Newsdesk Archive
A widely accepted theory of Native American origins coming from Japan has been attacked in a new scientific study, which shows that the genetics and skeletal biology "simply does not match-up".
Exactly how and when people settled in North America is a topic of much fascination for experts, and now a new analysis of ancient documents is shedding light on some lesser known details of this long-contested timeline.
States are generally following the same model for marijuana legalization. They don’t have to.
The researchers are sure now they've sent the robot to a location that provides the best possible opportunity to find signs of ancient life.
The oldest known footprints of pre-humans were found on the Mediterranean island of Crete and are at least six million years old, says an international team of researchers...
The close of the Eocene roughly 33 million years ago marks a time of great change on Earth. In a slow reversal of what we're seeing today, temperatures dropped and glaciers stretched their icy fingers towards the equator.
In the beginning, there was … well, maybe there was no beginning. Perhaps our universe has always existed — and a new theory of quantum gravity reveals how that could work.
Seattle is now the largest city in the United States to decriminalize psychedelic plants and fungi.
In our mythologies, there’s often a singular moment when we became “human”. Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge and gained awareness of good and evil. Prometheus created men from clay and gave them fire. But in the modern origin story, evolution, there’s no defining moment of creation. Instead, humans emerged gradually, generation by generation, from earlier species.
Dating from 120,000 to 90,000 years ago, the bone tools were found in association with carnivore remains that showed signs of skinning for furs and pelts.
Previous studies have also found that LSD, another psychedelic drug, can enhance the emotional responses triggered by music, so the team wanted to find out if psilocybin had a similar effect.
Research on remains provides first clue that mixing between early humans in Indonesia and Siberia happened earlier than previously thought.
A pair of space scientists, one with the University of Antioquia, the other the University of Salento, has found evidence of a swarm of large asteroids hidden in the Taurid complex.
It's a question that has puzzled observers for centuries: do the fantastic green and crimson light displays of the aurora borealis produce any discernible sound?
New research led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has re-examined a key Acheulean site at the margins of the monsoon zone in the Thar Desert, Rajasthan, revealing the presence of Acheulean populations until about 177,000 years ago, shortly before the earliest expansions of Homo sapiens across Asia.
For the vast majority of animals on Earth, breath is synonymous with life. Yet for the first 2 billion years of our planet's existence, oxygen was in scarce supply.
Graham Hancock: In late 2020 I returned to the enigmatic site of Karahan Tepe (near the more famous site of Gobekli Tepe) in Anatolia, Turkey, to research the mind-blowing new excavations underway there (my previous visit to Karahan Tepe, described in my book Magicians of the Gods, was in 2014 when the site was largely unexcavated)...
Photos by Santha Faiia
The use of psychedelic drugs is associated with lower levels of complex posttraumatic stress symptoms and internalized shame in adults who suffered maltreatment in childhood, according to new research published in the journal Chronic Stress.
An international team of researchers has discovered the first fossilised bone from a Pleistocene-era human in Wallacea, the cluster of Indonesian islands, including Lombok, Sulaewsi, Timor and Sumba, that were the likely seafaring gateway for the first humans to populate Australia.
Ancient cut marks on mammoth bones unearthed on a remote island in the frozen extremes of Siberia are the northernmost evidence of Paleolithic humans ever found, according to archaeologists.
LSD and psilocybin increasingly show promise as mental health treatments. Now universities and companies are exploring their use in pain management
The findings are welcomed by supporters of cometary catastrophe theories from Earth’s history.
Paper found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com
With powerful legs tipped by dagger-like talons, capable of eviscerating you with a single kick, cassowaries are the bird that most lives up to the moniker of a modern dinosaur.
A 25m-year-old eagle fossil discovered on a remote outback cattle station in South Australia has been identified as one of the oldest raptor species in the world.
Many local people believe the enormous pit is a prison for genies and a gateway to the underworld.
A startling recent discovery by the Pacunam Lidar Initiative, a research consortium involving a Brown University anthropologist, has ancient Mesoamerican scholars across the globe wondering whether they know Tikal as well as they think.
Researchers excavating a cave network on the Rock of Gibraltar have discovered a new chamber, sealed off from the world for at least 40,000 years, that could shed light on the culture and customs of the Neanderthals who occupied the area for a thousand centuries.
"Think of a coffee table. Short, broad, covered in spikes and walking towards you. That's an ankylosaur!"
New scientific research conducted by archaeologists has uncovered what they believe are the oldest known human footprints in North America.
On Friday, April 13, 2029, Earth will experience a dramatic close encounter with the asteroid 99942 Apophis
Astronomers analyzing 3D maps of the shapes and sizes of nearby molecular clouds have discovered a gigantic cavity in space.
New research published today in Nature makes the intriguing suggestion that the Polynesians who erected those mysterious stone figures on islands thousands of miles apart were actually descended from the same group of explorers.
Modern roads and developments share more similarities with ancient urban centers than we often realize – which is certainly the case with the sprawling Teotihuacan settlement, once located around 40 kilometers (25 miles) northeast of Mexico City.
Activists in Italy say they’ve gathered enough signatures to qualify a ballot measure that would decriminalize personal cultivation and use of not only marijuana but also psilocybin mushrooms and certain other psychoactive plants for personal use.
In the 12th century, Chinese and Japanese astronomers spotted a new light in the sky shining as brightly as Saturn.
In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3,600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE), the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant.
Researchers have rewritten Japanese history after uncovering a third, and previously unknown, group of ancestors that migrated to Japan around 2,000 years ago, of modern-day Japanese populations.
Neanderthal tooth in Iran from 42,000 years ago redraws human evolution. The Middle East was a border zone and we lived cheek by jowl, climatic conditions permitting, for hundreds of thousands of years
In new research our international team have discovered ancient hand and footprints high on the Tibetan plateau made by children.
A new simulation of the universe is a map and a time machine rolled up into one.
A new study suggests that all living snakes evolved from a handful of species that survived the giant asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs and most other living things at the end of the Cretaceous
The Pentagon has been quietly investigating unidentified flying objects since 2007. The fact that they think they might exist is good news to those who claim to have seen them.
Like a bowl of spaghetti noodles spilled across the floor of the North Sea, a vast array of hidden tunnel valleys wind and meander across what was once an ice-covered landscape.
The fossilized web of a 385-million-year-old root network has scientists reimagining what the world's first forests might once have looked like.
The fossilized web of a 385-million-year-old root network has scientists reimagining what the world's first forests might once have looked like.
Understanding the environmental conditions under which early humans dispersed out of Africa is important for understanding the factors that affected human evolution.
Inside some of our most magnificent trees, miniature worlds are at risk of extinction. The race is on to accelerate trees' ageing process, so these intricate communities aren't lost forever
Right now, a spacecraft is carrying a very special delivery to Earth after a years-long voyage to a cosmic destination that can shed light on how life might have first emerged on our planet and how we can protect it from future cosmic hazards.
Image from: asteroidmission.org (Wiki Commons)
The ability of the mind to generate the symptoms of illness is known as the “nocebo” effect. The nocebo effect is the unpopular twin brother of the placebo effect. Whereas the placebo effect alleviates pain and the symptoms of illness, the nocebo effect does the opposite: it generates pain and symptoms.
Neanderthals living in the Swabian Jura more than 45,000 years ago used sophisticated techniques with many different production strategies to make stone tools.
The growing legitimacy of psychedelics as therapies promises to transform how we view the extraordinary.
Prof Paul Davies suggests viruses may form vital part of ecosystems on other planets.
A billion years have vanished from the geological record – and over 152 years after this was first discovered, scientists can't agree on why.
Genetic "dark matter" may drive the emergence of new species, new research finds.
The new research establishes northern Arabia as a critical migration pathway in the storied history of our species.
Medieval manuscript fragments discovered in Bristol that tell part of the story of Merlin the magician, one of the most famous characters from Arthurian legend, have been identified by academics from the Universities of Bristol and Durham as some of the earliest surviving examples of that section of the narrative.
A wild boar carried out a daring mission to free two piglets from a trap, demonstrating high levels of intelligence and empathy, a new paper published in Scientific Reports shows
The Native Americans who occupied the area known as Poverty Point in northern Louisiana more than 3,000 years ago long have been believed to be simple hunters and gatherers. But new Washington University in St. Louis archaeological findings paint a drastically different picture of America's first civilization.
It's not quite a star, and it's not quite a planet — but it's soaring through the Milky Way, much closer than we thought.
Archaeologists have discovered some of the oldest artifacts ever found to be associated with beer, in a haul from Qiaotou in southern China dating back 9,000 years. However, it appears the ancient drinkers in question weren't in it simply for a buzz.
A mysterious stone tomb in western England — known as Arthur's Stone because of its links to the mythical King Arthur — originated almost 6,000 years ago as part of an elaborate "ceremonial landscape" across the whole area, according to archaeologists.
Scientists in Egypt have identified a new species of four-legged whale that lived around 43 million years ago.
Cambridge astronomers identify new hycean class of habitable exoplanets, which could accelerate search for life.
Abel Moclán, a researcher at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), is the lead author of a paper published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews which undertook a zooarchaeological and taphonomic study of the Neanderthal Navalmaíllo Rock Shelter site (Pinilla del Valle, Madrid), some 76,000 years old, whose results indicate that these Neanderthals mainly hunted large bovids and cervids.
The skeleton of an ancient woman, discovered in an Indonesian cave in 2015, appears to have ancestry unlike any other human found to date.
“We’re finding that there could be substantially more visitors,” say Harvard scientists
Scientists spot giant feature at edge of the galaxy.
The strength and direction of Earth's magnetic field has changed a lot over the millennia. Scientists are eager to study its past patterns to work out how the field might change in the future – a pretty vital research field, considering this magnetic shield protects us from damaging cosmic radiation.
Scientists create an exotic form of matter using ultracold gases of highly magnetic atoms.
People who use mental health services in Ireland generally have a favorable view of psychedelic research, according to a new study published in the Irish Journal of Medical Science. A little over half of those surveyed said they would be willing to try psilocybin therapy if their doctor recommended it.
Early on their quest to reach the Lonely Mountain in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), Bilbo Baggins and company cross paths with an enormous, shape-shifting warrior named Beorn.
Cuttlefish have one of the largest brains among invertebrates and can remember what, where, and when specific things happened right up to their final days of life, according to new research.
Astronomers have captured some of the most detailed images ever seen of galaxies in deep space.
On a sparse stretch of Vancouver’s East Hastings Street, the Coca Leaf Cafe & Mushroom Dispensary stands out.
Indigenous Ayta Magbukon people get 5 percent of their DNA from the mysterious ancient hominids.
The Solar System is positively lousy with magnetic fields. They drape around (most of) the planets and their moons, which interact with the system-wide magnetic field swirling out from the Sun.
The research shows that the Ice Age animal travelled a distance equivalent to circling the Earth twice.
In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, we have now shown that conscious brain activity seems to be linked to the brain’s “pleasure chemical,” dopamine.
Archaeologists from the Universities of Manchester and Cardiff have discovered the origins of Arthur's Stone, one of the UK's most famous Stone Age monuments.
According to theory, if you smash two photons together hard enough, you can generate matter: an electron-positron pair, the conversion of light to mass as per Einstein's theory of special relativity.
Neanderthals may have been closer to our species of prehistoric modern human than previously believed after cave paintings found in Spain proved they had a fondness for creating art, one of the authors of a new scientific report said on Sunday.
Modern analysis of a 1,000-year-old grave in Finland challenges long-held beliefs about gender roles in ancient societies, and may suggest non-binary people were not only accepted but respected members of their communities, researchers have said.
About 66 million years ago, an estimated 6-mile-wide (9.6 kilometers) object slammed into Earth, triggering a cataclysmic series of events that resulted in the demise of non-avian dinosaurs. Now, scientists think they know where that object came from.
Psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin and LSD can induce an experience known as oceanic boundlessness, which is characterized by a feeling of oneness with the world and a sense of awe. New research, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, provides some preliminary evidence that high doses of cannabis can also produce this type of altered state of consciousness.
A team of researchers from Zhengzhou University, the Modern Analysis and Computer Center of Zhengzhou University and Peking University, all in China, has found evidence of what appears to be the oldest coin-minting operation ever uncovered
Machu Picchu, the famous 15th-century Inca site in southern Peru, is up to several decades older than previously thought, according to a new study led by Yale archaeologist Richard Burger.
With a seven-meter wingspan, and a mouth bristling with fangs, a newly discovered pterosaur would have ruled the skies over Australia's northeast around 110 million years ago.
Wisdom, as Bob Marley put it, is better than gold. From next month however, the precious metal is central to a major new historical exhibition in Cambridge using loaned artefacts telling the story of an ancient civilization little known beyond Kazakhstan.
An "exciting" discovery of a Neolithic or early Bronze Age monument has been unearthed in an archaeological dig.
Old Babylonian tablet likely used for surveying uses Pythagorean triples at least 1,000 years before Pythagoras.
Scientists have found two huge, red objects in the asteroid belt that they believe are not supposed to be there – both of which have “complex organic matter” on their surfaces.
Researchers find North Africa’s oldest Stone Age hand-axe manufacturing site, dating back 1.3 million years.
An analysis of the blood types of one Denisovan and three Neanderthal individuals has uncovered new clues to the evolutionary history, health, and vulnerabilities of their populations
Intricate patterns of tubular structures discovered in giant ancient reefs may be the remnants of prehistoric horny sponges and the oldest known fossils of animal life on Earth.
Charles Darwin famously discussed the "imperfections" of the geological record in his book On The Origin of Species. He correctly pointed out that unless conditions are just right, it's unlikely for organisms to be preserved as fossils, even those with bones and shells.
Astronomers have detected light coming from behind a black hole for the first time, proving Albert Einstein right, yet again.
Ancient urn graves contain a wealth of information about a high-ranking woman and her Bronze Age Vatya community, according to a study published July 28, 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Claudio Cavazzuti from the University of Bologna, Italy, and Durham University, UK, and colleagues.
Iceland may be the last exposed remnant of a nearly Texas-size continent – called Icelandia – that sank beneath the North Atlantic Ocean about 10 million years ago, according to a new theory proposed by an international team of geophysicists and geologists.
A team from the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment found a 65,000-year-old Neanderthal leaf point at Hohle Fels Cave in southern Germany, a press release announced on Sunday.