Think about this: There is more genetic similarity between an Australian aboriginie and a Northern European than there is between most people of different tribes in Africa. How can that be? Well, about 70,000 years ago, one group made it out of Africa (with their relative lack of genetic diversity), […]

136,000 SKULLS. That’s what Andres de Tapia, one of the conquistadors, described seeing on towers and racks as they victoriously entered Tenochtitlan in 1519. Revulsed by the barbarity it represented, the conquistadors tore down the racks (called tzompantli), paved over the ruins, and began building what would become Mexico City. […]

Scientists have grudgingly begun to admit that our species was able to cross large stretches of ocean perhaps as long ago as 60,000 years. Turns out we probably weren’t the only seafaring human species. A new study–based on genetics–proposes that Denisovans similarly found a way to navigate the deep waters […]

PALEOHUMAN DISCOVERIES ARE COMING FAST AND FURIOUS, both from the genetics side and from the discovery of new bones. Think about it – until 2010, we knew NOTHING about Denisovans – didn’t even know they’d existed, much less contributed more to our gene pool (at least in SE Asians) than […]

Gilgamesh is the oldest known novel in the world, first written in Sumeria about 4100 years ago, about 1500 years before the Old Testament. In it, Gilgamesh comes across the only survivor of a catastrophic flood, and many scholars believe this influenced Moses in his later writings about Noah’s flood. […]

Imagine a huge wall of flood water thundering toward you and your family as you camp by a peaceful stream. That’s what some unfortunate Clovis people in present-day Washington State undoubtedly saw after an ice dam broke and Lake Missoula gushed out 13,000 years ago. The wall of water was […]

The oldest fingerprint from an Early Modern Human was that of a child found on the 26,000-year-old Venus of Dolní Věstonice ceramic figurine (from the Czech Republic). This 4.4” statue is the oldest known ceramic article yet discovered in the world. More than 140 of these obese, nude, female statuettes […]

Very cool – I learned a lot from the article, The Day the Dinosaurs Died. The impact of the KT asteroid was as powerful as a billion Hiroshimas. It caused earthquakes that were a thousand times more powerful than anything humans have experienced. Sediments thousands of miles away basically liquified […]

Archaeologists earlier discovered that the El Castillo pyramid of Chichén Itzá is built on an ancient cenote (water-bearing sinkhole or underground lake). Now, they’ve found a nearby cave with hundreds of untouched artifacts. The network of caves is huge – last year, researchers with the Great Maya Aquifer Project mapped […]

Did a species of hominin with a brain less than half the size of ours thoughtfully entomb their dead deep inside a South African cave roughly 300,000 years ago? Two chambers full of bones–only hominin bones–seem to indicate that they did. Anthropologists Lee Berger and John Hawks have led a […]