Cultures News

December 2, 2020

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Top Headlines

Ancient Blanket Made With 11,500 Turkey Feathers

Nov. 25, 2020 — New research sheds light on the production of an 800-year-old turkey feather blanket and explores the economic and cultural aspects of raising turkeys to supply feathers in the ancient ...

Middle Stone Age Populations Repeatedly Occupied West African Coast

Nov. 20, 2020 — Researchers reveal evidence of Middle Stone Age occupations of the West African coast. Ranging from 62 to 25 thousand years ago, the largest well-dated assemblages from the region clearly document ...

Early Big-Game Hunters of the Americas Were Female, Researchers Suggest

Nov. 5, 2020 — For centuries, historians and scientists mostly agreed that when early human groups sought food, men hunted and women gathered. Not so, ...

Population Dynamics and the Rise of Empires in Inner Asia

Nov. 5, 2020 — Researchers sought to understand the genetic, sociopolitical and cultural changes surrounding the formation of the eastern Eurasian Steppe's historic empires. The study analyzed genome-wide data for ...

Latest Headlines

updated 11:08pm EST

Population Dynamics and the Rise of Empires in Inner Asia

Nov. 5, 2020 — Researchers seek to understand the genetic, sociopolitical and cultural changes surrounding the formation of the eastern Eurasian Steppe's historic empires. The study analyzes genome-wide data for ...

Just Like Us Neanderthal Children Grew and Were Weaned Similar to Us

Nov. 2, 2020 — Neanderthals behaved not so differently from us in raising their children, whose pace of growth was similar to Homo sapiens. Thanks to the combination of geochemical and histological analyses of ...

Resilience in the Face of Climate Change: Archaeological Investigations Reveal Human Adaptability in Ancient Turkey

Oct. 29, 2020 — An examination of two documented periods of climate change in the greater Middle East, between approximately 4,500 and 3,000 years ago, reveals local ...

Denisovan DNA in the Genome of Early East Asians

Oct. 29, 2020 — Researchers analyzed the genome of the oldest human fossil found in Mongolia to date and show that the 34,000-year-old woman inherited around 25 percent of her DNA from western Eurasians, ...

Study of Ancient Dog DNA Traces Canine Diversity to the Ice Age

Oct. 29, 2020 — A global study of ancient dog DNA presents evidence that there were different types of dogs more than 11,000 years ago in the period immediately following the Ice ...

Clovis People: Narrow Window of Tool-Making

Oct. 23, 2020 — There is much debate surrounding the age of the Clovis -- a prehistoric culture named for stone tools found near Clovis, New Mexico in the early 1930s -- who once occupied North America during the ...

Rift Valley (stock | (c) (c) Tomasz / Adobe

Turbulent Era Sparked Leap in Human Behavior, Adaptability 320,000 Years Ago

Oct. 21, 2020 — The first analysis of a sedimentary drill core representing 1 million years of environmental history in the East African ...

Climate Change Likely Drove Early Human Species to Extinction, Modeling Study Suggests

Oct. 15, 2020 — Of the six or more different species of early humans, all belonging to the genus Homo, only we Homo sapiens have managed to survive. Now, a study ...

Modern Humans Took Detours on Their Way to Europe

Oct. 14, 2020 — Favourable climatic conditions influenced the sequence of settlement movements of Homo sapiens in the Levant on their way from Africa to Europe. In a first step, modern humans settled along the coast ...

Battling With Neighbors Could Make Animals Smarter

Oct. 6, 2020 — From ants to primates, 'Napoleonic' intelligence has evolved to help animals contend with the myriad cognitive challenges arising from interactions with rival outsiders, suggest ...

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Summaries
Headlines

Bison Engravings in Spanish Caves Reveal a Common Art Culture Across Ancient Europe

Oct. 28, 2020 — Recently discovered rock art from caves in Northern Spain represents an artistic cultural style common across ancient Europe, but previously unknown from the Iberian Peninsula, according to a new ...

Can Individual Differences Be Detected in Same-Shaped Pottery Vessels by Unknown Craftsmen?

Oct. 27, 2020 — Can quantitative differences be used to identify individual potters who make traditional, fixed-shape vessels that have been made in the same way for generations? Researchers discovered that there ...

Cognitive Elements of Language Have Existed for 40 Million Years

Oct. 21, 2020 — Humans are not the only beings that can identify rules in complex language-like constructions -- monkeys and great apes can do so, too, a new study has shown. Researcher used a series of experiments ...

6,500-Year-Old Copper Workshop Uncovered in the Negev Desert's Beer Sheva

Oct. 5, 2020 — A new study indicates that a workshop for smelting copper ore once operated in the Neveh Noy neighborhood of Beer Sheva, the capital of the Negev Desert. The new study also shows that the site may ...

A Tale of Two Cesspits: DNA Reveals Intestinal Health in Medieval Europe and Middle East

Oct. 5, 2020 — Analysis of 14th-15th century latrines in Jerusalem and Riga, Latvia identifies some of the microbes resident in the guts of these pre-industrial populations, illuminating how gut contents have ...

Mud-Slurping Chinless Ancestors Had All the Moves

Oct. 1, 2020 — Researchers have revealed our most ancient ancestors were ecologically diverse, despite lacking jaws and paired ...

The Ancient Neanderthal Hand in Severe COVID-19

Sep. 30, 2020 — Genetic variants that leave their carrier more susceptible to severe COVID-19 are inherited from Neanderthals, a new study ...

Modern Humans Reached Westernmost Europe 5,000 Years Earlier Than Previously Known

Sep. 28, 2020 — Modern humans arrived in westernmost Europe 41,000 to 38,000 years ago, about 5,000 years earlier than previously known, according to an international team of researchers that discovered stone tools ...

Y Chromosomes of Neanderthals and Denisovans Now Sequenced

Sep. 24, 2020 — An international research team led by Martin Petr and Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has determined Y chromosome sequences of three ...

Raids and Bloody Rituals Among Ancient Steppe Nomads

Sep. 18, 2020 — Traces of violence on 1700 year old skeletons allow researchers to reconstruct warfare and sacrifices of nomads in Siberia. An international and interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, ...

Ancient Human Footprints in Saudi Arabia Give Glimpse of Arabian Ecology 120000 Years Ago

Sep. 18, 2020 — Using high resolution paleoecological information obtained from fossilized footprints, a new study presents ~120 thousand-year-old human and animal footprints from an ancient lake bed in northern ...

The Oldest Neanderthal DNA of Central-Eastern Europe

Sep. 8, 2020 — A new study reports the oldest mitochondrial genome of a Neanderthal from Central-Eastern Europe. The mitochondrial genome of the tooth, discovered at the site of Stajnia Cave in Poland, is closer to ...

Ancient Hunters Stayed in Frozen Northern Europe Rather Than Migrating to Warmer Areas, Evidence from Arctic Fox Bones Shows

Sep. 8, 2020 — Ancient hunters stayed in the coldest part of Northern Europe rather than migrating to escape freezing winter conditions, archaeologists have ...