we compete

We cooperate to survive, but if no one’s looking, we compete

Jonathan R Goodman writes: Reading classic works in evolutionary biology is unlikely to make you optimistic about human nature. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) onwards, there is a fundamental understanding among biologists that organisms, especially humans, evolved to maximise self-interest. We act to promote our own success or that of our family. Niceness, by contrast, is just a mirage, and morality more broadly is just an illusion. Sociobiology – the infamous movement of the second half of…

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Chimp sounds trigger a strange brain signal in humans

Chimp sounds trigger a strange brain signal in humans

SciTechDaily reports: The human brain is not limited to recognizing speech from other people. Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have found that specific parts of the auditory cortex react strongly to the vocalizations of chimpanzees. These primates are our closest relatives both in evolutionary terms and in the acoustic qualities of their calls. The study, published in the journal eLife, points to the presence of specialized subregions in the human brain that are particularly responsive to the sounds…

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Neanderthals 400,000 years ago were striking flints to make fires

Neanderthals 400,000 years ago were striking flints to make fires

Carl Zimmer reports: Some 400,000 years ago, in what is now eastern England, a group of Neanderthals used flint and pyrite to make fires by a watering hole — not just once, but time after time, over several generations. That is the conclusion of a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Previously, the oldest known evidence of humans making fires dated back just 50,000 years. The new finding indicates that this critical step in human history occurred much…

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Europeans were dark skinned until just 3,000 years ago

Europeans were dark skinned until just 3,000 years ago

ZME Science reports: The textbook assumption is that when the first modern humans arrived in Europe, around 45,000 years ago, they quickly evolved pale skin to adapt to the region’s dimmer sunlight relative to Africa. The logic seemed straightforward: lighter skin allows more ultraviolet light to penetrate, helping the body produce vitamin D, a nutrient essential for human health. However, a study of ancient DNA challenges this long-held assumption. By analyzing the genomes of 348 individuals who lived between 45,000…

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Genetic traces of a long-lost people found in South America

Genetic traces of a long-lost people found in South America

Science Alert reports: Traces of a previously unknown group of people, genetically distinct from their neighbors, have persisted for at least 8,000 years in the central Southern Cone of South America, and Argentina in particular. It’s believed to be among the last places humans reached in our species’ expansion across the world: Some of the earliest evidence of human presence in the continent’s southernmost reaches dates to around 14,000 years ago, though this is greatly debated by archaeologists. And yet,…

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Chimpanzees can revise their beliefs in the light of new evidence, study finds

Chimpanzees can revise their beliefs in the light of new evidence, study finds

Science Alert reports: Chimpanzees can change their minds when the facts no longer support their previous beliefs – a rational level of thinking that was once considered uniquely human. In a series of experiments designed to test the metacognition of these fascinating apes, psychologist Hanna Schleihauf of Utrecht University and her colleagues observed, for the first time, how chimpanzees can weigh different kinds of evidence – and change their beliefs in response to a stronger argument. “This is really the…

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Jane Goodall (1934–2025): primatologist, conservationist, and messenger of hope

Jane Goodall (1934–2025): primatologist, conservationist, and messenger of hope

Rhett Ayers Butler writes: Jane Goodall, who revealed the intimate lives of chimpanzees and gave the modern world a language of hope, has died at the age of 91. Over the course of six decades, she moved from an unlikely young researcher in the forests of East Africa to one of the most recognizable scientists and conservationists of her time. Her patient fieldwork at Gombe transformed primatology, overturning entrenched beliefs about the uniqueness of humans and forcing science to reckon…

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A million-year-old skull rewrites human evolution, scientists says

A million-year-old skull rewrites human evolution, scientists says

BBC News reports: A million-year-old human skull found in China suggests that our species, Homo sapiens, began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study. It also shows that we co-existed with other sister species, including Neanderthals, for much longer than we’ve come to believe, they say. The scientists claim their analysis “totally changes” our understanding of human evolution and, if correct, it would certainly rewrite a key early…

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A massive eruption 74,000 years ago affected the whole planet – archaeologists use volcanic glass to figure out how people survived

A massive eruption 74,000 years ago affected the whole planet – archaeologists use volcanic glass to figure out how people survived

Collecting microscopic glass samples at Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains in South Africa. Katherine Elmes By Jayde N. Hirniak, Arizona State University If you were lucky 74,000 years ago, you would have survived the Toba supereruption, one of the largest catastrophic events that Earth has seen in the past 2.5 million years. While the volcano is located in what’s now Indonesia, living organisms across the entire globe were potentially affected. As an archaeologist who specializes in studying volcanic eruptions…

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DNA from extinct hominin, the Denisovans, may have helped ancient peoples survive in the Americas

DNA from extinct hominin, the Denisovans, may have helped ancient peoples survive in the Americas

University of Colorado at Boulder: Thousands of years ago, ancient humans undertook a treacherous journey, crossing hundreds of miles of ice over the Bering Strait to the unknown world of the Americas. Now, a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that these nomads carried something surprising with them—a chunk of DNA inherited from a now-extinct species of hominin, which may have helped humans adapt to the challenges of their new home. The researchers published their results…

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