In 2010, the discovery that early humans and Neanderthals interbred was groundbreaking, revealing a genetic legacy affecting modern humans‘ circadian rhythms, immune systems, and pain perception. However, understanding the gene flow in the opposite direction has been challenging. A new study published in the journal Science on July 12 has shed light on how this … Read more
BATH: Why did humans take over the world while our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, became extinct? It’s possible we were just smarter, but there’s surprisingly little evidence that’s true. Neanderthals had big brains, language and sophisticated tools. They made art and jewellery. They were smart, suggesting a curious possibility. Maybe the crucial differences weren’t at … Read more
Archaeologists have been trying to piece together the full human story for a long time, but some members of prehistoric societies have been largely overlooked: kids! It turns out these little people played a much bigger part in human history than we realized. In Little Sapiens, a documentary from The Nature of Things, Sarika Cullis-Suzuki … Read more
Pioneering groups of humans braved icy conditions to settle in northern Europe more than 45,000 years ago, a “huge surprise” that means they could have lived there alongside Neanderthals, scientists said Wednesday. The international team of researchers found human bones and tools behind a massive rock in a German cave, the oldest traces of Homo … Read more
The 2013 discovery of the largest collection of hominid fossils ever found is rewriting the origin of complex behaviours we thought were uniquely human, says a renowned paleoanthropologist. The fossilized bones belonged to an entirely new species of ancient human relatives called, Homo naledi, which lived in South Africa several hundred thousand years ago when the first Homo … Read more
