The Isthmus of Panama: Out of the Deep Earth

As dates in geologic history go, the formation of the slender land bridge that joins South America and North America is a red-letter one. More than once over the past 100 million years, the two great landmasses have been ...

Original Australians numbered 1,000-3,000, study finds

Australia was first settled by between 1,000 and 3,000 humans around 50,000 years ago, but the population crashed during the Ice Age before recovering to a peak of some 1.2 million people around five centuries ago, a study ...

320-year-old mystery solved thanks to ancient DNA

University of Adelaide researchers have found the answer to one of natural history's most intriguing puzzles – the origins of the now extinct Falkland Islands wolf and how it came to be the only land-based mammal on the ...

Skeletons in cave reveal Mediterranean secrets

Skeletal remains in an island cave in Favignana, Italy, reveal that modern humans first settled in Sicily around the time of the last ice age and despite living on Mediterranean islands, ate little seafood. The research is ...

Woolly mammoth extinction has lessons for modern climate change

Although humans and woolly mammoths co-existed for millennia, the shaggy giants disappeared from the globe between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago, and scientists couldn't explain until recently exactly how the Flinstonian behemoths ...

Scientists illuminate the ancient history of circumarctic peoples

Two studies led by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and National Geographic's Genographic Project reveal new information about the migration patterns of the first humans to settle the Americas. The studies identify ...

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