Showing posts with the label
Anthropology
The skeleton, discovered in a leather pouch behind an abandoned church, was pristine: a tiny figure, just six inches long, with a cone-shaped head, 10 pairs of ribs, and bones that looked like those …
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have sequenced the genomes of five Neanderthals that lived between 39,000 and 47,000 years ago. These late N…
The origin of the Dravidian language family, consisting of about 80 varieties spoken by 220 million people across southern and central India and surrounding countries, can be dated to about 4,500 yea…
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have cracked the evolutionary mystery of why chimpanzees and gorillas walk on their knuckles: The short explanation is that these African apes climb tre…
A long-standing debate in the field of cultural evolution has revolved around the question of how and why human societies become more hierarchical. Some theorize that material changes to a society…
An international team of researchers, led by Johannes Krause and Choongwon Jeong from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Jena, Germany), and Abdeljalil Bouzouggar from the Ins…
Modern humans co-existed and interbred not only with Neanderthals, but also with another species of archaic humans, the mysterious Denisovans. While developing a new genome-analysis method for compar…
Researchers for the first time reconstructed the head of a woman from the Jomon Pottery Culture period (c. 8000 B.C.-300 B.C.) using a DNA analysis that removed much of the guesswork usually involved…
They have an unwarranted image as brutish and uncaring, but new research has revealed just how knowledgeable and effective Neanderthal healthcare was. Neanderthals were genuinely caring of their peer…
The newcomers who arrived in the little farming villages of medieval Germany would have stood out: They had dark hair and tawny skin, spoke a different language and had remarkably tall heads. Skulls …
In a multidisciplinary study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , an international team of researchers combined archaeological, genetic and stable isotope data to encapsulat…
Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) have helped put together the most comprehensive study ever conducted into the origins of people in Vanuatu -- regarded as a geographic gatewa…
Homo naledi's relatively taller and more wear resistant molars enabled it to have a much more abrasive diet than other South African hominins. This is the result of a recent study published in th…
Trepanation – the technique of removing bone from the skull by scraping, sawing, drilling or chiselling – has long fascinated those interested in the darker side of medical history. One stock tale is…
A team of scientists including researchers from Washington State University has shown for the first time that nicotine residue can be extracted from plaque, also known as "dental calculus,"…
New genetic research reveals the complex demographic history of Vanuatu, explaining how Austronesian languages were retained throughout its history despite near-total replacement of early Austronesia…
