Is Homo longi an Extinct Human Species?
[no-caption] Chuang Zhao This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. In 1933, a mysterious fossil skull was discovered near …
Tag: Biology
Five Ways Humans Evolved to be Athletes
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…
Culture—Not Genetics—Was More Salient for Anglo-Saxons
An Anglo-Saxon burial mound rises in Taplow Court, England. Shutterstock This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. Scholar…
The Evolution of Throwing
United States Olympic athlete Kara Winger competes in the women’s javelin throw in 2019. Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images With the Tokyo Olympics on the horizon, Kara Winger is trainin…
Sexism Still Winning at the Olympic Games
New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard is, this year, the first openly trans athlete to be picked for an Olympic team. Alex Pantling/Getty Images I loved the Olympics growing…
How Apes Reveal Human History
Except for humans, every great ape is endangered—many at great risk of going extinct. There are fewer than 300,000 chimpanzees living in the wild. USAID Africa Bureau/Wikimedia Commons…
Chasing the Myths of Mexico’s “Superrunners”
Surrounded by torch-bearing supporters, runners kick a ball as part of a traditional rarajípare racing event practiced by the Rarámuri people of Mexico. Marcos Ferro On a mesa…
Sex in Sport: Men Don’t Always Have the Advantage
Many sporting events, like the Paris Marathon, have separate categories for men and women. Michel Stoupak/NurPhoto/Getty Images As the Summer Olympics gear up to kick off in Tokyo,…
How Scientific Taxonomy Constructed the Myth of Race
[no-caption] Hiroshi Watanabe/Getty Images As a graduate assistant in biological anthropology at the University at Buffalo, I was tasked with curating the primate skeletal collection. The…
Did a Magnetic Field Reversal Doom Neanderthals?
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…
Mapping Human and Neanderthal Genomes
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…
Is Love a Biological Reality?
Helen Fisher knows more about love than most. As a biological anthropologist who studies the topic, she has been a chief scientific adviser to the internet dating site…
Who First Made the Caribbean Home?
Volunteers and students from the United States and the Bahamas helped excavate the dunes where the Lucayan ancestral remains were found. William F. Keegan Locals in the Bahamas…
Time to Rethink Teeth
Tooth enamel growth starts before birth and continues until adult teeth are fully formed. Ksenia Chernaya/Pexels Four years ago, I found myself cataloguing some dusty containers of about…
The CDC Needs Social Science
[no-caption] John Moore/Getty Images The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as the primary agency in the United States that monitors, predicts, and responds to chronic disea…
A Startling Link Between Neanderthals and COVID-19
[no-caption] Angus Krieg SAPIENS host Chip Colwell speaks with evolutionary geneticist Hugo Zeberg about his surprising discovery of a connection between Neanderthal DNA and a greater ris…
A Vaccine Will Not Be Enough
[no-caption] Angus Greig SAPIENS host Jen Shannon speaks with Agustín Fuentes, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University, to unpack his insight that the COVID-19 pandemic is a…
The Green Woods of Resilience
Conservationist Madeleine Nyiratuza (center) walks through Rwanda’s Gishwati Forest with three eco-guards, who were charged with protecting the area. Courtesy of Madeleine Nyiratuza For a…
Adventures with Peccaries pt. 2
I spent time out in the Hill Country, north of San Antonio ,Texas. The clan that I worked with on this trip was made up of 8 total…
When Colorblind Parenting Meets Anti-racism
Author Zeray Alemseged and his daughter attend a Black Lives Matter protest in Chicago. Peter Stamos I watched the uniformed White policeman kneel on the Black man’s neck…
What’s Behind Humanity’s Love-Hate Relationship With Exercise?
Many people have a strong desire for physical rest despite the fact that health experts advise them to exercise more. Heart rules/Pexels At the start of the COVID-19…
My Nonbinary Child
[no-caption] Andrew Hasson/Getty Images “Mom, how do you know you’re a woman?” Sarah, my only child, startled me by asking this question during a telephone conversation this spring.…
What Milk-Sharing Communities Reveal
[no-caption] Getty Images Heather Wascak was devastated. In 2014, within days of giving birth to a baby girl, Lucia, she was aching to be with her child. “She’s…
Can Archaeology Dogs Smell Ancient Time?
Dax is a trained archaeology dog, seen here at work in southwest Montana. Lauri Travis On a sunny, cloudless afternoon in Croatia, a fierce wind known as a…