https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Researchers from several European institutions, led by scientists from the University of Barcelona and the University of Alcalá, have demonstrated that the hunter-gatherers who inhabited the interior of the Iberian Peninsula during the Last Glacial Maximum (between approximately 26,000 and 19,000 years ago) were part of large-scale social networks capable of connecting vast territories in western Europe. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-social-networks-spanned-thousands-square.html Archaeology Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:51:25 EST news688315861 Today, as Greenland once again becomes a strategic prize, history seems poised to repeat itself. Staying with the Polar Inuit means refusing to speak of territory while erasing those who inhabit it. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-secret-military-base-trigger-silent.html Environment Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:17:23 EST news688148221 What do you build with when trees are scarce and winters are brutal? For hunter-gatherers living in current-day Ukraine some 18,000 years ago, the answer was simple: mammoth bones. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-ice-age-architecture-mammoth-bones.html Archaeology Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:28:10 EST news683544454 Modern Chileans are significantly taller and have larger heads than their ancestors. That's the central finding of new research looking at how intracranial volume (ICV) has changed across thousands of years in northern Chile. ICV is the space inside the skull that houses the brain, which scientists use to estimate brain size. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-modern-life-people-chile-taller.html Evolution Wed, 26 Nov 2025 13:19:38 EST news683385559 From village dogs to toy poodles to mastiffs, dogs come in an astonishing array of shapes, colors and sizes. Today there are estimated to be about 700 million dogs living with or around humans. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-dogs-years-roamed-bands-humans.html Evolution Sat, 15 Nov 2025 13:40:03 EST news682335497 Dogs have been part of human societies across Eurasia for at least 20,000 years, accompanying us through many social and cultural upheavals. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-paleogenomics-humans-dogs-eurasia.html Archaeology Thu, 13 Nov 2025 14:00:04 EST news682240082 In our modern society, aging tends to be something we ignore, and then try to avoid. Mainstream culture is geared toward the young, using the young to gauge trends and styles, and targeting their spending power. Meanwhile, the anti-aging industry is booming, with billions of dollars trading hands in the form of creams, pills and nip/tuck treatments to stave off the look and feel of getting old. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-reframing-aging-evolutionary-success.html Social Sciences Tue, 04 Nov 2025 22:30:01 EST news681494852 Some 3,500 years ago, hunter-gatherers began building massive earthwork mounds along the Mississippi River at Poverty Point, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northeast Louisiana. "Conservatively, they moved 140,000 dump truck loads of dirt, all without horses or wheels," said Tristram "T.R." Kidder, the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor of anthropology. "It was incredibly hard work. The big question is why? What was their motivation?" https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ancient-people-poverty.html Archaeology Mon, 27 Oct 2025 14:50:03 EDT news680795069 In a study published in the International Journal of Paleopathology, Dr. Victoria Romano and her colleagues analyzed the bones of 189 hunter-gatherers who lived during the Late Holocene (~4000 to 250 BP) in Patagonia. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ancient-patagonian-hunter-disabled.html Archaeology Tue, 07 Oct 2025 07:30:01 EDT news678963258 What did early humans like to eat? The answer, according to a team of archaeologists in Argentina, is extinct megafauna, such as giant sloths and giant armadillos. In a study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers demonstrate that these enormous animals were a staple food source for people in southern South America around 13,000 to 11,600 years ago. Their findings may also rewrite our understanding of how these massive creatures became extinct. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-early-humans-dined-giant-sloths.html Archaeology Thu, 02 Oct 2025 09:44:54 EDT news678617088 Some ancient societies in China and Southeast Asia appear to have smoke-dried their dead, effectively mummifying them thousands of years earlier than their Egyptian counterparts, new research has found. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-dried-bodies-world-oldest-mummies.html Archaeology Sun, 21 Sep 2025 09:40:02 EDT news677234337 Smoke-drying mummification of human remains was practiced by hunter-gatherers across southern China, southeast Asia and beyond as far back as 12,000 years ago, my colleagues and I report in new research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-year-mummies-reveal-world-earliest.html Archaeology Tue, 16 Sep 2025 10:43:04 EDT news677238182 Roughly 10,000 years ago, humans started shifting from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to building large agricultural settlements, marking one of the greatest transformations in human history. This transition, known as the Neolithic Revolution, began in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East and led to the spread of farming throughout Europe. For decades, researchers have debated what drove this change. Did farming spread mainly because farmers themselves moved into new lands, or because hunter-gatherers adopted farming practices? https://phys.org/news/2025-08-ancient-dna-reveals-farming-migration.html Archaeology Wed, 27 Aug 2025 17:02:04 EDT news675532921 Université de Bordeaux-led research reports that spatial statistics can discriminate potential Paleolithic Artificial Memory Systems from butchery and art, aligning prehistoric marked objects with memory devices in Africa and Europe. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-artificial-memory-ancient-humans-spatial.html Mathematics Tue, 05 Aug 2025 09:29:57 EDT news673604990 The willingness of those in power to act fairly depends on how easily others can collectively push back against unfair treatment, psychologists have found. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-fairness-powerful.html Social Sciences Thu, 31 Jul 2025 11:52:04 EDT news673181521 New research on Monday contradicted the commonly held idea that males dominate females among primates, revealing far more nuanced power dynamics in the relationships of our close relatives. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-alpha-males-rare-fellow-primates.html Plants & Animals Sun, 13 Jul 2025 11:30:01 EDT news671124642 A new study has shown that as early as the Stone Age, people in Africa traveled long distances to procure colorful stone, the raw material for the manufacture of tools. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-stone-age-huntergatherers-distances-tools.html Archaeology Thu, 10 Jul 2025 08:59:58 EDT news671356793 Archaeologists have long thought that monumental architecture—large, human-built structures that emphasize visibility—were products of societies with power structures, including social hierarchy, inequality and controlled labor forces. But this notion is being questioned as researchers uncover evidence that hunter-gatherer groups also built such structures. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-ancient-andean-burial-mounds-reveal.html Archaeology Tue, 01 Jul 2025 17:20:04 EDT news670609202 A team of Tel Aviv University researchers from the field of prehistoric archaeology has proposed an innovative hypothesis regarding an intriguing question: Why did ancient humans bring their young children to cave-painting sites—deep underground—through dark, meandering, hazardous passages? https://phys.org/news/2025-03-children-prehistoric-cave-art.html Archaeology Mon, 31 Mar 2025 15:25:03 EDT news662653501 A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has turned traditional thinking on its head by highlighting the role of human interactions during the shift from hunting and gathering to farming—one of the biggest changes in human history—rather than earlier ideas that focused on environmental factors. https://phys.org/news/2025-03-story-humanity-shift-prehistoric-farming.html Archaeology Mon, 31 Mar 2025 15:00:06 EDT news662631546 A recent study published by Dr. Shirad Galmor and colleagues in Environmental Archaeology examined the role played by foxes and wildcats at the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (EPPNB) site of Aḥihud (Israel). The site was occupied between ca. 10,500 and 10,100 cal BP according to radiocarbon dates taken from two occupational layers. https://phys.org/news/2025-01-small-carnivores-constituted-important-huntergatherer.html Archaeology Mon, 20 Jan 2025 12:10:08 EST news656595925 A new study by archaeologist Xingtao Wei and his colleagues, published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, provides insights into some of the earliest forms of humans processing bones into powder for cooking, dating back nearly 8,000 years (6,085 and 6,369 BC). https://phys.org/news/2025-01-archaeologists-reveal-year-bone-powder.html Archaeology Wed, 15 Jan 2025 07:30:01 EST news656071193 Researchers at the University of Southampton have proposed that some wild plant species possess certain attributes which make them more suitable for human cultivation than others. https://phys.org/news/2025-01-scientists-species-ripe-domestication.html Evolution Tue, 14 Jan 2025 10:55:04 EST news656074501 Waves of human migration across Europe during the first millennium AD have been revealed using a more precise method of analyzing ancestry with ancient DNA, in research led by the Francis Crick Institute. https://phys.org/news/2024-12-ancient-dna-migrations-millennium-ad.html Archaeology Wed, 01 Jan 2025 11:00:02 EST news654765571 Waterfall Bluff Rock Shelter (WB) (Eastern Cape Province (ECP), South Africa) contains archaeological deposits demonstrating persistent and continuous human occupation spanning from Late Marine Isotope Stage 3 (~39ka–29ka) to the mid-Holocene (~8ka). It is at this site that the first leopard seal (Hydrurga leptonyx) specimen was recently recovered from a Pleistocene and Holocene zooarchaeological assemblage along South Africa's coast. https://phys.org/news/2024-12-paleoenvironmental-waterfall-bluff-reveals-leopard.html Ecology Sat, 14 Dec 2024 08:40:02 EST news653308503 A trio of archaeologists at the University of Cambridge, in the U.K. conducted a study of hundreds of papers outlining research into hunter–gatherer societies, finding that people in such groups engage in a variety of physical activities. George Brill, Marta Mirazon-Lahr and Mark Dyble published their paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://phys.org/news/2024-12-meta-analysis-huntergatherer-societies-remarkable.html Archaeology Thu, 05 Dec 2024 14:50:01 EST news652627919 A study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour has uncovered fascinating insights into gender roles and cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies. The study, entitled "Bargaining between the sexes: outside options and leisure time in hunter-gatherer households," focuses on how men and women divide work and leisure time, challenging traditional views of gender inequality. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-reveals-insights-gender-equality-hunter.html Evolution Fri, 29 Nov 2024 12:39:35 EST news652106371 Unlike kids in the United States, hunter-gatherer children in the Congo Basin have often learned how to hunt, identify edible plants and care for babies by the tender age of six or seven. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-hunter-children-human-history.html Archaeology Tue, 19 Nov 2024 13:00:01 EST news651243387 Humans, it turns out, possess much higher metabolic rates than other mammals, including our close relatives, apes and chimpanzees, finds a Harvard study. Having both high resting and active metabolism, researchers say, enabled our hunter-gatherer ancestors to get all the food they needed while also growing bigger brains, living longer, and increasing their rates of reproduction. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-humans-evolved-energetically-unique.html Plants & Animals Tue, 19 Nov 2024 10:17:04 EST news651233821 A recent study by archaeologist Prof. Peter Mitchell and his colleagues published in Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa examines how ostrich eggshell (OES) beads moved across southeast southern African landscapes during the Pleistocene and Holocene. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-strontium-isotope-analysis-tracks-prehistoric.html Archaeology Mon, 11 Nov 2024 10:40:02 EST news650539022