Humans news stories

This will be the last Super Blue Moon until 2037.

Bees may be the source of pollen near remains, but evidence still suggests bodies were buried with care. See the research here.

The study, conducted by researchers at New York University’s Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine and the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, suggests that “co-use of MDMA with psilocybin/LSD may buffer against some aspects of challenging experiences and enhance certain positive experiences”.

Image by: William Rafti (Wiki Commons)

Jujuy is located in what has become known as the “lithium triangle”, a stretch of the Andes straddling the tri-border area between Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, which holds the world’s biggest reserves of lithium.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has a message for young people.

Dreams are one of the most universal yet elusive human experiences…Most people rarely, if ever, realize that they’re dreaming while it’s happening, what’s known as lucid dreaming. But some enthusiasts have cultivated techniques to become self-aware in their sleep and even wrest some control over their dream selves and settings.

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of unique early Neolithic burial practices in Galería del Sílex in Spain, following an analysis of ceramic vessels found with human remains in two pits. The study has been published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

Peruvian archaeologists have uncovered the 3,000-year-old remains of what is believed to be one of the first priests of the ancient north Andean region.

Research led by Complutense University, Madrid, has discovered an array of ancient cave paintings hidden among previously described cave art. In a paper, “Animals hidden in plain sight: stereoscopic recording of Paleolithic rock art at La Pasiega cave, Cantabria,” published in Antiquity, the team fills in details missing from previous photographic images.

A new fossil ape from an 8.7-million-year-old site in Türkiye is challenging long-accepted ideas of human origins and adding weight to the theory that the ancestors of African apes and humans evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa between nine and seven million years ago. See the study here.

The team extracted DNA from the samples by adapting a protocol previously used for other porous materials, such as bone. The results are published in Scientific Reports.

A recent case study published in Frontiers in Psychology sought to compare the experiences of a near-death experience (NDE) and an experience induced by the psychedelic drug 5-MeO-DMT.

The find provides a rare glimpse into the role played by sound and dance in ancient societies. See the research here.

When archaeologists recently carried out an excavation at Vinjeøra in southern Trøndelag County, they made a surprising discovery that they had only dreamed of finding.

Studies suggest that H. sapiens last shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 years ago, though the exact date of the split is debated. Neanderthals arose as a distinct population between 400,000 and 350,000 years ago and went extinct around 40,000 years ago, though exactly why isn’t clear.

In a new study, published in August 2023, we sought to understand changes that were happening in California during the last major extinction event at the end of the Pleistocene, a time period known as the Ice Age.