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Category: Anthropology

Unearthing the origins of agriculture

Unearthing the origins of agriculture

John Carey writes: Archaeobiology involves gathering and analyzing the remains of humans and plants to discern how people were living and what they were eating and doing. It started first with bioarchaeology, a term coined in the 1970s for the study of human bones and teeth, explains Clark Larsen, an anthropologist at The Ohio State University in Columbus. Researchers can use clues in bone structure and advanced technologies to determine whether our ancestors walked or ran a lot, measure isotopes…

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Fossil teeth reveal how brains developed in utero over millions of years of human evolution – new research

Fossil teeth reveal how brains developed in utero over millions of years of human evolution – new research

Any hominid fossil find with molar teeth can be plugged into a new equation that reveals its species’ prenatal growth rate. Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images By Tesla Monson, Western Washington University Fossilized bones help tell the story of what human beings and our predecessors were doing hundreds of thousands of years ago. But how can you learn about important parts of our ancestors’ life cycle – like pregnancy or gestation – that leave no obvious trace in the fossil…

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Genetics study lays bare Ice Age drama for humans in Europe

Genetics study lays bare Ice Age drama for humans in Europe

Reuters reports: Europe was no balmy paradise during the Ice Age, with the vast glaciers that blanketed large parts of the continent rendering wide swathes inhospitable for humans. But our species – a new immigrant to Europe – endured, though with great hardship. Researchers on Wednesday unveiled an analysis of genome data from 356 hunter-gatherers who lived in the region between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago, a span that included the Ice Age’s coldest interval between 25,000 and 19,000 years…

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Imagination makes us human – this unique ability to envision what doesn’t exist has a long evolutionary history

Imagination makes us human – this unique ability to envision what doesn’t exist has a long evolutionary history

Your brain can imagine things that haven’t happened or that don’t even exist. agsandrew/iStock via Getty Images Plus By Andrey Vyshedskiy, Boston University You can easily picture yourself riding a bicycle across the sky even though that’s not something that can actually happen. You can envision yourself doing something you’ve never done before – like water skiing – and maybe even imagine a better way to do it than anyone else. Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that…

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Fossils upend conventional wisdom about evolution of human bipedalism

Fossils upend conventional wisdom about evolution of human bipedalism

Jeremy DeSilva writes: Long before our ancestors evolved large brains and language, even before they tamed fire or made stone tools, they started doing something no mammal had done before: walking on two legs. Skeletal adaptations for traveling upright are evident in fossils of the very oldest hominins—members of the human family—which date to between seven million and five million years ago. Moving on two legs rather than four set the stage for subsequent evolutionary changes in our lineage. It…

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Hominids used stone tool kits to butcher animals earlier than once thought

Hominids used stone tool kits to butcher animals earlier than once thought

Science News reports: Nearly 3 million years ago, hominids employed stone tool kits to butcher hippos and pound plants along what’s now the shores of Kenya’s Lake Victoria, researchers say. Evidence of those food preparation activities pushes back hominids’ use of these tool kits, known as Oldowan implements, by roughly 300,000 years, say paleoanthropologist Thomas Plummer of Queen’s College, City University of New York and colleagues. That makes these finds possibly the oldest known stone tools. Several dating techniques place…

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We can still see these five traces of ancestor species in all human bodies today

We can still see these five traces of ancestor species in all human bodies today

Elia Pellegrini/Unsplash By Alice Clement, Flinders University Many of us are returning to work or school after spending time with relatives over the summer period. Sometimes we can be left wondering how on earth we are related to some of these people with whom we seemingly have nothing in common (especially with a particularly annoying relative). However, in evolutionary terms, we all share ancestors if we go far enough back in time. This means many features in our bodies stretch…

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Ancient humans and their early depictions of the universe

Ancient humans and their early depictions of the universe

Astronomy reports: In the Lascaux caves of southwestern France, which are famously adorned with 17,000-year-old paintings, the artist’s subject is almost always a large animal. But hovering above the image of one bull is an unexpected addition: a cluster of small black dots that some scholars interpret as stars. Perhaps it is the eye-catching Pleiades, which Paleolithic hunter-gatherers would have seen vividly in the unpolluted sky. Claims of prehistoric astronomy are controversial. Even if true, we frequently trace our cosmic…

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Human and Neanderthal brains have a surprising ‘youthful’ quality in common, new research finds

Human and Neanderthal brains have a surprising ‘youthful’ quality in common, new research finds

Neanderthal skull. Petr Student/Shutterstock By Stephen Wroe, University of New England; Gabriele Sansalone, Institute of Marine Sciences, and Pasquale Raia, University of Naples Federico II Many believe our particularly large brain is what makes us human – but is there more to it? The brain’s shape, as well as the shapes of its component parts (lobes) may also be important. Results of a study we published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution show that the way the different parts of…

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Neanderthals were smart, sophisticated, creative — and misunderstood

Neanderthals were smart, sophisticated, creative — and misunderstood

Newsweek reports: Nearly 40,000 years after disappearing from the planet, Neanderthals are having a moment. In recent years, tantalizing new evidence suggests that our primitive, heavy-browed cousins were chefs, jewelry-makers and painters. And what we are learning from the genetic clues they left behind—and the promise of what those clues will tell us about ourselves in the years ahead—won Swedish paleo-geneticist Svante Pääbo the 2022 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology this fall. The most recent discoveries, un-earthed in a…

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Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans first arrived in the Americas

Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans first arrived in the Americas

Jennifer Raff writes: The debate over how people first arrived in the Western Hemisphere continues to roil archaeology in the United States – and to capture public attention. Today, the scientific community is contending with significant amounts of new genetic and archaeological data, and it can be overwhelming and even contradictory. These data are coming from new archaeological excavations but also from the application of newly developed tools to re-analyse prior sites and artefacts. They’re coming from newly sequenced genomes…

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How religion made us a successful species

How religion made us a successful species

Victor Kumar and Richmond Cambell write: For most of history, human populations were limited to small bands of around 150 members. After exceeding that size, a band would split and drift apart, the descendants forgetting their common ancestry. At some point in human history, however, bands were knit together into tribes—groups of groups—geographically distributed but linked by ethnicity, dialect, and common purpose. Tribes had an edge over bands because they enabled cooperation at a larger scale. One vital benefit was…

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New research upends conventional wisdom about how we burn calories

New research upends conventional wisdom about how we burn calories

Herman Pontzer writes: We’re often told our metabolism speeds up at puberty and slows down in middle age, particularly with menopause, and that men have faster metabolisms than women. None of these claims is based on real science. My colleagues and I have begun to fill that gap in scientific understanding. In 2014 John Speakman, a researcher in metabolism with laboratories at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenzhen, organized an international effort…

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Genetic legacy of Denisovans may be shaping modern immune system of southwest Pacific populations

Genetic legacy of Denisovans may be shaping modern immune system of southwest Pacific populations

Science reports: When modern humans first migrated from Africa to the tropical islands of the southwest Pacific, they encountered unfamiliar people and new pathogens. But their immune systems may have picked up some survival tricks when they mated with the locals—the mysterious Denisovans who gave them immune gene variants that might have protected the newcomers’ offspring from local diseases. Some of these variants still persist in the genomes of people living in Papua New Guinea today, according to a new…

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DNA from elusive human relatives the Denisovans has left a curious mark on modern people in New Guinea

DNA from elusive human relatives the Denisovans has left a curious mark on modern people in New Guinea

Derek R. Audette/Shutterstock By Irene Gallego Romero, The University of Melbourne and Davide Vespasiani, The University of Melbourne An encounter with a mysterious and extinct human relative – the Denisovans – has left a mark on the immune traits of modern Papuans, in particular those living on New Guinea Island. This is a new discovery we describe in a study published in PLoS Genetics today. It further suggests that our modern human diversity didn’t just evolve – some parts of…

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Cooked leftovers suggest Neanderthals were foodies

Cooked leftovers suggest Neanderthals were foodies

The Guardian reports: If you thought Neanderthals survived on a diet of foraged berries and uncooked animal flesh, think again. Charred remnants of what appears to be the world’s oldest cooked meal ever found have been unearthed in a cave complex in northern Iraq, prompting speculation that Neanderthals may have been foodies. “Our findings are the first real indication of complex cooking – and thus of food culture – among Neanderthals,” said Chris Hunt, a professor of cultural paleoecology at…

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