Sound doesn't fossilize. Language doesn't either.
Even when writing systems have developed, they've represented full-fledged and functional languages. Rather than preserving the first baby steps toward language, they're fully formed, made up of words, sentences and grammar carried from one person to...
An international team, led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), Harvard University and the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), has used ancient DNA and a new data processing...
These are teeth from Megan Brickley's lab at McMaster University.
Credit: McMaster University
The story of humanity's vital -- and fragile -- relationship with the sun has been locked inside our teeth for hundreds of thousands of years. A new method...
Danish scientists have managed to extract a complete human DNA sample from a piece of birch pitch more than 5,000 years old, used as a kind of chewing gum, a study revealed Tuesday.
The Stone-Age sample yielded enough information to...
Every culture enjoys music and song, and those songs serve many different purposes: accompanying a dance, soothing an infant, or expressing love. Now, after analyzing recordings from all around the world, researchers reporting in Current Biology on January 25 show that...
The face of 'Cheddar Man', Britain's oldest nearly complete skeleton at 10,000 years old, is revealed for the first time and with unprecedented accuracy by UCL and Natural History Museum researchers.
The results indicate that Cheddar Man had blue eyes,...
Neolithic populations have long been credited with bringing about a revolution in farming practices across Europe. However, a new study suggests it was not until the Bronze Age several millennia later that human activity led to significant changes to...
Father loss is clearly associated with cellular function as estimated by telomere length: any father loss between birth and 9 years of age leads to a reduction in telomere length, and the effect is greatest for children whose fathers...
Hunter-gatherer societies typically had low wealth disparities. Their mobility would make it hard to accumulate wealth. (stock image)
Credit: © Rafal Cichawa / Fotolia
Researchers at Washington State University and 13 other institutions have found that the arc of prehistory bends...
A project led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has excavated the Panga ya Saidi cave site, in the coastal hinterland of Kenya. The excavations and analyses represent the longest archaeological sequence in East...
This is Lucy, a 3.18 million year old fossil specimen of Australopithecus afarensis.Credit: Image provided by John Kappelman, UT Austin
Lucy, the most famous fossil of a human ancestor, probably died after falling from a tree, according to a study...
