The shoulder blade is such a wide and flat bone that in some areas it becomes almost translucent when held up to the light. That is why it is rare to find it whole, even in modern burials, and why it so surprised archaeologists from the University of Cambridge that from Shanidar Cave, in Iraqi […]

Cut a mammoth tusk across and a pattern appears that nobody drew. Rings like those of a tree trunk mark how the ivory grew, and are known as Owen’s lines. Crossing them runs a web of curved lines that looks like the mesh of a net, the Schreger lines. About 18,000 years ago, in a […]

Near Parabita, a town in the province of Lecce, in the heel of Italy’s boot (the region of Apulia, also spelled Puglia), a limestone cave holds a piece of Ice Age history. Two small bone figurines found there in 1966 belong to the group known as the Palaeolithic Venus figurines. Now a new survey suggests […]

Among the stone tools that early humans left beside a lake in northern Israel, archaeologists found something far bigger: the molar of an elephant, about 8 inches (20 cm) tall and 3 inches (8 cm) wide, lying next to several pieces of tusk. It sat at the same level of ground as handaxes and cleavers […]

When people talk about Neanderthal technology, they almost always mean stone: points, scrapers, flakes chipped from flint. There is a good reason for that. Stone can last hundreds of thousands of years, while a wooden stick buried in the ground rots away quickly. For decades, a large part of Neanderthal equipment has simply been missing […]

Proposed dates for the arrival of the first humans in the Americas span more than 100,000 years. At one end sits Cerutti, a site in California that Holen and colleagues dated to about 130,000 years ago in a 2017 study in Nature. At the other is Swan Point, in Alaska, at around 14,200 years old: […]

In 2019, workers doing routine ecological restoration at a quarry in China’s Yunnan province hit something under the soil: bones and stone tools. Nobody realized at the time that this unassuming hole — known as Bianfu Cave, “bat cave,” after its former residents — would turn out to hold the largest collection of Denisovan remains […]

An international team of researchers has published a study that questions one of the most widespread theories about the disappearance of Neanderthals. According to their findings, climate change and the resulting fragmentation of habitats did not play a decisive role in the extinction of this human species, which occurred approximately 40,000 years ago. The work, […]