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Category: Anthropology

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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Humans adapted to diverse habitats before successfully populating Eurasia

Humans adapted to diverse habitats before successfully populating Eurasia

Live Science reports: Before modern humans began their major dispersal out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, they moved to places that were significantly more ecologically diverse, which may have given them the flexibility they needed to migrate across the globe, a new study finds. Our species, Homo sapiens, originated in Africa more than 300,000 years ago. Genetic evidence suggests that all modern human populations outside Africa mostly descend from a small group of modern humans who started migrating out…

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An ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over human origins

An ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over human origins

Scott Sayare writes: On a late-summer day in 2001, at the University of Poitiers in west-central France, the palaeontologist Michel Brunet summoned his colleagues into a classroom to examine an unusual skull. Brunet had just returned from Chad, and brought with him an extremely ancient cranium. It had been distorted by the aeons spent beneath what is now the Djurab desert; a crust of black mineral deposits left it looking charred and slightly malevolent. It sat on a table. “What…

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Why one branch on the human family tree replaced all the others

Why one branch on the human family tree replaced all the others

Nick Longrich writes: On the western slope of Mount Carmel, in Israel, lies the cave of Es-Skhul. About 140,000 years ago, during the Ice Age, nomadic hunter-gatherers made camp here. The sea to the west had receded, exposing a broad plain covered with groves of live oak, almond and olive, meadows filled with asphodel and anemone. Herds of fallow deer, rhinoceros and aurochs roamed the plains. People hunted animals with stone-tipped spears, and foraged wild mustard and olives. And when…

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Fossils reveal secrets about the ancient Denisovans

Fossils reveal secrets about the ancient Denisovans

Nature reports: It was the finger seen around the world. In 2008, archaeologists working in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, Russia, uncovered a tiny bone: the tip of the little finger of an ancient human that lived there tens of thousands of years ago. The fragment didn’t seem remarkable, but it was well preserved, giving researchers hope that it harboured intact DNA. A team of geneticists led by Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,…

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Pacific voyagers’ remarkable environmental knowledge allowed for long-distance navigation without Western technology

Pacific voyagers’ remarkable environmental knowledge allowed for long-distance navigation without Western technology

An outrigger canoe would typically have several paddlers and one navigator. AP Photo/David Goldman By Richard (Rick) Feinberg, Kent State University Wet and shivering, I rose from the outrigger of a Polynesian voyaging canoe. We’d been at sea all afternoon and most of the night. I’d hoped to get a little rest, but rain, wind and an absence of flat space made sleep impossible. My companions didn’t even try. It was May 1972, and I was three months into doctoral…

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Chimpanzees’ rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at origins of human language

Chimpanzees’ rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at origins of human language

  NPR reports: Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic structures and call combinations, two key elements of spoken language. Taken together, the studies add to an emerging “early footprint” indicating how human language may have evolved, says Catherine Crockford, an author of one of the studies and a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific…

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New evidence prompts researchers to rethink humanity’s origin story

New evidence prompts researchers to rethink humanity’s origin story

By Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias This article was originally published on SAPIENS As a university student in the early 2010s, I recall how beautifully simple our origin story was: Homo sapiens evolved in East African savannas around 150,000 years ago. Then, sometime around 70,000 years ago, a mutation occurred that endowed these individuals with the capacity for complex, symbolic behavior. This set them apart from any other species and allowed them to leave Africa and take over the world, replacing all other humans they encountered….

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