Anthropology

  1. Anthropology

    Stone Age campers set up separate activity areas

    Hominids displayed advanced organizational thinking almost 800,000 years ago

    By Bruce Bower
  2. Anthropology

    Ancient Maya king shows his foreign roots

    Copán’s first king may have been part of a colonial expansion by another, distant Maya kingdom.

    By Bruce Bower
  3. Anthropology

    Contested signs of mass cannibalism

    A new study yields controversial evidence of mass cannibalism in central Europe 7,000 years ago.

    By Bruce Bower
  4. Anthropology

    For Hadza, build and brawn don’t matter for choosing mates

    Study of hunter-gatherer community in Tanzania shows that, across human groups, mating criteria vary.

    By Bruce Bower
  5. Anthropology

    Macaws bred far from tropics during pre-Columbian times

    Colorful birds possibly raised for ceremonial and trade purposes long before Spanish arrival

    By Bruce Bower
  6. Anthropology

    Droughts gave early humans survival skills for later travels

    Droughts were actually good times for early humans, helping to develop skills for survival in other parts of the world, Lisa Grossman reports in a blog from the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing's New Horizons in Science meeting.

    By Lisa Grossman
  7. Anthropology

    Pygmies’ short stature linked to high death rates

    Island-dwelling pygmies provide contested evidence that body size shrinks as mortality rates climb.

    By Bruce Bower
  8. Anthropology

    DNA points to India’s two-pronged ancestry

    Two ancient populations laid the genetic foundation for most people now living in India, a new DNA study suggests.

    By Bruce Bower
  9. Anthropology

    Stone Age twining unraveled

    Plant fibers excavated at a cave in western Asia suggest that people there made twine more than 30,000 years ago.

    By Bruce Bower
  10. Anthropology

    Humanity’s upright gait may have roots in trees

    A comparison of wrist bones from African apes and monkeys indicates that human ancestors began walking by exploiting the evolutionary legacy of ancient, tree-climbing apes.

    By Bruce Bower
  11. Health & Medicine

    Chimpanzees die from primate version of HIV

    A new study links the simian immunodeficiency virus to serious AIDS-like illness in a wild population.

    By Rachel Ehrenberg
  12. Anthropology

    Maize may have fueled ancient Andean civilization

    A chemical analysis of skeletons from Peru’s Andes Mountains suggests that cultivation of key crop made building a prehistoric civilization possible.

    By Bruce Bower