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Categories: Anthropology: General, Space: The Solar System

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Studying prehistoric production processes of birch bark tar using computational modelling reveals what kinds of cognition were required for the materials produced by Neanderthal and early modern humans.

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A new study appearing in Science Advances compares Pleistocene vegetation communities around Lake Baikal in Siberia, Russia, to the oldest archeological traces of Homo sapiens in the region. The researchers use the 'remarkable evidence' to tell a compelling story from 45,000-50,000 years ago with new detail: how the first humans migrated across Europe and Asia.

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Using ancestry decomposition techniques an international research team has revealed a deeply divergent ancestry among admixed populations from the Angolan Namib desert. This unique genetic heritage brings the researchers closer to understanding the distribution of genetic variation in the broader region of southern Africa before the spread of food production.

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Astronomers using data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have identified carbon dioxide in a specific region on the icy surface of Europa.

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Violence was a consistent part of life among ancient communities of hunter-gatherers, according to a new study that looked for signs of trauma on 10,000-year-old skeletal remains from burial sites in northern Chile.

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An international study has documented post-mortem bone modifications not linked to consumption.

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The first use of a novel method of analyzing Mars' gravitational force supports the idea that the planet once had an extensive northern ocean. In doing so, the method defines the scope of what scientists refer to as the northern Martian paleo-ocean in more detail.

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A new study suggests patches of fertile soil in the Amazon, known as dark earth, were intentionally produced by ancient Amazonians as a way to improve the soil and sustain large and complex societies.

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Half a million years ago, earlier than was previously thought possible, humans were building structures made of wood, according to new research.

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A groundbreaking study is reshaping our understanding of crocodile evolution by pinpointing the onset of slow growth rates to the Late Triassic period, much earlier than the previously assumed Early Jurassic timeline. The research highlights newly discovered fossil crocodile ancestors (known as crocodylomorphs) that exhibited slow growth rates, similar to modern-day crocodilians. Intriguingly, these early crocodylomorphs were not the lethargic, semi-aquatic creatures we are familiar with today; they were small, active, and fully terrestrial. The study also suggests that this slow-growth strategy was not a mere evolutionary quirk but a survival mechanism, as only the slow-growing crocodylomorphs managed to survive the End-Triassic mass extinction. This stands in stark contrast to the fast-growing dinosaurs of the same era, setting the stage for the divergent evolutionary paths that would later define their modern descendants.

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X-rays of an ancient jawless fish shows earliest-known example of internal cartilage skull, unlike that of any other known vertebrate.

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A new study sheds new light on the origins of modern brain cells. Researchers find evidence that specialized secretory cells found in placozoans, tiny sea creatures the size of a grain of sand, have many similarities to the neuron, such as the genes required to create a partial synapse. From an evolutionary point of view, early neurons might have started as something like these cells, eventually gaining the ability to create a complete synapse, form axons and dendrites and create ion channels that generate fast electrical signals -- innovations which gave rise to the neuron in more complex animals such as jellyfish. Though the complete story of how the first neuron appeared remains to be told, the study demonstrates that the basic building blocks for our brain cells were forming in the ancestors of placozoans grazing inconspicuously in the shallow seas of Earth around 800 million years ago.

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Researchers discover how molecules in ancient glass rearrange and recombine with minerals over centuries to form a patina of photonic crystals -- ordered arrangements of atoms that filter and reflect light in very specific ways -- an analog of materials used in communications, lasers and solar cells.

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A team recently calculated that most of the Moon's permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) are at most around 3.4 billion years old and can contain relatively young deposits of water ice. Water resources are considered key for sustainable exploration of the Moon and beyond, but these findings suggest that current estimates for cold-trapped ices are too high.

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Mice treated aboard the International Space Station showed significantly reduced bone loss.

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Herbig-Haro (HH) objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars, formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars form shock waves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. This image of HH 211 from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals an outflow from a Class 0 protostar, an infantile analog of our Sun when it was no more than a few tens of thousands of years old and with a mass only 8% of the present-day Sun (it will eventually grow into a star like the Sun).

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Planetary scientists have discovered that high energy electrons in Earth's plasma sheet are contributing to weathering processes on the Moon's surface and, importantly, the electrons may have aided the formation of water on the lunar surface.

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A new investigation with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope into K2-18 b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, has revealed the presence of carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. Webb's discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that K2-18 b could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean-covered surface.

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Elusive fundamental particles called neutrinos are predicted to interact unexpectedly with photons under extreme conditions.

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A new article hints at the existence of several black holes in the Hyades cluster -- the closest open cluster to our solar system -- which would make them the closest black holes to Earth ever detected.