Humans news stories

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the new research proposes a transformative approach to economics—one that recognizes nature not merely as a resource, but as a living system deeply intertwined with human identity, culture, and well-being.

A cloud of dust escapes from an excavation site in the sand of Chad’s arid north, where scientists are looking for signs of human habitation in an area once humid and called the “Green Sahara.”

The findings, published in The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, unveil a previously undocumented Paleolithic presence in Ayvalık and more importantly could redocument our species’ migration into the continent.

The study, published in Nature Sustainability, describes a powerful new mechanism for increasing the extent of effective area-based protection by piggybacking on community management of natural resources. The paper is titled “Community-based management expands ecosystem protection footprint in Amazonian forests.”

From butterflies to grasshoppers, many delicate little things that run our world are in dire trouble. Not just in regions where human activity directly affects the landscape, but even in remote, human-free zones, a new study finds. The remote insect study was published in Ecology.

Orbiting spacecraft have peered inside the swirling vortex which encircles Mars’ north pole during winter and found an unexpected surge in ozone, raising questions as to whether the Red Planet once had a protective layer like Earth. Olsen presented the analysis last week at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the Division of Planetary Sciences (EPSC-DPS) in Helsinki, Finland.

A well-known Maya stone carving known as Altar Q, located at the site of Copán in Honduras, may use hand signs to represent key dates in the Maya Long Count Calendar, a new study claims.

On remote islands of Papua New Guinea, people carry a story that ties us all back to our deepest roots. Although their striking appearance once puzzled scientists, new genetic evidence shows they share a common ancestry with other Asians, shaped by isolation, adaptation, and even interbreeding with mysterious Denisovans. Yet, their unique history — marked by survival bottlenecks and separation from farming-driven booms — leaves open questions about the earliest migrations out of Africa and whether their lineage holds traces of a forgotten branch of humanity.

Reporting in PLOS One, UC Santa Barbara Emeritus Professor of Earth Science James Kennett and collaborators present their findings of shocked quartz—grains of sand deformed by extreme pressures and temperatures—at three classic Clovis culture archaeological sites in the United States: Murray Springs in Arizona, Blackwater Draw in New Mexico and Arlington Canyon in California’s Channel Islands.

Scientists have discovered what’s thought to be the oldest known mummies in the world in southeastern Asia, dating back up to 12,000 years. A new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pushes that timeline back.

Ancient bones discovered in a cave in Vietnam could belong to one of the world’s earliest known victims of homicide. The research has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Researchers have discovered that women and children were just as likely as men to be buried with stone tools at a Stone Age grave site, challenging the assumption that such tools were associated only with men. The full analysis of the burial site has been published in PLOS One.

Scientists at the University of Illinois have discovered that poorly aimed asteroid deflection attempts could accidentally steer space rocks through dangerous regions in space known as “gravitational keyholes” that would alas, still mean they hit Earth, just years or decades later!

A new long-term follow-up study has found that a significant majority of individuals treated for major depressive disorder with psilocybin-assisted therapy were still in remission from their depression five years later. The findings were published in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies.

Anthropologist Lee Berger and his team at the University of the Witwatersrand, working within the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, have published their most extensive evidence yet of deliberate burial by Homo Naledi, a small brained hominin that walked the Earth with several current modern human cousins over 240,000 years ago.

Data collected from the Perseverance rover last year has just delivered what might be the best evidence yet for microbial life on Mars. The research has been published in Nature.