Paleoanthropology News

Durham University archaeologist Izzy Wisher and colleagues investigated whether pareidolia — a psychological phenomenon where people see meaningful...

Archaeologists have found an ancient wooden structure at the archaeological site of Kalambo Falls in Zambia. This structure — dated to about 476,000...

Namibia is rich in hunter-gatherer rock art from the Later Stone Age. This is a tradition of which well-executed engravings of animal tracks in large numbers...

New evidence from three tracksites on South Africa’s Cape coast suggests that early humans may have worn footwear while traversing dune surfaces during...

Early humans and apes likely evolved free-moving shoulders and flexible elbows to slow their descent from trees as gravity pulled on their heavier bodies,...

Today, there are more than 8 billion human beings on the planet. Our species dominate Earth’s landscapes, and our activities are driving large numbers...

The fossilized remains of the Miocene-period ape species Anadoluvius turkae have been unearthed at the paleotological site of Çorakyerler in central Anatolia,...

Molecular de-extinction could offer avenues for drug discovery by reintroducing bioactive molecules that are no longer encoded by living organisms. Archaic...

Looking at habitat overlap for Neanderthals and Denisovans, Pusan National University researcher Jiaoyang Ruan and colleagues found patterns of interbreeding...

New paleoclimate evidence shows that around 1.1 million years ago, the southern European climate cooled significantly and caused an extinction of archaic...

An analysis of a 300,000-year-old double-pointed wooden stick from the Middle Pleistocene site of Schöningen, Germany, shows it was scraped, seasoned...

The sexual division of labor among human foraging populations has typically been recognized as involving males as hunters and females as gatherers. Recent...

Paleoanthropologists have found multiple cut marks on a 1.45-million-year-old (Early Pleistocene) hominin fossil found in the Koobi Fora Formation in the...

Non-figurative markings on the walls of La Roche-Cotard cave in France are the oldest known engravings made by our sister species. The 57,000-year-old...

Soft tissues rarely preserve in the fossil record, rather scientists are mostly left with just the skeletal material. Yet, muscles animate the body. They...

Also known as Dupuytren’s disease, ‘Viking disease’ hand disorder — a condition in which one or more fingers become permanently bent in a flexed...

The 153,000-year-old footprint, which was found in the Garden Route National Park, a national park in the Garden Route region of the South African Western...

The dispersal of anatomically modern Homo sapiens out of Africa and across Eurasia provides a unique opportunity to examine the impacts of genetic selection...

Early humans and their hominin relatives had to adapt to new environments to spread out of Africa. In a new study, paleoanthropologists from the Institute...