1,000-year-old horseshoes, sleds, and tools are emerging from a shrinking ice patch in Norway, telling the story of the rise and fall of a mountain pass and the people who traveled along it.
Research on Massospondylus carinatus embryos sheds new light on animals’ development
The Paleoneurobiology Group of the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), led by Emiliano Bruner, has just published a morphological analysis of the brains of Neanderthals and modern humans in the Journal of Human Evolution, whose results suggest that the more rounded shape of modern human brains is due in part to larger and bulgier parietal lobes, on average.
When it comes to deciphering our ancient family tree, DNA from fossils is the new gold standard. But after about half a million years, even the best-preserved DNA degrades into illegibility, leaving the story of our early evolution shrouded in mystery. A new study of proteins taken from the tooth of an enigmatic human ancestor reveals their rough place in the family tree—and shows how ancient proteins can push beyond the limits of DNA.
The oldest known animals and plants preserved in amber from Southern Gondwana are reported in Scientific Reports this week. Gondwana, the supercontinent made up of South America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Antarctica and Australia, broke away from the Pangea supercontinent around 200 million years ago. The findings further our understanding of ecology in Australia and New Zealand during the Late Triassic to mid-Paleogene periods (230-40 million years ago).
Genetic information from an 800,000-year-old human fossil has been retrieved for the first time. The results from the University of Copenhagen shed light on one of the branching points in the human family tree, reaching much further back in time than previously possible.
Antarctica was covered in rainforest in the time of the dinosaurs, according to a new study.
Scientists have solved a longstanding mystery over the age of a landmark skull found in 1921 in Zambia – the first fossil of an extinct human species discovered in Africa – in research with big implications for deciphering the origin of our own species.
Up to now, studies have focused on determining when the first modern human arrived in China, but there has been hardly any research into the dynamics of this settlement. A joint paper by institutions from China, Spain and the United Kingdom proposes that, given its size and biogeographical diversity, China would have received migrations by Homo sapiens from both north and south, with hardly any overlap between them.
Archaeologists are hoping to establish the age of an ancient naked figure sculpted into a chalk hillside.
