Aug 16, 2023 by Enrico de Lazaro

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

Aug 15, 2023 by News Staff

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

Aug 10, 2023 by News Staff

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

Jul 26, 2023 by Sergio Prostak

Archaeologists have discovered three footprints of Homo heidelbergensis — a direct ancestor of Neanderthals — and numerous footprints of elephants...

Jul 20, 2023 by News Staff

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...

Jul 5, 2023 by News Staff

Archaeologists have found several handaxes — two of which can be classed as ‘giant handaxes’ — at the Maritime Academy site in Frindsbury,...

Jun 27, 2023 by News Staff

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...

Jun 21, 2023 by Enrico de Lazaro

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...

Jun 14, 2023 by News Staff

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

May 11, 2023 by News Staff

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...

Mar 17, 2023 by News Staff

Among animals, humans stand out in their consummate propensity to self-induce altered states of mind. Archaeology, history and ethnography show these activities...

Feb 22, 2023 by News Staff

Different genetic traits can be beneficial (for example, fending off disease) or harmful (making humans more susceptible to illness), depending on the...

Feb 10, 2023 by Enrico de Lazaro

Oldowan tools, consisting of stones with one to a few flakes removed, are the oldest widespread and temporally persistent hominin tools. The oldest of...

Feb 7, 2023 by News Staff

Archaeologists have unearthed a rich assemblage of human-accumulated terrestrial and marine faunal remains, including those of several crab species, in...

Feb 2, 2023 by Enrico de Lazaro

Straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) were the largest terrestrial mammals of the Pleistocene epoch, present in Europe and western Asia between...

Dec 23, 2022 by Enrico de Lazaro

Researchers from the University of Tübingen and elsewhere have unearthed the cutmarked bones of cave bears at the Middle Pleistocene site of Schöningen...

Dec 15, 2022 by Enrico de Lazaro

Scientists at the University of Tübingen have performed a careful and in-depth analysis of tiny resharpening flakes from the famous Middle Pleistocene...

Dec 15, 2022 by News Staff

Bipedalism — walking upright on two legs — us a defining feature of the human lineage. It is thought to have evolved as forests retreated in...

Dec 9, 2022 by Enrico de Lazaro

Modern humans have admixed with multiple species of archaic hominins. Papuans, in particular, owe up to 5% of their genome to Denisovans, a sister group...

Nov 15, 2022 by Enrico de Lazaro

Archaeologists have found the 780,000-year-old remains of a cooked carp-like fish at the wetland Acheulean site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel. Ancient...