More than 1,000 feet inside a cave in SW France are several circles comprised of about 400 broken stalagmites. They were built by someone or something 175,000 years ago. Was it cave bears pushing aside stalagmites to hibernate? No. The largest ring is nearly 22′ in diameter and has relatively […]

More on the apparent genocide 4500-5000 years ago that happened when people from the steppes near the Caspian Sea moved into the Iberian Peninsula. Though 60% of the region’s DNA remained the same, the Y chromosomes were almost totally replaced. This indicates that men from the steppes appropriated all the […]

Ancient DNA is showing us some amazing things! For instance, a group of nomadic herders from the Asian steppes arrived in Europe about 5,000 years ago and pretty much wiped out the existing population of hunter-gatherers and early farmers. A nearly complete genocide, probably made possible by new technologies including […]

Mount Etna in Sicily is currently erupting. Most don’t recognize that it is part of the dangerous Campanian Volcanic Arc that extends along Italy and wraps around southern Sicily. A Campanian eruption 39,000 years ago was probably the second most powerful eruption in the world in the last million years, […]

Analysis of ancient DNA indicates the man who lived near Cheddar, England 10,000 years ago had dark skin, dark, wavy hair, and blue eyes. This is further corroboration that in the movie Clan of the Cave Bear, it would have been more accurate to have Ayla played by Halle Berry […]

Humans butchered a woolly rhino in the Philippines 700,000 years ago, but it surely wasn’t us. We weren’t around yet and wouldn’t be for at least another 350,000 years. Odds are, it was “Upright Man” – Homo erectus, who had made it out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years […]

All non-Africans trace their ancestry to a single intrepid population that probably took a “beachcomber” route along the SE Asian coast sometime between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago. Evidence is building that our ancestors made it to Australia as early as 60,000 years ago. Even though sea levels were much […]

After living millions of years in North America, the giant ground sloth died off between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, shortly after the arrival of the first humans. These 5-ton beasts were slow-moving and could reach 17 feet. They were like dangerous, giant cows. It’s hard for me to understand […]

Scientists have dated the mutation of body lice from head lice to determine when humans first started wearing clothes. Head lice feed and live on the scalp, whereas body lice feed on body skin, but live in clothing. The mutation that led to body lice happened about 107,000 years ago, […]

The Clacton Spear was shaped by flint tools and fire-hardened 420,000 years ago in southern England. This spear, as well as finds at Boxgrove, England, and Schonigen, Germany prove that early man (probably Homo heidelburgensis or early Neanderthal) was able to hunt much earlier than previously thought.