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: Evolution
What Misspellings Reveal About Cultural Evolution
[no-caption] DrAfter123/Getty Images Something about me must remind people of a blind 17th-century poet. My last name, Miton, is French, yet people outside of France invariably misspell i…
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…
Who is the Nesher Ramla Homo?
This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. An international group of archaeologists has discovered a missing piece in the story…
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…
Discovering Africa’s Oldest Burial
This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. Africa is often referred to as the cradle of humankind—the birthplace of our…
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…
Evolutionary Foodprints
*This essay includes a photograph of a replica Paranthropus boisei skull and a replica human skull. New approaches to the dental remains of early hominins and the diets…
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…
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…
A Spark of Insight Into Neanderthal Behavior
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…
Why Are There So Many Humans?
Savanna Pumé (hunter-gatherers in Venezuela) children, shown here building a house, learn to cooperate from a young age. Russell D. Greaves Something curious happened in human population …
What Orangutans Taught Me About Motherhood
[no-caption] Sascha Wenninger/Flickr The first time I saw wild orangutans, in Borneo back in 2017, it was a mother-infant pair that caught my eye. The mother, Bibi, had…
Biosocial Medical Anthropology in the Time of Covid-19. New Challenges and Opportunities.
SAHRA GIBBON, LEWIS DALY, AARON PARKHURST, CARRIE RYAN, GUL DENIZ SALALI AND ALEX TASKER As the events of the past few months concerning the coronavirus have unfolded across…
Animal Grief Shows We Aren’t Meant to Die Alone
A mother gorilla cradles her dead baby at a zoo in Germany in 2008. Rolf Wilms/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images As the SARS-CoV-2 virus rocks the world, a haunting aspect of…
Will Asia Rewrite Human History?
Archaeologists dig at a site called Al Wusta in Saudi Arabia. Klint Janulis Please note that this article includes images of human remains. The Nefud Desert is a…
Why Social Distancing Feels So Strange
People stand 6 feet apart while waiting in line for a store in Denver, Colorado. Michael Ciaglo/Stringer/Getty Images Around the world, millions of people are now practicing social…
How Eating Rat Stew Serves Hobbit Research
Kamelus Nampung, one of the Manggarai people who live on the Indonesian island of Flores, cooks a giant rat. Paige Madison “Don’t forget to save every last bone!”…
How Did Belief Evolve?
The Egyptians began constructing Karnak temple around 4,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence suggests large-scale religions arose throughout the world by 4,000 to 8,000 years ago. Christoph…
What Makes Baby Yoda So Lovable?
The internet doesn’t agree on much these days. But there is one indisputable fact: Baby Yoda is absolutely adorable. For the uninitiated, Baby Yoda is an infantile alien…
Were Neanderthals More Than Cousins to Homo Sapiens?
Scans compare a Neanderthal fossil (at left) to a modern human skull (right). Philipp Gunz/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Around 200,000 years ago, in what is now northern Israel, a small band…
Archaeology Is Having a Great Century So Far
Nearly a century ago, the focus of human origins research shifted from Europe to Africa—such as to the Oldupai (Olduvai) Gorge in Tanzania, one of the cradles of…