Anthropology

  1. 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.

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  2. 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.

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  3. 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.

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  4. 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.

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  5. 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.

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  6. Anthropology

    Temples of Boom: Ancient Hawaiians took fast road to statehood

    A boom in temple construction on two Hawaiian islands around 400 years ago marked the surprisingly rapid formation of an early political state.

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  7. Anthropology

    Suddenly Civilized: New finds push back Americas’ first society

    The earliest known civilization in the Americas appears to have emerged about 5,000 years ago in what's now Peru.

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  8. Anthropology

    Fossil ape makes evolutionary debut

    Newly discovered fossils from an ape that lived in what's now northeastern Spain around 13 million years ago may hold clues to the evolutionary roots of living apes and people.

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  9. Anthropology

    Apes, monkeys split earlier than fossils had indicated

    A new genetic analysis pushes back the estimated time at which ancient lineages of monkeys and apes diverged to between 29 million and 34.5 million years ago, at least 4 million years earlier than previously thought.

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  10. Anthropology

    Remnants of the Past

    Sophisticated analyses suggest that some prehistoric peoples were highly skilled weavers.

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  11. Anthropology

    South American Surprise: Ancient farmers settled in Uruguay’s wetlands

    The discovery of a 4,200-year-old farming settlement in Uruguay challenges traditional notions of where early South American societies took root.

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  12. Anthropology

    Evolutionary Shrinkage: Stone Age Homo find offers small surprise

    Scientists announced the discovery of the partial skeleton of a small-bodied Homo species that inhabited an eastern Indonesian island from at least 38,000 years ago until about 18,000 years ago.

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