News Desk

Their findings, published this week (Aug. 25) in Nature Communications, show that migration of farming groups was the dominant factor, while cultural adoption by hunter-gatherers only played a minimal role.

Tiny stone artifacts discovered in Uzbekistan may be the oldest known arrowheads, a new study suggests.

The skull of a small child who lived and died many millennia ago represents the oldest direct evidence to date of the prolonged mingling between anatomically modern humans and our closely related cousins, the Neanderthals. The research has been published in L’Anthropologie.

Around 12,000 years ago, a man was shot by an arrow with an exotic stone tip in what is now Vietnam. He survived the initial injury but likely succumbed to infection, a new analysis of his remains suggests.

When NASA’s Dawn mission arrived at Ceres in 2015, scientists and the general public got their first detailed look at this strange and beautiful planetoid. New research can be found in a paper summarising their findings, which was published on August 20th in Science Advances.

The near-Earth asteroid Bennu contains stardust that is older than the solar system and clues about its violent history, three new studies of the asteroid’s sample materials show.

Many key crops, such as wheat, barley, and legumes, have been traced to the Fertile Crescent and the harvesting of wild grains by a people known as the Natufians, roughly 10,000 years ago. Now, a new study by an interdisciplinary research team shows that, by at least 9,200 years ago, people as far north and east as southern Uzbekistan were harvesting wild barley using sickle blades as well.

Even the words we use to express our connection to nature are dwindling as the demands of modern life isolate us from the non-human world, according to a new study by psychologist Miles Richardson of the University of Derby in the UK. The research was published in Earth.

The research, published in PLOS One, proposes that the beginnings of urban civilisation in ancient Mesopotamia were driven by the dynamic relationships between rivers, tides and sediments at the head of the Persian Gulf.

Our new study, published in the journal Australian Archaeology, is the first archaeological research undertaken on the Great Papuan Plateau. The findings continue to undermine the historical Eurocentric idea that early Indigenous societies in this region were static and unchanging.

New data from the James Webb telescope suggests that Bennu and Ryugu — two asteroids recently visited by sample-return missions — are both fragments of a single massive “parent”. See the findings in a new study, published Aug. 18 in The Planetary Science Journal.

The mystery of the Petralona Cave skull centers around two intriguing unknowns. First, while it is clearly of the Homo genus, it is distinctly different from both Neanderthals and current modern humans. Next, dating the skull has remained difficult to narrow down, with previous estimates spanning about 170,000 to 700,000 years in age. See the study, “New U-series dates on the Petralona cranium, a key fossil in European human evolution,” published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

The research takes a new look at a species known as Denisovans. These ancient relatives of humans lived from what is today Russia south to Oceania and west to the Tibetan Plateau.The researchers published their results in the journal Science.

Isotopes shows animal began life in Wales, adding weight to theory cattle used in hauling stones across country

Have you ever wondered why people who nearly die often describe speeding toward supernatural light, or seeing their life flash before their eyes? You may have also heard about the powerful psychedelic dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a class A illegal drug in the UK, and how it might generate the so-called near-death experiences. In a recent study, I compared both types of experience and found they share fascinating similarities – but also critical differences.

The people of the ancient Incan empire kept careful records of their economics, religion, demographics and history. Those records took the form of knotted cords called khipus.