Danish scientists have managed to extract a complete human DNA sample from a piece of birch pitch more than 5,000 years old, used as a kind of chewing gum, a study revealed Tuesday.
Archaeology
Dec 17, 2019
6
1020
At the center of a cathedral-size cave in remote Borneo, an Indonesian archaeologist brushed away sediment to reveal the top of a human skull. Next came a perfect right foot. Then, a leg.
Archaeology
Sep 7, 2022
0
202
A trio of researchers from Texas A&M University and Wichita State University has found evidence of an early hunter-gatherer eating an entire venomous snake. In their paper published in Journal of Archaeological Science, Elanor ...
The reason that humans shifted away from hunting and gathering, and to agriculture—a much more labor-intensive process—has always been a riddle. It is only more confusing because the shift happened independently in about ...
Archaeology
Apr 2, 2019
0
37
Humans constantly alter the world. We fire fields, turn forests into farms, and breed plants and animals. But humans don't just reshape our external world—we engineer our internal worlds, and reshape our minds.
Archaeology
Jul 19, 2021
5
19
Where the Limpopo and Shashe Rivers meet, forming the modern border between Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, lies a hill that hardly stands out from the rest. One could easily pass it without realizing its historical ...
Archaeology
Apr 4, 2023
0
10
When the Australian government relocated Martu hunter-gatherers from their Western Australia lands in the 1960s, no one could have predicted the massive impact their absence would have on the desert ecosystem. A new study ...
Ecology
Feb 22, 2019
0
8
The oldest strain of Yersinia pestis—the bacteria behind the plague that caused the Black Death, which may have killed as much as half of Europe's population in the 1300s—has been found in the remains of a 5,000-year-old ...
Archaeology
Jun 29, 2021
0
906
Conducting the first large-scale, genome-wide analyses of ancient human remains from the Near East, an international team led by Harvard Medical School has illuminated the genetic identities and population dynamics of the ...
Archaeology
Jul 25, 2016
2
531
Some 9,700 years ago on an autumn day, a group of people were camping on the west coast of Scandinavia. They were hunter-gatherers that had been fishing, hunting and collecting resources in the area.
Archaeology
Jan 21, 2024
0
70
