Evolutionary Insights by Anthropology.net

<p>Somewhere in the Altai Mountains roughly 59,000 years ago, a Homo neanderthalensis sat still while someone drilled into their tooth with a pointed piece of jasper.</p><p>We know this because the tooth survived. It...

<p>A tooth recovered from Zhoukoudian cave near Beijing in the early 1950s has been sitting in storage for decades. It belongs to a Homo erectus individual who died roughly 420,000 years ago, during a period when the...

<p>When T. Whitworth described a set of human cranial fragments from Turkana, Kenya, in 1960, he found himself stuck. The skull was thick-walled. The forehead sloped. The mandible was heavy-built in a way that recalled...

<p>The mound at Baraleti sits near the center of the Javakheti Plateau, and its name tells you something right away. Natsargora means “hill of ashes.” Not a metaphor. When excavations began in 2023, researchers from the...

<p>Somewhere around 4,000 BC, people living at a promontory above the Sitna river in what is now northeastern Romania built something that didn’t fit. Their settlement had roughly 45 houses, each between 70 and 120...

<p>The petrous bone is not beautiful. It is a dense, pyramidal wedge buried in the base of the skull, housing the cochlea and semicircular canals, its name taken from the Latin petrosus, meaning rock-like. It weighs...

<p>Somewhere between 1665 and 1680, a man was buried at the hip with a clay pipe. Traces of soot were still lodged in the bowl. The pipe maker’s stamp on the heel showed a crowned rose and the monogram RW, later traced...

<p>Somewhere around 3600 BC, a man was laid to rest in a stone-walled tomb beside Loch Calder, in what is now the far north of mainland Scotland. Later, his son was placed there too. Then, some years after that, his...

<p>There’s a specific kind of power that lives in restricted space. The Classic Maya k’uhul ajaw — the divine king — expressed his authority partly through enclosure. His palace at the center of the city was internally...

<p>The Sama people of the Philippines spend their lives on or near the ocean, and much of their foraging happens underwater. Over generations, something measurable shifted in their biology: their spleens got bigger. The...

<p>In 1948, a small team of amateur excavators working a marl quarry near the village of Lehringen in Lower Saxony pulled a wooden spear from sediments laid down during the last interglacial. It was 2.38 meters long...

<p>When French Catholic missionaries arrived in the Mangareva Islands in 1834, they came with tools, building expertise, and an agenda. Within a few years, the frères bâtisseurs — lay builder-brothers attached to the...

<p>In 902 CE, a fleet dispatched by the Umayyad Emirate of Córdoba arrived at Ibiza. The island was barely inhabited. Contemporary Andalusi writers rarely mentioned it at all. Whatever pre-conquest population existed...

<p>The bone fragment pulled from Denisova Cave is 2.5 centimeters long. It was dug out of Layer 12 of the East Chamber, a vaulted space in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia where the light changes color in the...

<p>The caves of Ice Age Europe were not quiet places. People lived in them, killed animals inside them, made art on their walls, and sometimes processed their dead in them. At Gough’s Cave in Somerset, around 14,300...