Humans news stories

For ice age hunters in Europe some 30,000 years ago, styles of ornaments including amber pendants, ivory bangles, and fox tooth beads may have also signaled membership in a particular culture, researchers report in Nature Human Behaviour.

A team of Japanese scientists analysed coprolites (fossilised faeces) from the Early Jomon period, about 7,000-5,500 years ago. The researchers have published their findings in PLOS One.

The birds’ brains and behavior could give clues to the evolution of intelligence.

An iron age workshop, where blacksmiths were forging metal about 2,700 years ago, has been discovered in Oxfordshire…This was no ordinary smithy but a highly skilled producer of large and high-end iron artefacts, including everything from swords to chariot wheels.

Underneath a temple in the ancient ruined city of Taposiris Magna on the Egyptian coast, archaeologists uncovered a vast, spectacular tunnel that experts are referring to as a “geometric miracle”.

Recent research has unveiled the intricate patterns of human settlements on China’s Ordos Plateau, stretching back to the Neolithic Age. This study analyzing the spatiotemporal distribution of these settlements, sheds new light on the dynamic interplay between humans and their environment through millennia.

This story begins with a funeral. On my 33rd birthday in June, I entered my coffin on five grams of mushrooms, had it “nailed” shut, and listened while sixteen friends delivered eulogies as the soundtrack to my trip.

A new analysis of a skeleton buried under Hernán Cortés’ palace in Mexico reveals that it doesn’t belong to a monk, as was long thought.

Some 9,700 years ago, on an autumn day, a group of people were camping on the west coast of Scandinavia. They were hunter-gatherers that had been fishing, hunting and collecting resources in the area. Analysis of DNA left in the chewed resin has been published in Scientific Reports.

A new study offers preliminary evidence that small, regular doses of psilocybin could potentially offer therapeutic benefits, particularly in reducing stress-induced anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure) and compulsive behaviors.

Researchers have been able to prove, in the first archaeobotanical study of burnt food residues on the surface of ceramic vessels, how varied the meals prepared in Eastern Holstein 5,000 years ago were.

About 8,200 years ago, an underwater landslide known as the Storegga slide near Norway triggered a tsunami that engulfed parts of northern Europe. Around the same time, there was a massive dip in Britain’s population. See the research here.

In a groundbreaking study, researchers at the University of Chicago have discovered that low doses of LSD may have potential antidepressant effects. The findings have been published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

Evidence of at least four populations from different times in Brazil’s history was found at the same archaeological site.

Windswept piles of dust, or layers of ice? ESA’s Mars Express has revisited one of Mars’s most mysterious features to clarify its composition. Its findings suggest layers of water ice stretching several kilometers below ground—the most water ever found in this part of the planet.

The random nature of genetic mutation implies evolution is largely unpredictable. But recent research suggests this may not be entirely so, with interactions between genes playing a bigger role than expected in determining how a genome changes.