Humans news stories

Thousands of years ago, early hunter-gatherers returned regularly to Tagua Tagua Lake in Chile to hunt ancient elephants and take advantage of other local resources, according to a study published May 22 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Rafael Labarca of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and colleagues.

These traces of ancient viruses are the oldest remnants of human viruses ever discovered, New Scientist reported. They are around 20,000 years older than the previous record-holder for the most ancient human virus ever found: a common-cold virus uncovered inside a pair of 31,000-year-old baby teeth in Siberia.

Most people alive today carry traces of genes inherited from Neanderthals—the enduring legacy of prehistoric hookups with our extinct cousins. But researchers have long debated when and where that mingling happened and whether these were one-off romps or commonplace trysts. Now, an analysis of ancient and modern genomes suggests contemporary people’s Neanderthal DNA came from a single, prolonged period of mixing some 47,000 years ago.

According to a study published in Current Biology on May 22, the genetic components of the ancient populations in the western Tibetan Plateau are closest to ancient populations in the southern Tibetan Plateau, and their major genetic components have been maintained over the past 3,500 years.

If you search “shrimp Jesus” on Facebook, you might encounter dozens of images of artificial intelligence (AI) generated crustaceans meshed in various forms with a stereotypical image of Jesus Christ. Some of these hyper-realistic images have garnered more than 20,000 likes and comments. So what exactly is going on here?

For nearly a century, scientists have known that the universe is expanding. But in recent decades, physicists have found that different types of measurements of the expansion rate — called the Hubble parameter — produce puzzling inconsistencies. To resolve this paradox, a new study suggests incorporating quantum effects into one prominent theory used to determine the expansion rate.

The findings contribute to the growing body of research around Traditional Ecological Knowledge and practices, demonstrating the care and specificity with which Indigenous groups have been stewarding and cultivating natural resources for millennia. The work is published in The Holocene journal.

Recent research published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry has provided new insights into the potential therapeutic effects of psilocybin, a psychedelic compound, on cognitive flexibility and weight maintenance in a rat model of anorexia.

Neanderthals and humans mated millennia ago, and their legacy lives on in us today. Here’s how.

Slowly but surely, the ground is regurgitating its secrets. The history that lies buried beneath the swirling sands of time yields, piece by piece, to technology. But one such piece, in a well-explored region, has archaeologists a little baffled. The team’s findings have been published in Archaeological Prospection.

Scientists have discovered a long-buried branch of the Nile river that once flowed alongside more than 30 pyramids in Egypt, potentially solving the mystery of how ancient Egyptians transported the massive stone blocks to build the famous monuments…according to a study revealing the find on Thursday.

Scientists have discovered that individuals who are particularly good at learning patterns and sequences tend to struggle more with tasks requiring active thinking and decision-making. See the new research, published in npj Science of Learning.

A nearly 130,000-year-old bear bone was deliberately marked with cuts and might be one of the oldest art pieces in Eurasia crafted by the Neanderthals, researchers say. In the new study, the researchers examined the bone with a 3D microscope and computed tomography (CT) scans, which enabled them to make a digital model of the bone.

Researchers at the Salk Institute discovered that not only does CBN protect brain cells from age-related damage, but its chemically modified versions could be even more effective. These findings, detailed in the journal Redox Biology, suggest a new frontier in the treatment of traumatic brain injuries and other neurodegenerative diseases.

MIT researchers, including several undergraduate students, have discovered three of the oldest stars in the universe, and they happen to live in our own galactic neighborhood. They have published their findings (May 14) in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

For many decades, archaeologists were convinced that the first people to arrive in the Americas came some 13,000 years ago, after the Ice Age glaciers melted. The White Sands footprints, whose age scholars estimated again, in a paper published this past October, by analyzing tree pollen and quartz grains in the sedimentary layers, provide the most conclusive evidence to date that humans were actually here much earlier, toward the end of the last ice age. It’s possible that they reached North America more than 32,000 years ago.