Five Breakthrough Signs of Early Peoples in the Americas
A lot of ink has been spilled in archaeological debates about the human occupation of the continents known today as North and South America. When did people arrive?…
A lot of ink has been spilled in archaeological debates about the human occupation of the continents known today as North and South America. When did people arrive?…
We’re so used to the idea of being the only people around that it seems outlandish to think that not so long ago in our evolutionary history, multiple…
The coming Olympics will showcase some of the most extraordinary human feats of strength, speed, and agility. As an archaeologist who focuses on the development of the human…
With the summer solstice approaching in the Northern Hemisphere, the site of Stonehenge is likely to pop up quite a bit on your news feeds. While that particular…
I remember exactly where I was when I first learned about magnetic field reversals: sitting in a lab as an undergraduate student in a geoarchaeology class. I knew…
Back in 1990, researchers embarked on an epic project to map out all of human DNA: the Human Genome Project. Their first draft of the human genome was…
The winter holiday season will feel different this year for many: Extended families may not be able to gather, leaving holiday meals shared with smaller groups, or digitally,…
In 2017, Naomi Martisius, now a postdoctoral researcher with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, was sitting in a conference session when she had an…
Southwestern Finland isn’t a great place for archaeologists to find anything other than the sturdiest of remains. The pine needles that fall to the boreal forest floor make…
While sheltering in place in California during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about my graduation day—but not because it was particularly…
As I sit writing this column post, my sinuses feel like they are made of concrete, and my ears are aching and clogged to the point of causing…
If you’re like me, you view long-distance running as a somewhat unrealistic aspiration and see those people who do it well as remarkable creatures. The truth, though, is…
In a cave tucked into the limestone hills of the Asturias region of Spain, there lie the remains of a group of 13 Neanderthals that date to between…
One of the more tenacious misconceptions about Neanderthals is that they were exclusively meat eaters. Sure, in some of the colder regions of Europe plant food would have…
The human body is often visualized as a symmetrical form: Picture the geometric precision of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic drawing of a man’s proportions encased by a circle…
The human body is often visualized as a symmetrical form: Picture the geometric precision of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic drawing of a man’s proportions encased by a circle…
In 1856, a scattered collection of bones was found in the Feldhofer Cave of the Neander Valley in Germany. Scientists had never seen anything like it. The skull…
Jonathan Bethard’s life is anything but dull. He analyzes human remains to determine people’s identities, understand their lifeways, and figure out how they died. And while his work…
San Nicolas Island, the most remote and one of the smallest of California’s Channel Islands, is more than 60 miles from the mainland. The seas around the island…
It’s mid-August, 2017, but the temperature in Unalaska, one of the Aleutian Islands that trails off of the western Alaskan coast, is a brisk 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Christine…
For Jade Luiz, a graduate student in archaeology at Boston University, historical archaeology is all about detective work. Through piecing together historical documents and archaeological finds from t…
When I ask her “So how big are the rats?,” E. Grace Veatch, a graduate student in zooarchaeology at Emory University, smiles and immediately holds her hands apart…
The movies that Natalie Laudicina makes use the same software that helped create some of the biggest blockbuster hits of the last decade, but her movies won’t be…