Daily bread before farming, according to reports in Science (AAAS) News and ScienceDaily 16 July 2018 and BBC News 17 July 2018, and PNAS 16 July 2018 doi: 10.1073/pnas.1801071115. A team of researchers from UK and Denmark have found charred remains in the fireplaces of an archaeological site known as Shubayqa 1, located in the […]
Neanderthals were artists, according to reports in BBC News, Nature News, Science (AAAS) News and ScienceDaily 22 February 2018, and Science doi: 10.1126/science.aap7778, 23 February 2018, and Science Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aar5255, 22 February 2018. Over the past few years scientists studying rock art and artefacts in several caves in Spain. Some of it is just […]
Stone tools increase Hobbit age, according to reports in ScienceNOW 17 March 2010 and ABC (Australia) News in Science 18 March 2010. In 2004 the bones of a creature nicknamed the Hobbit were found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Even though it had a chimp sized brain and ape-like body size […]
Stone age pyrotechnology described in ScienceNOW 13 August 2009, and Science Daily and ABC News in Science, 14 August 2009. Archaeologists collecting stone tools at a site called Pinnacle Point in South Africa have long been puzzled by stone tools made of a fine grained rock named silcrete. The tools showed evidence of much working […]
Sophisticated, fearless Neanderthals described in an article in AlphaGalileo and ScienceDaily 14 May 2009. Neanderthals are usually portrayed as brutish muscle men who were unable to compete with smarter modern men in the struggle for existence. Gerrit Dusseldorp of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has analysed archaeological sites of Neanderthals and concluded they were […]
Cavemen better than modern artists, according to a report in Fossil Science 9 December 2012 and PLoS ONE doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0049786. Anyone who has tried to draw running animals has found it is not easy to accurately depict the relative positions of their moving legs, so what has modern man done to fix this? In the 1880s […]
Just when we thought we were evolving more brains, a 2,000 year old analogue computer made by the ancient Greeks is documented in Sky and Telescope article, 29 November 2006. It has been named the Antikythera Mechanism, and was made of brass enclosed in wood. Until recently, no one has had a close look at […]
Americans ten times older, according to reports in Nature News and Science (AAAS) News and ScienceDaily 26 April 2017, and Nature, 2017; 544 (7651): 479 doi: 10.1038/nature22065. In 1992 palaeontologists found bones, teeth and tusks from a Mastodon buried in a fine silt layer that was exposed during a road construction project in California. Many […]
Cooking plants in a green Sahara, reported in Science (AAAS) News and ScienceDaily 19 December 2016, BBC News 20 December 2016, and Nature Plants doi:10.1038/nplants.2016.194, published online 19 December 2016. A group of researchers from the UK and Italy have studied 110 broken pieces of pottery from archaeological sites at Takarkori and Uan Afuda in […]
Monkeys make stone tools, according to reports in Nature News and ScienceDaily 19 October 2016 and Nature (2016) doi:10.1038/nature20112, published online 19 October 2016. Sharp edged stone flakes with a distinctive conchoidal fracture are traditionally considered evidence of human or hominid stone tool production. Researchers from the University of Oxford, University College London and University […]