Anthropology
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Society structure impacts innovation
Study finds fewer interactions, not more, fuel cultural evolution.
Over time, evolution has endowed humans with bigger, better brains, but a study of Agta hunter-gatherers in the Phili...
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Sign languages grew from five lineages
Scientists merge linguistics with evolutionary biology.
Delving into centuries-old manuscripts depicting dozens of sign language alphabets, scientists have identified five p...
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Traditional record of a modern problem
Japanese fish rubbings tell about threatened species.
Welcome to the world of alternative biodiversity records. Since the last Edo period, around the middle of the 19th c...
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Gene study reveals Bronze Age slavery
A much more complex society than previously thought.
High status families in late Neolithic and Bronze Age Germany kept slaves, genetic analysis reveals. The finding, r...
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Genome study reveals South Asia’s prehistory
Migrations spread farming and languages across Eurasia.
A massive study of ancient and modern genomes stretching from Europe to Central and South Asia and spanning the last ...
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A long history of changing the planet
Unique archaeological study takes a new look at land use.
Long before people started documenting their own existence, their way of life was already taking a toll on the planet...
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Early human arrival in North America
New finds in Idaho push things back to 16,500 years ago.
Archaeological discoveries in western Idaho indicate that humans were in that part of the US nearly 16,500 years ago ...
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The peopling of the Americas
New archaeological and genetic evidence is fleshing out the story.
Exactly when and how the first people populated the final continental frontiers of North and South America has been a...
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Ancient DNA sheds some light on mystery
How Philistine culture came to the ancient near east.
Migrants from Southern Europe were the likely source of distinctive architecture and pottery associated with the anci...
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Conversation
Why humans were destined to walk Earth
The paths available to evolving organisms are far from limitless.
What would happen if the hands of time were turned back to an arbitrary point in our evolutionary history and we rest...
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Ancient chewing gum provides DNA clues
Masticated birch bark points to hunter-gatherer migrations.
Human DNA extracted from lumps of 10,000-year-old chewing gum is helping to unravel early settlement patterns in Scan...
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Indian island settlers came from far and wide
The people of Lakshadweep have evidence of a seafaring past.
People living on Lakshadweep, an archipelago off the south-western coast of India in the Arabian Sea, are genetically...