Early Humans News

April 12, 2025

Top Headlines

Footprints Reveal Prehistoric Scottish Lagoons Were Stomping Grounds for Giant Jurassic Dinosaurs

Apr. 2, 2025 — Jurassic dinosaurs milled about ancient Scottish lagoons, leaving up to 131 footprints at a newly discovered stomping ground on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, according to a new ...

Machine Learning Helps Construct an Evolutionary Timeline of Bacteria

Apr. 3, 2025 — Scientists have helped to construct a detailed timeline for bacterial evolution, suggesting some bacteria used oxygen long before evolving the ability to produce it through ...

First Ancient Genomes from the Green Sahara Deciphered

Apr. 2, 2025 — An international team has sequenced the first ancient genomes from the so-called Green Sahara, a period when the largest desert in the world temporarily turned into a humid savanna-like environment. By analyzing the DNA of two 7,000-year-old ...

Discovery of Quina Technology Challenges View of Ancient Human Development in East Asia

Mar. 31, 2025 — Researchers have uncovered a complete Quina technological system in the Longtan site in southwest China. The discovery challenges the widely held perception that the Middle Paleolithic period was ...

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A Genetic Tree as a Movie: Moving Beyond the Still Portrait of Ancestry

Mar. 27, 2025 — Researchers have created a way to see your family tree as a movie rather than a still portrait by tracing where your ancestors moved across the globe over time. The statistical method can also be ...

Genetic Study Reveals Hidden Chapter in Human Evolution

Mar. 18, 2025 — Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the ...

When Did Human Language Emerge?

Mar. 18, 2025 — Humans' unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago, according to a survey of genomic evidence. As such, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ...

Dozens of 3-Toed Dinosaurs Leave Their Mark in Australia

Mar. 13, 2025 — A researcher has confirmed a boulder at a regional school contains one of the highest concentrations of dinosaur footprints per square meter ever documented in ...

Prehistoric Bone Tool 'Factory' Hints at Early Development of Abstract Reasoning in Human Ancestors

Mar. 5, 2025 — The oldest collection of mass-produced prehistoric bone tools reveal that human ancestors were likely capable of more advanced abstract reasoning one ...

Humans Inherited Their Flexible Joints from the Earliest Jawed Fish

Feb. 25, 2025 — The efficient architecture of our joints, which allows our skeletons to be flexible and sturdy, originated among our most ancient jawed fish ancestors, according to a new ...

New Study Reveals Neanderthals Experienced Population Crash 110,000 Years Ago

Feb. 25, 2025 — A new study suggests that Neanderthals experienced a dramatic loss of genetic variation during the course of their evolution, foreshadowing their ...

Does Planetary Evolution Favor Human-Like Life? Study Ups Odds We're Not Alone

Feb. 14, 2025 — Humanity may not be extraordinary but rather the natural evolutionary outcome for our planet and likely others, according to a new model for how ...

Ancient DNA Analyses Bring to Life the 11,000-Year Intertwined Genomic History of Sheep and Humans

Jan. 30, 2025 — The rise of pastoralist peoples in the Eurasian steppes and their westward spread some 5,000 years ago may have been fueled by sheep herding and ...

Three Million Years Ago, Our Ancestors Were Vegetarian

Jan. 17, 2025 — Human ancestors like Australopithecus -- which lived around 3.5 million years ago in southern Africa -- ate very little to no meat, according to new research. This conclusion comes from an analysis ...

Early Humans Adapted to Harsh Conditions More Than a Million Years Ago

Jan. 16, 2025 — A long-standing question about when archaic members of the genus Homo adapted to harsh environments such as deserts and rainforests has been answered in a new research ...

Protein Shapes Can Help Untangle Life's Ancient History

Jan. 15, 2025 — The three-dimensional shape of a protein can be used to resolve deep, ancient evolutionary relationships in the tree of life, according to a new study. It is the first time researchers use data from ...

A New Timeline for Neanderthal Interbreeding With Modern Humans

Dec. 12, 2024 — Neanderthal genes make up 1-2% of the genomes of non-Africans. Scientists analyzed the lengths of regions of Neanderthal DNA in 58 ancient Eurasian genomes of early modern humans and determined that ...

Oldest Modern Human Genomes Sequenced

Dec. 12, 2024 — Few genomes have been sequenced from early modern humans, who first arrived in Europe when the region was already inhabited by Neanderthals. An international team has now sequenced the oldest modern ...

Earliest Deep-Cave Ritual Compound in Southwest Asia Discovered

Dec. 9, 2024 — A cave in Galilee, Israel, has yielded evidence for ritualistic gathering 35,000 years ago, the earliest on the Asian ...

Chimpanzees Perform the Same Complex Behaviors That Have Brought Humans Success

Dec. 5, 2024 — A new study suggests that the fundamental abilities underlying human language and technological culture may have evolved before humans and apes diverged millions of years ...

How Did Humans and Dogs Become Friends? Connections in the Americas Began 12,000 Years Ago

Dec. 4, 2024 — A new study sheds light on how long humans in the Americas have had relationships with the ancestors of today's dogs -- and asks an 'existential question': What is a ...

A Fossil First: Scientists Find 1.5-Million-Year-Old Footprints of Two Different Species of Human Ancestors at Same Spot

Nov. 28, 2024 — More than a million years ago, on a hot savannah teeming with wildlife near the shore of what would someday become Lake Turkana in Kenya, two completely different species of hominins may have passed ...

Brains Grew Faster as Humans Evolved

Nov. 27, 2024 — Brain size increased gradually within each ancient human species rather than through sudden leaps between ...

Herodotus' Theory on Armenian Origins Challenged by First Whole-Genome Study

Nov. 25, 2024 — Armenians, a population in Western Asia historically inhabiting the Armenian highlands, were long believed to be descendants of Phrygian settlers from the Balkans. This theory originated largely from ...

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. 14, 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 ...

More Evidence That Europe's Ancient Landscapes Were Open Woodlands: Oak, Hazel and Yew Were Abundant

Nov. 13, 2024 — A new study finds that the disturbance-demanding plant species oak, hazel and yew were abundant in Europe's forests before modern humans arrived, strengthening the argument that ancient ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 38 genomes harvested from bones dating across 50 ...

'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 ...

Turtle Genome Provides New Clues on the Evolution of Vertebrates

Oct. 21, 2024 — Scientists have generated the genome assemblies of two hidden-neck turtles, unpublished until now. The results, which revealed a new three-dimensional structure of the genome within the phylogenetic ...

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 ...