Bruce Bower

Bruce Bower

Behavioral Sciences Writer

Bruce Bower has written about the behavioral sciences since 1984. He often writes about psychology, anthropology, archaeology and mental health issues. Bruce has a master's degree in psychology from Pepperdine University and a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. Following an internship at Science News in 1981, he worked as a reporter at Psychiatric News, a publication of the American Psychiatric Association, until joining Science News as a staff writer. In 1996, the American Psychological Association appointed Bruce a Science Writer Fellow, with a grant to visit psychological scientists of his own choosing. Early stints as an aide in a day school for children and teenagers with severe psychological problems and as a counselor in a drug diversion center provided Bruce with a surprisingly good background for a career in science journalism.

All Stories by Bruce Bower

  1. Archaeology

    Homo sapiens may have reached Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought

    Archaeological finds in an ancient French rock-shelter suggest migrations to the continent started long before Neandertals died out.

  2. Archaeology

    ‘Origin’ explores the controversial science of the first Americans

    A new book looks at how genetics has affected the study of humans’ arrival in the Americas and sparked conflicts with Indigenous groups today.

  3. Archaeology

    A taste for wild cereal sowed farming’s spread in ancient Europe

    Balkan groups collected and ate wild cereal grains several millennia before domesticated cereals reached Europe.

  4. Archaeology

    Gold and silver tubes in a Russian museum are the oldest known drinking straws

    Long metal tubes enabled communal beer drinking more than 5,000 years ago, scientists say.

  5. Anthropology

    Homo sapiens bones in East Africa are at least 36,000 years older than once thought

    Analyses of remnants of a volcanic blast push the age of East Africa’s oldest known H. sapiens fossils at Ethiopia’s Omo site to 233,000 years or more.

  6. Archaeology

    Clovis hunters’ reputation as mammoth killers takes a hit

    Early Americans’ stone points were best suited to butchering the huge beasts’ carcasses, scientists contend.

  7. Archaeology

    Arctic hunter-gatherers were advanced ironworkers more than 2,000 years ago

    Swedish excavations uncover furnaces and fire pits from a big metal operation run by a small-scale society, a new study finds.

  8. Archaeology

    Neandertals were the first hominids to turn forest into grassland 125,000 years ago

    Neandertals’ campfires, hunting and other activities altered the land over 2,000 years, making them the first known hominids to impact their environs.

  9. Anthropology

    2021 research reinforced that mating across groups drove human evolution

    Fossils and DNA point to mixing and mingling among Homo groups across vast areas.

  10. Anthropology

    Ancient footprints suggest a mysterious hominid lived alongside Lucy’s kind

    A previously unknown hominid species may have left its marks in muddy ash about 3.66 million years ago in what is now East Africa.

  11. Anthropology

    Ancient giant orangutans evolved smaller bodies surprisingly slowly

    Fossil teeth from Chinese caves indicate that a single, ancient orangutan species gradually trimmed down over nearly 2 million years.

  12. Anthropology

    ‘The Dawn of Everything’ rewrites 40,000 years of human history

    A new book recasts human social evolution as multiple experiments with freedom and domination that started in the Stone Age.