The Lapedo Child: the little Portuguese who blended Neanderthal and sapiens
Buried beneath a Portuguese rock shelter almost 28,000 years ago, a child of four or five carries in its bones a puzzling mix of Neanderthal and modern traits. A ne…
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From 3 million years ago to the dawn of our era: archaeological discoveries, palaeogenetics, cave art and the great transformations of human societies.
Buried beneath a Portuguese rock shelter almost 28,000 years ago, a child of four or five carries in its bones a puzzling mix of Neanderthal and modern traits. A ne…
Read →Near Bad Camberg in Hesse, an early La Tène elite burial yielded a two-wheeled chariot, gold jewellery and an Etruscan oinochoe, evidence of a Celtic aristocracy an…
Read →At Machrie Moor on the Isle of Arran, a survey meant to test instruments revealed an unknown 28 m circle beneath the moor: twelve pit-anomalies in a ring, perhaps a Neolithic timber or stone circle.
Stemmed points 14,000 years old, contemporary with or older than Clovis, show that several traditions coexisted. The 'Clovis first' model crumbles further.
Beneath a mound in the Guadiana plain of Extremadura, archaeologists have uncovered the best preserved protohistoric building in the western Mediterranean. A mass sacrifice of dozens of horses, a bronze votive chariot and, in 2023, the very first human faces of Tartessos: the site of Casas del Turuñuelo is overturning the image of a culture once thought to have no images at all.
Near Armagh, a vast Bronze Age centre gathered, from 1200 BCE, over 200 houses, large communal buildings and gold and bronze workshops. A proto-urban hub with links as far as Iberia.
Read →By combining climate and terrain, researchers place in Iran's Zagros Mountains the zone where Homo sapiens and Nea…
Read →At Carnac, modelling of 49 radiocarbon dates places the first alignments between 4600 and 4300 BCE, over 1,000 yea…
Read →At Qafzeh in Israel, a healed cut on the jaw of Qafzeh 25 may be the oldest known trace of sharp-weapon violence b…
Read →Near Cap Blanc-Nez, 57 bronze axes from Britain outline a Bronze Age exchange hub, between Baltic amber and island metal, perhaps controlled by a local chiefdom.
Microscopic grooves on fossil hominin and non-human primate teeth reveal an unexpected practice: mutual tooth cleaning, a social bonding behaviour whose roots stretch back millions of years.
Everyone outside Africa carries 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA, but that inheritance is not scattered randomly across the genome. The X chromosome is strangely emptied of it, as are the genes active in the testes, a signal geneticists link to the reduced fertility of the first hybrids. Studies from 2024 to 2026 date the great mixing to around 47,000 years ago and clarify who was mating with whom.
A giant skull from China, a mandible from the Tibetan plateau, and a novel epigenetic method: how scientists reconstructed the face of our Denisovan cousins, long reduced to a handful of bone fragments.
Read →Bird bones bearing cut marks and heat traces reveal that Neanderthals hunted and cooked birds using elaborate Mous…
Read →At Cueva de los Aviones in Spain, pierced, ochre-dyed shells show Neanderthals mastered symbolic adornment, 20,000…
Read →At Milovice IV, 29 flint blades gathered in a vanished pouch form the personal kit of a Gravettian hunter. Their s…
Read →At Boomplaas Cave, an antelope molar yielded the oldest DNA ever recovered in sub-Saharan Africa. Heat does not necessarily destroy DNA: palaeogenomics reaches the cradle of humankind.
Read →At Tam Pà Ling in Laos, Homo sapiens remains dated to 86,000-68,000 years push our species' presence in Southeast …
Read →In Israel, five red-ochre burials in fetal position show that Levantine Neanderthals and Homo sapiens shared tools…
Read →Man hunted, woman gathered, and the prized meat flowed first to the hunters. This old story about the prehistoric …
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