Paleontologists in South Africa said Monday they have found the oldest known burial site in the world, containing remains of a small-brained distant relative of humans previously thought incapable of complex behaviour. Led by renowned palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger, researchers said they discovered several specimens of Homo naledi – a tree-climbing, Stone Age hominid – buried

Science is founded on hard evidence, but ironically, many of the stories we tell about scientists and their experiments are not based on much truth. An apple falling on Newton’s head didn’t suddenly stimulate his idea of gravity; Darwin’s theory of evolution wasn’t founded on the beaks of finches. And Benjamin Franklin certainly didn’t discover

Archaeologists have mapped out the lost city of Rungholt for the first time. Legend has it that the once thriving city, which now sits off the coast of northern Germany, was swallowed by the North Sea in a single night following a heavy storm as punishment for its inhabitants’ sins. According to folklore, these sins

The first synthetic substance ever brewed on planet Earth may not have been a product of our own species but was concocted by a close relative as far back as around 200,000 years ago. Researchers from the University of Tübingen and the State Museum of Prehistory in Germany and Strasbourg University in France recently conducted

Background noise – like the chatter in a coffee shop or the drone of passing traffic – might slow our reading speed, but according to a study of Russian readers, it doesn’t affect how our brain comprehends written text. The study looked at the effects of auditory noise and visual distractions such as typos or

A team of archaeologists has found that our obsession with hair removal can be traced back to Roman times. Archaeologists working in Wroxeter Roman City, in Shropshire, England, have discovered a huge collection of over 50 tweezers at the settlement that dates from the 2nd to 4th century CE. They also discovered a skin scraper,

The sex of human and other mammal babies is decided by a male-determining gene on the Y chromosome. But the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene. The good news is two branches of rodents have already lost

Compared to apes, human children are more likely to open a mystery ‘box’ over one with known contents, a new study finds. This suggests that one thing that makes us unique as a species might be our innate sense of curiosity. Children “explored the uncertain options before the alternatives were presented, showing a higher degree

The DNA of a strain of bacteria responsible for the infamous Black Death plague has been found in the teeth of three individuals found buried in the UK thousands of years before the deadly pandemics raged across Europe. Two of those individuals, determined to be young adolescents, were buried in a mass grave in Charterhouse

Archaeologists have mapped a hidden landscape where Australia’s first people made inroads more than 60,000 years ago. This now-inland region was once a coastal mangrove swamp and, before that, a semi-arid savannah plain hundreds of kilometers from the seashore. During the late Pleistocene epoch, sea levels were so low that Australia was connected to its

A reconstruction of oral microflora genomes spanning a whopping 100,000-year period of human history may have revealed a surprising shift in the kinds of bacteria that like to call our mouths home. Researchers from across Germany and the US teamed up to decode DNA extracted from the dental plaque of human and Neanderthal remains, using

The pressure to publish or perish has led some desperate researchers to pay for fake papers to pad their resumés. Worse still, some of these sham papers are getting published in official scientific journals. A computer program designed to detect these made-up studies suggests far too many are slipping past peer review. The study was

Cats have a reputation for aloofness (and flooffiness), but if you and your feline friend aren’t bonding, maybe you’re just not speaking their language. Never fear – research from 2020 has shown that it’s not so difficult. You just need to smile at them more. Not the human way, by baring your teeth, but the

Scientists using ultraviolet photography say they have found an old version of a chapter of the Bible that was hidden underneath a different section of text for more than 1,500 years. Historian Grigory Kessel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences announced the discovery in an article in the journal, New Testament Studies, earlier this year.

The next time you whisper sweet-nothings into someone’s ear, you might want to target their left side. Neuroscientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne University Hospital and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have discovered a strange bias in our perception of pleasing voices. According to the brain scans of 13

Human history is intimately entwined with the use and control of fire. However, working out when our relationship with fire began and how it subsequently evolved has been notoriously difficult. This is partly due to the incomplete nature of archaeological records, and also because fire use was fleeting, making burnt remains difficult to detect. But

The human family tree is a tangle of twisted branches. Parting the foliage to disentangle the stem of our own species is not so easy. The classic out-of-Africa hypothesis suggests that Homo sapiens evolved from a distinct lineage of early human that evolved around 150,000 years ago before setting off to spread through Europe and

A new deep dive into humanity’s history of romantic kissing has revealed that locking lips has a more complex story than some researchers have proposed. Though smooching one’s love interest might not be a human-only past time, not all cultures do it, leading to speculation over the behavior emerging in select localities before spreading like

Researchers have discovered the earliest examples of human footprints in Germany. They’re so old, it’s unlikely they were made by any species live today. Stretching back some 300,000 years through time, it’s thought they were made not by Homo sapiens, but by the ancient (and now extinct) ‘Heidelberg people’ (or Homo heidelbergensis). The impressions provide

Archaeologists have described what could be the oldest examples of construction plans in human history, chiseled into ancient stones in Jordan and Saudi Arabia between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago. Engraved geometric patterns have been matched with neighboring desert megastructures built long before the pyramids of Giza, leading an international team of researchers to conclude

Talking to babies could help shape the structure of their growing brains, according to new research. A study led by researchers at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom has found toddlers who hear more speech on the regular have more efficient-looking neurons. Specifically, brain scans showed that their language-processing regions hosted a

In a first, a team of mathematicians has developed a model that can map the best way for human males to reach sexual climax. What they’ve found is that getting too excited early on can actually prevent men from reaching climax. But the good news is their research also shows a way around this problem.

Every skin flake, hair follicle, eyelash, and spit drop cast from your body contains instructions written in a chemical code, one that is unique to you. According to a new study, technology has advanced to the point that it’s now possible to sift scraps of human DNA out of the air, water, or soil and

When you’re poking around ancient ruins, you probably expect to find a few artifacts or the bits and pieces left behind by the people who lived and worked there long ago. But an archaeological site has just yielded something you might not expect if you didn’t know the history of the place. At what was

Eight years after the technology was approved by government authorities, it can be reported that at least one child with DNA from three different people has been born to parents in the United Kingdom. The announcement isn’t exactly ‘new’ knowledge, but reporters at The Guardian were able to prompt an official confirmation with a freedom

For 20 years, experts have relied on the human genome reference as a genetic benchmark for the study of biology, disease, evolution, and more. It’s considered one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 21st century. Now we’ve got something even better. Scientists have just unveiled the first draft of the human pangenome, a much

Archaeologists have unearthed the remnants of a 7,000-year-old road hidden beneath layers of sea mud off the southern Croatian coast. Made at the sunken Neolithic site of Soline, this exciting find may once have linked the ancient Hvar culture settlement to the now isolated island of Korčula. Once an artificial island, the ancient site of

Human noses come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from cute and petite to classically aquiline, broad and stately, bold and noble. A new study by an international team of researchers has found at least some of the genes responsible for our nasal anatomy may have been inherited from our Neanderthal cousins. The analysis

A new era of clinical research on psilocybin mushrooms (aka ‘magic mushrooms’) has emboldened some scientists to share their own life-changing experiences with psychedelics. A recent case study describes a young 35-year-old male researcher in the United States, who claims to distinguish red and green colors better after taking psychedelics. Following his ingestion of magic

Scientists are rewriting the story of how modern humans first spread out of Africa, and it might contain more run-ins with Europe’s Neanderthals than previously recognized. Last year, archaeologists uncovered several lines of evidence to suggest that Homo sapiens was living in Europe a whole 10,000 years before we once thought. That initial group of

Like treasured recipes passed down from generation to generation, there are just some regions of DNA that evolution doesn’t dare tweak. Mammals far and wide share a variety of such encoded sequences, for example, which have remained untouched for millions of years. Humans are a strange exception to this club. For some reason, recipes long

Underneath a temple in the ancient ruined city of Taposiris Magna on the Egyptian coast, archaeologists discovered a vast, spectacular tunnel in 2022, a tunnel that experts called a “geometric miracle”. During ongoing excavations and exploration of the temple, Kathleen Martinez of the University of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and colleagues uncovered the

A pendant made from a deer’s tooth has turned out to be a veritable locket of genetic information left by an ancient woman who lived in Siberia some 20,000 years ago. Evolutionary anthropologists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany found a way to safely probe ancient artifacts for environmental DNA without destroying them, and

The human digestive system is much more variable than we tend to think, according to a new study, with significant differences in gut anatomy even among healthy individuals. This includes individual differences from person to person, the researchers report, plus broader differences such as those between women and men. In one noteworthy example, the researchers

Most people, if they’re going to add anything to their coffee, choose the side of sweetness and cream. A touch of sugar or hazelnut syrup, perhaps a dash of cow’s milk, all to help smooth out the rough, bitter edges of coffee. But it might be worth your while to reach for something savory instead.

Sometimes you need to make sure you know what you’re looking at before its scientific value is made clear – and that’s the case with a 3,000-year-old piece of human bone initially thought to have come from a bear. The remains were discovered in Lawyer’s Cave in Southeast Alaska. The cave is on the mainland,

Anemia was common in mummified ancient Egyptian children, according to a new study that analyzed child mummies in European museums. Researchers used computed tomography (CT) scans to peer non-invasively through the mummies’ dressings and discovered that one-third of them had signs of anemia; they found evidence of thalassemia in one case, too. “Our study appears

Since our earliest school days, we generally accept the idea that some people learn faster than others – but, according to a new study, it turns out that we actually learn at very similar rates given the same opportunities. Researchers looked at 1.3 million “student interactions” across a variety of learning software tools used by

The head of the Pentagon office that is reviewing reported unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP – commonly known as UFOs, unidentified flying objects) told the US Congress this week that his office is now reviewing more than 650 incidents, but so far, none exhibited anything that was evidence of extraterrestrial activity or defied the known laws

Researchers from around the world have embarked on an effort to try to build a system allowing humanity to anticipate violent conflicts before they erupt – and thus potentially prevent them. They will examine dramatic advances in artificial intelligence and how the decisions taken by the world’s leaders could be swayed at a time when

You learn from your mistakes. At least, most of us have been told so. But science shows that we often fail to learn from past errors. Instead, we are likely to keep repeating the same mistakes. What do I mean by mistakes here? I think we would all agree that we quickly learn that if

A cycle featured in Maya calendars has been a mystery pretty much since it was rediscovered and its deciphering began in the 1940s. Covering a period of 819 days, the cycle is referred to simply as the 819-day count. The problem is that researchers couldn’t match that 819 days up to anything. But anthropologists John

Scientists studying hair follicles in mice may have finally uncovered a mechanism behind how and why hair turns gray, which could one day lead to potential new ways to stop or reverse the process. On a basic level, we already know that hair goes gray when specialized pigment-producing cells called melanocytes are in short supply.

Scientists have discovered how two distinct brain networks interact with one another to help us make meaning out of words and glean complex, higher-level meaning from sentences, like the one you’re reading right now. “This study helps us better understand how distributed hubs in the brain’s language network work together and interact to allow us

Scientists have recently identified a unique form of cell messaging occurring in the human brain that’s not been seen before. Excitingly, the discovery hints that our brains might be even more powerful units of computation than we realized. Back in 2020, researchers from institutes in Germany and Greece reported a mechanism in the brain’s outer

Almost every morning I face the same dilemmas. Whether I should wake up my wife with a kiss or let her sleep longer. Should I get out of bed or just press the snooze button? And that is even before I have had my first cup of coffee. Our daily life is rife with so-called

An ancient stone “scoreboard” likely used in a soccer-like ball game was discovered at an archeological site in Mexico earlier this week, archaeologists said. Found at the Maya Chichen Itza site, researchers and archeologists said the circular stone’s diameter was just over 32 centimeters (or just over 12 inches), and it weighed 40 kilograms (about

As early as 170,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was sustaining itself on fatty, protein-rich fare: the cooked flesh of giant land snails. A study of snail shells excavated from the famous Border Cave archaeological site in South Africa, followed by rigorous experimentation, reveals that the nutritious mollusks were an important part of the human diet