Hello, Ardi: New Oldest Humanoid Fossil A Million Years Older Than Lucy

10-01-2009 • Popular Science

The new fossil indicates that our ancestors were less chimplike than heretofore thought

Fire Used to Make Better Tools 75,000 Years Ago

08-16-2009 • LiveScience

Early humans crossed a threshold around 75,000 years ago, when they started painting symbols, carving patterns and making jewelry. A new study found they also began to use fire to make tools around that time.

Until now, this complex, multi-step process for tool making was only known to occur as recently as 25,000 years ago in Europe. But the new findings show this breakthrough occurred much earlier, and in Africa, not Europe.

Chinese survey finds prostitutes more trusted than officials

08-04-2009 • Rawstory.com

 The online survey of 3,376 Chinese showed that 7.9 percent of respondents considered sex workers trustworthy, putting them in third place after farmers and religious workers, the Insight China magazine said on its website. “A list like this is at the same time surprising and embarrassing,” the China Daily said Tuesday in an editorial, commenting on the result of the survey, which was carried out in June and July.

How Do you Spend Your Day ? (Time Analysis)

08-02-2009 • Ritholtz.com/blog & NYtimes

 It is kinda weird seeing how people spend their time each day: Note that the chart shows the percentage of what EVERYONE is doing at a given money over the course of a day doing a given activity at that moment.

'Oldest musical instrument' found

06-25-2009 • news.BBC.co.uk

 Scientists in Germany have published details of flutes dating back to the time that modern humans began colonising Europe, 35,000 years ago.

The first Europeans were cannibals with a taste for kids

06-24-2009 • Daily Telegraph

The claim has come after bones of the ancestors of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens who first settled in Europe around 800,000 years ago were unearthed in the Atapuerca caves in northern Spain.

A study of the prehistoric remains has revealed that human flesh formed part of the diet of early man and children and adolescents in particular were regularly killed and eaten.

Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music

06-24-2009 • NY Times

At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.

Earliest Grain Storage

06-24-2009 • arclein

That's as much as a thousand years before people in the Middle East domesticated grain, the research team led by anthropologist Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame said. Remains of wild barley were found in the structure, indicating that the grain was collected and saved even though formal cultivation had not yet developed. The granary was between two other structures used for grain processing and residences, discovered in excavations at Dhra', near the Dead Sea. The granary was round with walls of stone and mud. The researchers said it had a raised floor for air circulation and protection from rodents.

'Cigarettes, whisky, and wild, wild women'

06-23-2009 • independent.co.uk/

 For someone who has seen three different centuries, six monarchs, two world wars (and 18 world cups), becoming the oldest living man is, perhaps, something of a non-event.

Early Agriculture in Arizona

05-20-2009 • arclein

Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of an ancient farming community at a site called Las Capas in Arizona. The settlement dates to 1200 BC-800 BC, the early agricultural period in the Southwest

Scientists Unveil Missing Link In Evolution

05-19-2009 • http://news.sky.com

Scientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution.

Ancient Gem-Studded Teeth Show Skill of Early Dentists

05-18-2009 • National Geographic

The glittering "grills" of some hip-hop stars aren't exactly unprecedented. Sophisticated dentistry allowed Native Americans to add bling to their teeth as far back as 2,500 years ago, a new study says.

Oldest Human Hairs Found in Hyena Dung

05-11-2009 • LiveScience

The oldest known human hair belonged to a 9,000-year-old mummy disinterred from an ancient Chilean cemetery. Until now: a recent discovery pushes the record back some 200,000 years.

Africans have world's greatest genetic variation

04-30-2009 • AP

Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth, according to a new study that helps narrow the location where humans first evolved, probably near the South Africa-Namibia border. The largest study of African genetics ever undertake

Hobbit Thoughts

04-29-2009 • arclein

In my manuscript Paradigms Shift, I develop the thesis that modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens emerged first in the Indonesian archipelago somewhere around perhaps 70,000 to 100,000 years ago from a hominid distribution that had reached there long since.

A Tiny Hominid With No Place on the Family Tree

04-27-2009 • NY Times

6 years after their discovery, the extinct little people nicknamed hobbits who once occupied the Indonesian island of Flores remain mystifying anomalies in human evolution, out of place in time and geography, their ancestry unknown

Early Humans Were Poor Climbers

04-15-2009 • LiveScience

Our ancient human ancestors traded in the ability to climb trees for the power to walk on two legs, but it is unclear when this happened in evolutionary time. A new study could help pin down the timing of this exchange, revealing that human

CT Scan Reveals Hidden Face Under Nefertiti Bust

03-31-2009 • AP

Researchers in Germany have used a modern medical procedure to uncover a secret within one of ancient Egypt's most treasured artworks — the bust of Nefertiti has two faces.

Greek fisherman nets 2,200-year-old bronze statue

03-23-2009 • AP

A Greek fisherman must have been expecting a monster of a catch when he brought up his nets in the Aegean Sea last week. Instead, Greek authorities say his haul was a section of a 2,200-year-old bronze statue of a horseman.

Google Earth reveals fish trap made from rocks 1,000 years ago off British coast

03-18-2009 • Daily Mail

For a millennium it has lain undisturbed beneath the waves a stone's throw from one of Britain's best-loved beaches. But now modern technology has revealed this ancient fish trap, used at the time of the Norman Conquest.

Italy dig unearths female "vampire" in Venice

03-13-2009 • LiveScience

An archaeological dig near Venice has unearthed the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick stuck between her jaws — evidence, experts say, that she was believed to be a vampire.

1.5 Million-Year-Old Human Footprints Found

02-27-2009 • LiveScience

Early humans had feet like ours and left lasting impressions in the form of 1.5 million-year-old footprints, some of which were made by feet that could wear a size 9 men's shoe. The findings at a Northern Kenya site represent the oldest evidence

13,000-year-old tools unearthed at Colorado home

02-27-2009 • AP

Landscapers were digging a hole for a fish pond in the front yard of a Boulder home last May when they heard a "chink" that didn't sound right. Just some lost tools. Some 13,000-year-old lost tools. They had stumbled onto a cache of mor

Ancient statue found buried at Egypt pyramids

02-26-2009 • MSNBC

Maintenance workers at Egypt's Giza Pyramids have found an ancient quartzite statue of a seated man buried close to the surface of the desert. The statue, about life-size at five feet tall, was found north of the smallest of Giza's three mai

Legacy Landscapes of Amazonia

02-24-2009 • arclein

Most encouraging to myself is that the consistent application of terra preta and terra mulato soils allows us to ultimately map truly settled lands like nowhere else in the world. We will ultimately get a measure of optimum population at the time of

Bulgarian archaeologists discover ancient chariot

11-21-2008 • AP

Archaeologists have unearthed a well-preserved 1,800-year-old bronze chariot at an ancient Thracian tomb in southeastern Bulgaria. "The lavishly ornamented four-wheel chariot dates back to the end of the second century A.D.,"

The £350,000 Iron Age neckband discovered by one man and his metal detector

11-20-2008 • Daily Mail

For 40 years, Maurice Richardson has been braving all weathers to scour the countryside with his trusty metal detector, dreaming of buried treasure. But he almost ignored an unpromising-sounding beep as he searched for debris from a wartime air cr