Stone tools show when we left Africa
Live Science reveals the simple treasures of Wadi Dabsa, where stone hand-axes, scrapers, spear-points and hammers are among a trove of relics that might show […]
archaeology
We found some runes by the railway….
LiveScience reports on Norwegian railway construction workers who found a whetstone carved with a (relatively rare) runic inscription: Runic writing was used in Norway and […]
Ancient women had strong arms, say bone studies.
Science News demonstrates how the prehistoric agricultural revolution was fueled by women with mighty arm muscles: In the early stages of farming more than 7,000 […]
Florida Man kills Clovis-First Hypothesis – with a few buddies on boats.
Ars Technica sums up research that kills the idea that the first Americans walked over Arctic ice from Russia. Instead, it really looks like humans […]
Science Art: Matsaki Polychrome Bowls of Shape 2, from The Excavation of Hawikuh, 1966.
Pottery charts are cool. This expedition report is full of ’em.
Civil War submarine mystery solved
Nature reports on researchers who have determined that the Confederate Navy’s Hunley – the first submarine to sink an enemy warship – probably sank itself […]
They drank bad water in Pompeii.
EurekAlert has research from the University of Southern Denmark on just how doomed Pompeii really was. Not only was that volcano about to engulf the […]
DNA is rewriting humans’ family tree… again.
PhysOrg looks back at our misunderstood ancestors with a University of Utah team that has revealed more about how – and when – Denisovans and […]
Science Art: Mummy Portrait of a Woman (73.AP.91), attributed to Malibu Painter.
Click to embiggen The Malibu Painter, who probably painted this, was not active in California’s surf culture, but in Egypt around the time the first […]
The Skull Cults of Göbekli Tepe
Science News brings some pretty pulpy-sounding history into the present day with the discovery that a group in the world’s oldest city was carving skulls […]
Neanderthal dentistry
PhysOrg has one more thing Neanderthals had that we have too – dental care: A discovery of multiple toothpick grooves on teeth and signs of […]
Sniffing out Amelia Earhart’s bones… with dogs.
National Geographic is following the Amelia Earhart research group TIGHAR – the same group that held the chilling experiments involving coconut crabs and pig carcasses […]
The oldest Homo sapiens are from Morocco. And pretty darn old.
Nature turns the origins of modern humans – not Neanderthals, not Denisovans, but Homo sapiens like you and me – back more than 100,000 years, […]
Science Art: Corpus of Prehistoric Pottery: Polished Red – p. 1-22
Click to embiggen Silhouettes of polished redware from the Ancient Egyptian (or, really, older than Ancient Egyptian) Naqada culture. That’s about 5,500 years old, a […]
Humans didn’t live with dinosaurs… but maybe with ape-men.
Nature shines new light on a very old hominid – “Neo,” the ape-like Homo naledi who may have coexisted with early modern humans: H. naledi […]