Anthropology

Anthropology

Climate shift shaped Aussie extinctions

Stone Age people lived virtually side-by-side with now-extinct animals in western Australia for 6,000 years.

Anthropology

Faithful Ancestors

A controversial fossil analysis supports the view that, more than 3 million years ago, human ancestors living in eastern Africa favored long-term mating partnerships.

Anthropology

Carnivore conflicts gnaw at Neandertals

Discoveries in a French cave indicate that by about 41,000 years ago, Neandertals and hyenas competed for prey and for access to protected sites where they could safely consume their food.

Anthropology

Founding Families: New World was settled by small tribe

A new genetic analysis indicates that only about 200 to 300 people crossed the ice age land bridge from Asia to become the founding population of North America.

Anthropology

Coasting to Asia in the Stone Age

New genetic analyses of people from native island groups in Southeast Asia support the unconventional view that around 70,000 years ago, people living in Africa crossed the Red Sea and moved east along Asia's southern coast.

Anthropology

These spines were made for walking

A new analysis of fossil backbones indicates that human ancestors living around 3 million years ago were able to walk much as people today do.

Anthropology

Noses didn’t need cold to evolve

Neandertals evolved big, broad noses not in response to a cold climate, as has often been argued, but in conjunction with the expansion of their upper jaws.

Anthropology

Stone Age Cutups: Deathly rituals emerge at Neandertal site

A new analysis of 130,000-year-old fossils found in a Croatian cave a century ago suggests that Neandertals ritually cut up corpses of their comrades and perhaps engaged in cannibalism.

Anthropology

Untangling Ancient Roots: Earliest hominid shows new, improved face

New fossil finds and a digitally reconstructed skull bolster the claim that the oldest known member of the human evolutionary family lived in central Africa between 6 million and 7 million years ago.

Anthropology

Inside view of our wee, ancient cousins

A tiny, humanlike species that inhabited an Indonesian island more than 20,000 years ago possessed a brain that shared some organizational features with Homo erectus, a large-brained human ancestor that thought in complex ways.

Anthropology

Human fossils are oldest yet

Homo sapiens fossils found along Ethiopia's Omo River in 1967 date to 195,000 years ago, making them the oldest-known remains of our species.

Anthropology

Cultivating Revolutions

New studies suggest that farmers spread from the Middle East throughout Europe beginning around 10,000 years ago in a multitude of small migrations that rapidly changed the continent's social and cultural landscape.