Humans news stories

Stone tools bear microscopic evidence of ancient plant technology, according to a study published June 30, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Starting July 1, 2023, Australia will allow psychiatrists to prescribe certain hallucinogens in medical settings to treat PTSD and treatment-resistant depression.

Long before the invention of agriculture, humans already knew how to process cereals and other wild plants into a flour suitable for food—and now there’s new evidence they did so long before scientists was previously thought. See the research here.

Our ideas about the universe are based on a century-old simplification known as the cosmological principle…In our recent review published in Classical and Quantum Gravity, we discuss how new discoveries force us to radically re-examine our assumptions and change our understanding of the universe.

Ravine-like channels on Mars are something of a puzzle. They look like the gullies in Antarctica caused by melting glaciers, but the elevated locations of many of the features aren’t places we’d expect to find recently flowing water. The research has been published in Science.

US space agency Nasa has ambitions to mine resources on the moon in the next decade, with the goal of excavating the soil there by 2032.

A new facial approximation offers insight into what one of humankind’s extinct relatives, Homo floresiensis —nicknamed “the hobbit,”—may have looked like when it lived on the Indonesian island of Flores approximately 18,000 years ago.

Hunter-gatherer roles in human society are not nearly as gendered as anthropologists and archaeologists have traditionally believed, with narratives of ‘man the hunter’ and ‘woman the gatherer’ crumbling in the face of new evidence. The study was published in PLOS ONE.

Bottlenose dolphin moms modify their individually distinctive whistles when their babies are nearby, researchers report June 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This “parentese” might enhance attention, bonding and vocal learning in calves, as it seems to do in humans.

A new book, I Feel Love, explores the rollicking history of the 90s club drug turned 21st-century therapeutic treatment…“MDMA deserves its own story,” Nuwer said. “I wanted to bring together the history, culture, politics and science of the drug all in one place.

It’s not an unknown behavior, over the years. But the tibia, marked with cuts, and belonging to a mystery human relative who used to live in what is now Kenya, may represent the oldest example we’ve seen yet of hominin-on-hominin butchery. The findings have been published in Scientific Reports.

Several studies have found psilocybin to be safe and effective in treating substance use disorders—but a first-of-its-kind analysis offers novel insights into exactly how psychedelic-assisted therapy works for people addicted to alcohol.

Markings on a cave wall in France are the oldest known engravings made by Neanderthals, according to a study published June 21, 2023, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jean-Claude Marquet of the University of Tours, France and colleagues.

Dutch archaeologists on Wednesday revealed an around 4,000-year-old religious site – dubbed the “Stonehenge of the Netherlands” in the country’s media – which included a burial mound serving as a solar calendar.

From the Mediterranean to North America, there’s a lot of evidence that the day the ‘sun stands still’ has been important to humans for thousands of years.