Anthropology

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.