Humans

In caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, ancient peoples marked the walls with red and mulberry hand stencils, and painted images of large native mammals or imaginary human-animal creatures. These are the oldest cave art sites yet known – or at least the oldest attributed to our species. One painting of a Sulawesi warty

After a winter of lockdown and with coronavirus restrictions beginning to lift, many will be hoping for good weather this summer. Restrictions on foreign travel have meant that more people plan to stay within their country for their summer holidays than ever before. This shift, along with our social lives increasingly being based outside, makes

There you are, sitting front row of Miss Ryan’s English class in your underwear, when in walks Chris Hemsworth holding a saxophone in one hand and a turtle in the other, asking you to play in his band. “Why not?” you say, taking the turtle before snapping awake in a cold sweat, the darkness pressing

An ancient necropolis with 40 tombs, including cylindrical jars filled with human remains, has been discovered on the French island of Corsica.  The people buried in the cemetery range from infants to adults, the archaeologists said. Located in the town of Île-Rousse on the island’s northern coast, the cemetery seems to have been used between

If you’re going to gargle something next time you go for a run, here’s some free advice: Try using a pink-colored drink. As strange as it sounds, pink drinks appear to be linked with enhanced running performance. In a new study, scientists found that runners who rinsed their mouths with a pink-colored liquid solution –

Once upon a time, the Aqueduct of Valens was one of the longest aqueduct lines in the ancient world. By the fifth century, Constantinople’s citizens were getting their water through this channel – named after emperor Valens – that could have exceeded 500 kilometers (310 miles) in its prime. Today, scientists have finally identified a

Everybody knows the physical feeling of acceleration: the surging sensation as we pick up speed while moving from one place to another. But few of us know what it might be doing to our bodies. In a new study, scientists investigated the physiological effects of acceleration in a small experiment, where participants simply drove themselves

A cave ancient Romans believed to be a gate to the underworld was so deadly that it killed all animals who entered its proximity, while not harming the human priests who led them. Millennia later, scientists believe they have figured out why – a concentrated cloud of carbon dioxide that suffocated those who breathed it.

Archaeologists have discovered the fossilized remains of nine Neanderthals who were hunted and mauled to death by a pack of hyenas in a cave just outside Rome, the Italian Culture Ministry announced Saturday. The fossilized bones, which included skullcaps and broken jawbones, were discovered in the Guattari Cave in San Felice Circeo in Italy’s Lazio region. They are

IQ tests are widely used by educational and professional organizations to assess applicants. They are also the focus of psychological studies which seek to identify the many factors that influence intelligence. Like all tests, it seems reasonable to assume that you could improve your IQ score by practicing the test many times. Is it possible to improve

Fields of rust-colored soil, spindly cassava, small farms, and villages dot the landscape. Dust and smoke blur the mountains visible beyond massive Lake Malawi. Here in tropical Africa, you can’t escape the signs of human presence. How far back in time would you need to go in this place to discover an entirely natural environment?

The number of babies born in the United States took a hit last year, just like experts predicted it would. In 2020, according to initial government data, the national birth rate fell by a total of 4 percent – the largest annual decrease in 50 years. Obviously, most babies born last year were conceived before

From the algorithms that make our social media accounts function to the sleep-tracking technology in our smartwatches, the world has never seemed so technologically advanced and developed. Which is why it would be easy to assume that with each generation, humans are getting smarter. But is this the case? It’s a question many scientists have

Around 78,000 years ago, in what is now Kenya, a three-year-old child died. History is full of dead humans and human ancestors of all ages – dying is something everyone does, sooner or later – but this child was special. The evidence suggests that he or she was carefully laid to rest in a deliberate

It’s called Dunbar’s number: an influential and oft-repeated theory suggesting the average person can only maintain about 150 stable social relationships with other people. Proposed by British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar in the early 1990s, Dunbar’s number, extrapolated from research into primate brain sizes and their social groups, has since become a ubiquitous

A doomsday scenario of an end to human sperm production has been back in the news recently, now with the added threat of shrinking penises. Professor Shanna Swan, a US epidemiologist who studies environmental influences on human development, recently published a new book called Countdown. In it, she suggests sperm counts could reach zero by

If someone asked you what the worst year in human history was, what would you guess? 1347 CE was pretty bad. That’s the year the Black Death seriously hit Europe. Any of the years of the Holocaust, between 1941 and 1945. Or 1918, the year of the start of the flu pandemic that killed up

A Swedish orienteering enthusiast working on a map earlier in April stumbled across a stash of some 50 Bronze Age relics dating back over 2,500 years, authorities said Thursday. Mainly consisting of ancient jewelry, the find outside the small town of Alingsas in western Sweden represents one of “the most spectacular and largest cache finds”

Humans and dogs have been staring into each other’s eyes for generations. Whether it’s a pleading gaze for some leftovers, or a loving stare before a lick on the face, many dogs have mastered the art of making eye contact with their human companions. You might think this is just a side effect of living

The first humans to set foot on the supercontinent that once joined Australia and New Guinea could have spread across the entire landmass using ‘superhighways’ in as few as 200 generations, according to new models. From a band of less than a thousand humans, roughly 50,000 to 75,000 years ago, simulations suggest the continent’s population

Cancer isn’t just a modern-day affliction. A new archaeological analysis suggests malignant growths in medieval Britain were not as rare as we once thought.  Even before widespread smoking, the Industrial Revolution, and the modern surge in life expectancy, it seems cancer was still a leading cause of disease. Scanning and X-raying 143 medieval skeletons from

The Wonderwerk Cave site in South Africa is one of very few places on Earth where human activity can be traced back continuously across millennia, and scientists just established the oldest evidence of archaic human habitation in the cave: some 1.8 million years ago. That’s based on an analysis of sedimentary layers containing animal bones,

At first, archaeologists thought they were scanning the mummy of an ancient Egyptian priest named Hor-Djehuty. Then, in the body’s abdomen, images revealed what appeared to be the bones of a tiny foot. Full scans confirmed it: the foot belonged to a tiny fetus, still in the womb of its deceased and mummified mother. Not

In the area where the Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexican borders now meet, ancestral Pueblo societies thrived and then collapsed several times, over the span of 800 years. Each time they recovered, their culture transformed. This shifting history can be seen in their pottery and the incredible stone and earth dwellings they created. During

Fifteen volunteers have emerged from a cave in the southwest of France after spending 40 days without clocks, phones, or sunlight for a human isolation experiment. The group of eight men and seven women lived in the Lombrives cave as part of a $1.4 million project called Deep Time, which set out to explore the limits of human

Our language weighs heavily with idioms and clichés about the human gaze. Whether they’re windows to the soul, or we’re staring daggers, eye contact communicates more about our intentions than words ever could alone. Poetry aside, the mechanisms behind our response to the gaze of another human are less than clear. Is it an emotional

Update (22 April 2021): Since we first wrote about the Moon Trees, interest in these wonderful living relics of the Apollo era has renewed. Now, the Royal Astronomical Society and the UK Space Agency have begun a quest to search for these trees across Britain. According to a recent BBC Radio 4 program, around 15

Ever since the Dead Sea Scrolls were accidentally discovered over 70 years ago in a cave in Israel, they have been a source of fascination. The scrolls are famous for containing the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. But exactly who wrote these important documents has been a mystery. Now, thanks to the use of

Traces of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s can still be found in American honey, new research reveals. The radioactive isotope identified, cesium-137, falls below levels considered to be harmful – but the amounts measured nonetheless emphasize the lingering persistence of environmental contaminants in the nuclear age, even a half-century after

More than a year into the coronavirus pandemic, you’ve probably at least heard of Zoom fatigue – if not experienced it yourself – and now a new study has dug deeper into the reasons for it happening. One of the primary drivers behind this video calling weariness seems to be what the researchers are calling “mirror anxiety”,

We haven’t been dependent on natural light from the Sun since the invention of the light bulb in 1879. Nowadays, many people spend most of the day not just in artificially lit rooms but also looking at screens – phones, computers, and TVs. Recently, there have been concerns that looking at bright screens in the evening

For a couple of hundred years, Cahokia was the place to be in what is now the US state of Illinois. The bustling, vibrant city was at one time home to some 15,000 people, but by the end of the 14th century it was deserted – and researchers still aren’t sure why. A new study

An alphabetic inscription written on a jar fragment found at the site of Tel Lachish in Israel and dating back around 3,450 years may provide a “missing link” in the history of the alphabet, a team of researchers said. “Dating to the fifteenth century BCE, this inscription is currently the oldest securely dated alphabetic inscription from the

If you could cross a monkey with a human, what might that creature tell us? We are beginning to find out. In a pioneering and controversial experiment, scientists successfully created just such a hybrid: a chimeric combination of monkey and human cells, existing together in a living embryo that otherwise would never have been conceived

It’s easy to focus on all the negatives amid a traumatic global pandemic, but there are some positives, too. A new online survey has found the psychological outcomes of New Zealand’s super strict lockdown were not all bad. The study mirrors other mental health studies on COVID-19 in New Zealand, which had one of the

Archaeologists have found a “Lost Golden City” that’s been buried under the ancient Egyptian capital of Luxor for the past 3,000 years, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced Thursday (April 8).  The city, historically known as “The Rise of Aten,” was founded by Amenhotep III (ruled 1391-1353 BCE), the grandfather of Tutankhamun, or King Tut. People

Have you ever noticed how we usually try and solve problems by adding more, rather than taking away? More meetings, more forms, more buttons, more shelves, more systems, more code, and so on. Now scientists think they might know the reason why. A study of 1,585 people across 8 different experiments showed that our brains

Some of the oldest human art in Europe is entirely hidden from sight, tucked away in the narrow crawl spaces of deep, dark, and winding caves. To even see the walls, let alone decorate them, stone age artists would have needed to crawl around with several torches, and archaeologists now suspect all that smoke induced

Modern brains are younger than originally thought, possibly developing as recently as 1.5 million years ago, according to a study published Thursday – after the earliest humans had already begun walking on two feet and had even started fanning out from Africa. Our first ancestors from the genus Homo emerged on the continent about 2.5

Bishop of Lund Peder Pedersen Winstrup, of the Churches of Sweden and Denmark, died in 1679. An important and well-respected man, his body was mummified and laid to rest in a family vault in Lund Cathedral. Apart from the exceptional preservation of his remains, nothing seemed unusual about his death or burial. In 2012, when

Genetic sequencing of human remains dating back 45,000 years has revealed a previously unknown migration into Europe and showed intermixing with Neanderthals in that period was more common than previously thought. The research is based on analysis of several ancient human remains – including a whole tooth and bone fragments – found in a cave

The markings are unfamiliar: carved contours that now only hint at a lost landscape from long ago. Nonetheless, a large, mysterious slab of stone recently rediscovered in France looks like it might just be the oldest known map in Europe. In a new study, researchers re-examined the Saint-Bélec slab – an intricately carved, partly broken

Paleolithic cuisine was anything but lean and green, according to a recent study on the diets of our Pleistocene ancestors. For a good 2 million years, Homo sapiens ditched the salad and dined heavily on meat, putting them at the top of the food chain. It’s not quite the balanced diet of berries, grains, and

A procession of floats carried the mummified remains of 22 pharaohs, including Egypt’s most powerful ancient queen, through Cairo Saturday evening, in an eye-catching parade to a new resting place. Under hefty security, the mummies were driven on floats seven kilometers (four miles) across the capital from the iconic Egyptian Museum to the new National

Nobody ever said parenting was easy, but depending on circumstances, some people can find it much harder than others. In recent years researchers have begun to recognize ‘parental burnout‘ – a condition in which exhausted parents become overwhelmed by their role as primary carers, potentially leading to emotional distance from their children, parental ineffectiveness, neglect,

It was August 13, 1945, and the ‘demon core’ was poised, waiting to be unleashed onto a stunned Japan still reeling in fresh chaos from the deadliest attacks anyone had ever seen. A week earlier, ‘Little Boy’ had detonated over Hiroshima, followed swiftly by ‘Fat Man’ in Nagasaki. These were the first and only nuclear

Human cultures can see the world through very different lenses, but the way we sort stars in the night sky is surprisingly universal. Even when separated by vast differences in time and space, many of the same constellations stand out time and time again in human history, albeit with different names and stories behind them. 

The more we look into the harsh extremes of Chile’s Atacama Desert, the more we find. Phenomena both mystifying and wonderful, occasionally bordering on alien. But in this incredibly dry place, it wasn’t just the climate that was unforgiving. Its ancient human inhabitants, making do in a parched place not best suited to hosting them,