Words for emotions like "anger" and "fear" vary in meaning across language families. Researchers have now compared colexifications of emotion words—cases where one word signifies multiple semantically related concepts. ...
Over the last 2000 years Christianity has grown from a tiny religious sect to the largest family of religions in the world. How did Christianity become so successful? Did Christianity spread through grass-roots movements ...
The first whole-genome analyses of ancient human DNA from Southeast Asia reveal that there were at least three major waves of human migration into the region over the last 50,000 years.
A long-standing debate in the field of cultural evolution has revolved around the question of how and why human societies become more hierarchical. Some theorize that material changes to a society's resources or subsistence ...
Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) have helped put together the most comprehensive study ever conducted into the origins of people in Vanuatu—regarded as a geographic gateway from Asia to the Remote ...
The study, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution and led by a multidisciplinary research team at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) together with researchers in France, Australia, New Zealand, ...
A tiny Indonesian island, previously unexplored by archaeologists, has been found to be unusually rich in ancient cave paintings following a study by researchers from The Australian National University (ANU).
One of the world's 7,000 languages vanishes every other week, and half - including scores of indigenous North American languages—might not survive the 21st century, experts say. To preserve as much linguistic diversity ...
As a linguist I dread the question, "what do you do?", because when I answer "I'm a linguist" the inevitable follow-up question is: "How many languages do you speak?" That, of course, is not the point. While learning languages ...
The 'myth' of language history: languages do not share a single history but different components evolve along different trajectories and at different rates.A large-scale study of Pacific languages reveals that forces driving ...
