Anthropology News

November 20, 2024

Top Headlines

The Chilling Sound of the Aztec Death Whistle

Nov. 19, 2024 — The Aztec skull whistle produces a shrill, screaming sound. A study shows that these whistles have a disturbing effect on the human brain. The Aztecs may have deliberately used this effect in sacrificial ...

Earliest Evidence of Humans Using Fire to Shape the Landscape of Tasmania

Nov. 16, 2024 — Some of the first human beings to arrive in Tasmania, over 41,000 years ago, used fire to shape and manage the landscape, about 2,000 years earlier than previously ...

The Secrets of Fossil Teeth Revealed by the Synchrotron: A Long Childhood Is the Prelude to the Evolution of a Large Brain

Nov. 13, 2024 — Could social bonds be the key to human big brains? A study of the fossil teeth of early Homo from Georgia dating back 1.77 million years reveals a prolonged childhood despite a small brain and an ...

New Insights Into the Denisovans: New Hominin Group That Interbred With Modern Day Humans

Nov. 8, 2024 — Scientists believe individuals of the most recently discovered 'hominin' group (the Denisovans) that interbred with modern day humans passed on some of their genes via multiple, distinct ...

Latest Headlines

updated 11:25pm EST

DNA Evidence Rewrites Story of People Buried in Pompeii Eruption

Nov. 7, 2024 — Researchers have used ancient DNA to challenge long-held interpretations of the people of Pompeii. Contrary to physical appearances, the DNA evidence revealed unexpected variations in gender and ...

Indigenous Cultural Burning Has Protected Australia's Landscape for Millennia, Study Finds

Nov. 1, 2024 — Ancient cultural burning practices carried out by Indigenous Australians limited fuel availability and prevented high intensity fires in southeastern ...

Evolutionary Paths Vastly Differ for Birds, Bats

Nov. 1, 2024 — New research has found that, unlike birds, the evolution of bats' wings and legs is tightly coupled, which may have prevented them from filling as many ecological niches as ...

The 'Urban Revolution' Was Slow in Bronze Age Arabia

Oct. 30, 2024 — Settlements in northern Arabia were in a transitional stage of urbanization during the third to second millennium BCE, according to a new ...

A Novel Neural Network for Preserving Cultural Heritage Via 3D Image Reconstruction

Oct. 31, 2024 — Relief-type cultural heritage objects are commonly found in many historical sites worldwide, but often suffer from varying levels of damage and ...

Ancient DNA Brings to Life History of the Iconic Aurochs, Whose Tale Is Intertwined With Climate Change and Human Culture

Oct. 30, 2024 — Geneticists have deciphered the prehistory of aurochs -- the animals that were the focus of some of the most iconic early human art -- by analyzing ...

Have We Found All the Major Maya Cities? Not Even Close, New Research Suggests

Oct. 29, 2024 — Researchers used laser-guided imaging to uncover vast unexplored Maya settlements in Campeche, Mexico, revealing more than 6,500 pre-Hispanic ...

Scientists Create Geochemical Fingerprints

Oct. 28, 2024 — Using new technology, researchers have been able to confirm the location of the world's oldest ochre mine and trace how ochre from the mine was dispersed to nearby ...

'Well-Man' Thrown from Castle Identified from 800-Year-Old Norse Saga

Oct. 25, 2024 — A passage in the Norse Sverris Saga, the 800-year-old story of King Sverre Sigurdsson, describes a military raid that occurred in AD 1197, during which a body was thrown into a well at Sverresborg ...

'Paleo-Robots' to Help Scientists Understand How Fish Started to Walk on Land

Oct. 23, 2024 — The transition from water to land is one of the most significant events in the history of life on Earth. Now, a team of roboticists, palaeontologists ...

Into the Great Wide Open: How Steppe Pastoralist Groups Formed and Transformed Over Time

Oct. 30, 2024 — With the 'time-traveling ability' of archaeogenetic studies it has become possible to shed light onto the dynamic past of human populations world-wide. Integrated with archaeological and ...

Traces of Ancient Immigration Patterns to Japan Found in 2000-Year-Old Genome

Oct. 14, 2024 — A joint research group has demonstrated that the majority of immigration to the Japanese Archipelago in the Yayoi and Kofun periods (between 3000 BCE and 538 CE) came from the Korean Peninsula. The ...

Genomic Study Identifies Human, Animal Hair in 'Man-Eater' Lions' Teeth

Oct. 11, 2024 — Scientists analyzed hairs extracted from the broken teeth of two 19th century 'man-eater' lions. Their analysis revealed DNA from giraffe, human, oryx, waterbuck, wildebeest and zebra as ...

Early Human Species Benefited from Food Diversity in Steep Mountainous Terrain

Oct. 10, 2024 — A new study shows that the patchwork of different ecosystems found in mountainous regions played a key role in the evolution of ...

Fossils and Fires: Insights Into Early Modern Human Activity in the Jungles of Southeast Asia

Oct. 10, 2024 — Studying microscopic layers of dirt dug from the Tam Pa Ling cave site in northeastern Laos has provided a team of archaeologists further insights into some of the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens ...

In Studying the Mating Rituals of Fruit Flies, Scientists May Have Learned Something About How Brains Evolve

Oct. 9, 2024 — Researchers have identified how the architecture of brain circuits helps different species flexibly adapt to new mating signals across evolutionary ...

Underwater Caves Yield New Clues About Sicily's First Residents

Oct. 9, 2024 — Archaeological surveys suggest that coastal and underwater cave sites in southern Sicily contain important new clues about the path and fate of early human migrants to the ...

2-Billion-Year-Old Rock Home to Living Microbes

Oct. 3, 2024 — Pockets of microbes have been found living within a sealed fracture in 2-billion-year-old rock. The rock was excavated from the Bushveld Igneous Complex in South Africa, an area known for its rich ...

Twice as Many Women as Men Were Buried in the Megalithic Necropolis of Panoria, Study Finds

Sep. 25, 2024 — A new study uncovers gender bias at the megalithic necropolis of Panoria where twice as many women were ...

World's Oldest Cheese Reveals Origins of Kefir

Sep. 25, 2024 — Scientists successfully extracted and analyzed DNA from ancient cheese samples found alongside the Tarim Basin mummies in China, dating back approximately 3,600 years. The research suggests a new ...

Multilingual Gossip in Elizabethan London

Sep. 24, 2024 — Stranger churches in early modern London had 'eyes everywhere' to hear, spread and dispel gossip in multiple languages, according to new ...

Scientists Turn to Human Skeletons to Explore Origins of Horseback Riding

Sep. 20, 2024 — A new, wide-ranging exploration of human remains casts doubt on a long-standing theory in archaeology known as the Kurgan hypothesis -- which, among other claims, suggests that humans first ...

Insights Into South African Population History from 10,000-Year-Old Human DNA

Sep. 19, 2024 — Ancient DNA has provided spectacular insights into human history, particularly in Europe and Asia, where researchers have reconstructed the genomes of thousands of people. However, fewer than two ...

Early Dingoes Are Related to Dogs from New Guinea and East Asia

Sep. 18, 2024 — New archaeological research has discovered for the first time clear links between fossils of the iconic Australian dingo, and dogs from East Asia and New ...

New Fossil Fish Species Scales Up Evidence of Earth's Evolutionary March

Sep. 12, 2024 — Climate change and asteroids are linked with animal origin and extinction -- and plate tectonics also seems to play a key evolutionary role, 'groundbreaking' new fossil research reveals. ...

Research Reveals Reality of Ice Age Teen Puberty

Sep. 12, 2024 — Landmark new research shows Ice Age teens from 25,000 years ago went through similar puberty stages as modern-day ...

The Neanderthals May Have Become Extinct Because of Their Isolated Lifestyle

Sep. 12, 2024 — Neanderthal remains recently discovered in a cave in France support well-known theory of why the Neanderthals became extinct, researchers behind a new study ...

Risky Play Exercises an Ancestral Need to Push Limits

Sep. 11, 2024 — Since their invention in the 1920s, jungle gyms and monkey bars have become both fixtures of playgrounds and symbols of childhood injury that anxious caretakers want removed. Anthropologists mark 100 ...

Agriculture Accelerated Human Genome Evolution to Capture Energy from Starchy Foods

Sep. 4, 2024 — Scientists have suspected that modern humans have more genes to digest starch than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but the amylase locus of the genome is hard to study. Researchers have now developed ...

New Population Model Identifies Phases of Human Dispersal Across Europe

Sep. 4, 2024 — Researchers have developed a model that captures the dynamics of human dispersal across the continent during the last Ice Age in unprecedented ...