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Categories: Anthropology: General, Paleontology: Dinosaurs

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Researchers have discovered evidence of horse riding by studying the remains of human skeletons found in burial mounds called kurgans, which were between 4500-5000 years old. The earthen burial mounds belonged to the Yamnaya culture. The Yamnayans had migrated from the Pontic-Caspian steppes to find greener pastures in today's countries of Romania and Bulgaria up to Hungary and Serbia.

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Some cities only last a century or two, while others last for a thousand years or more. Often, there aren't clear records left behind to explain why. Instead, archaeologists piece together clues from the cities' remains to search for patterns that help account for why certain places retained their importance longer than others.

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An international team of researchers analyzed the genomes of 180 indigenous Africans from a dozen ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and geographically diverse populations. The results shed light on the origin of modern humans, historical migrations, linguistic evolution, and local adaptation, and lay the groundwork for more people to benefit from precision medicine.

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A world-first model of paleoclimate and hydrology in Iran has highlighted favourable routes for Neanderthals and modern human expansions eastwards into Asia. The findings reveal that multiple humid periods in ancient Iran led to the expansions of human populations, opening dispersal route across the region, and the possible interactions of species such as Neanderthals and our own Homo sapiens.

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A new study reports on genomic data from a 23,000-year-old individual who lived in what was probably the warmest place of Europe at the peak of the last Ice Age. The oldest human genome recovered from the southern tip of Spain adds an important piece of the puzzle to the genetic history of Europe.

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In 2011, scientists recorded a previously unknown feeding strategy in whales around the world. Now, researchers in Australia think they may have found evidence of this behaviour being described in ancient accounts of sea creatures, recorded more than 2,000 years ago. They believe that misunderstandings of these descriptions contributed to myths about medieval sea monsters. Whales are known lunge at their prey when feeding, but recently whales have been spotted at the surface of the water with their jaws open at right angles, waiting for shoals of fish to swim into their mouths. A clip of this strategy was captured in 2021 and went viral on Instagram. This strategy seems to work for the whales because the fish think they have found a place to shelter from predators, not realising they are swimming into danger. It's not known why this strategy has only recently been identified, but scientists speculate that it's a result of changing environmental conditions -- or that whales are being more closely monitored than ever before by drones and other modern technologies.

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Cartilaginous fish have changed much more in the course of their evolutionary history than previously believed. Evidence for this thesis has been provided by new fossils of a ray-like shark, Protospinax annectans, which demonstrate that sharks were already highly evolved in the Late Jurassic.

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Dinosaur claws had many functions, but now a team has shown some predatory dinosaurs used their claws for digging or even for display.

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By simulating early Earth conditions in the lab, researchers have found that without specific amino acids, ancient proteins would not have known how to evolve into everything alive on the planet today -- including plants, animals, and humans.

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Scientists who study the origins and evolution of the plague have examined hundreds of ancient human teeth from Denmark, seeking to address longstanding questions about its arrival, persistence and spread within Scandinavia.

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The meat-eating dinosaurs known as theropods that roamed the ancient Earth ranged in size from the bus-sized T. rex to the smaller, dog-sized Velociraptor. Scientists puzzling over how such wildly different dinosaur sizes evolved recently found -- to their surprise -- that smaller and larger theropod dinosaurs like these didn't necessarily get that way merely by growing slower or faster.

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A recent excavation in Megiddo, Israel, unearthed the earliest example of a particular type of cranial surgery in the Ancient Near East -- and potentially one of the oldest examples of leprosy in the world.

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In their search for silver ore, the Romans established two military camps in the Bad Ems area near Koblenz in the 1st century AD.

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A new study explores 'balancing selection' by analyzing thousands of modern human genomes alongside ancient hominin groups, such as Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes. The research has 'implications for understanding human diversity, the origin of diseases, and biological trade-offs that may have shaped our evolution,' says evolutionary biologists.

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Researchers have reconstructed the brains and inner ears of two British spinosaurs, helping uncover how these large predatory dinosaurs interacted with their environment.

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Along the shores of Africa's Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, according to new research. The study presents what are likely to be the oldest examples of a hugely important stone-age innovation known to scientists as the Oldowan toolkit, as well as the oldest evidence of hominins consuming very large animals. Excavations at the site, named Nyayanga and located on the Homa Peninsula in western Kenya, also produced a pair of massive molars belonging to the human species' close evolutionary relative Paranthropus. The teeth are the oldest fossilized Paranthropus remains yet found, and their presence at a site loaded with stone tools raises intriguing questions about which human ancestor made those tools.

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Researchers have pinpointed two intervals when ice and ocean conditions would have been favorable to support early human migration from Asia to North America late in the last ice age, a new paper shows.

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An interdisciplinary team of scientistshas found that rapid sea-level rise drove early settlers in Southeast Asia to migrate during the prehistoric period, increasing the genetic diversity of the region today.

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New research has revealed that the process of 'peopling' the entire continent of Sahul -- the combined mega continent that joined Australia with New Guinea when sea levels were much lower than today -- took 10,000 years. Sophisticated models show the scale of the challenges faced by the ancestors of Indigenous people making their mass migration across the supercontinent more than 60,000 years ago. This pattern led to a rapid expansion both southward toward the Great Australian Bight, and northward from the Kimberley region to settle all parts of New Guinea and, later, the southwest and southeast of Australia.

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Around 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic revolution radically changed the economy, diet and structure of the first human societies in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. With the beginning of the cultivation of cereals -- such as wheat and barley -- and the domestication of animals, the first cities emerged in a new social context marked by a productive economy. Now, a study analyses the evolution of wheat spikes since its cultivation began by the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia -- the cradle of agriculture -- between the Tigris and the Euphrates.