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For about 400,000 years, humans have consistently relied on fire for various purposes, especially for cooking, a process that helps kills off harmful bacteria and parasites in our food while also making it easier to digest. According to a statement released by Tel Aviv University (TAU), however, cooking was not the motivating factor for why early hominins learned to control fire. Instead, TAU archaeologists Miki Ben-Dor and Ran Barkai propose, its original purpose was to preserve meat in order to extend its shelf life and to ward off scavengers intent on stealing humans’ hard-won prey. The research examined the earliest...

Scientists were recently baffled by DNA evidence that revealed the existence of a genetically unknown group of early South American settlers. Archaeologists are continually adapting their models for how human populations spread from Asia through North America to South America, and this new research is bound to alter those theories once again. The Associated Press reports that the researchers analyzed ancient DNA from 21 individuals who lived in Colombia's Altiplano Cundiboyacense region thousands of years ago. Located near current-day Bogotá, this area was also close to the ancient land bridge connecting South and Central America, the route that early human...

Whales, as the largest mammals on Earth, have long been an important resource for human societies, whether it be for food, oil, or other materials. According to a report by Popular Science, hunter-gatherers in present-day Spain and France have been crafting essential tools from whale bones for much longer than previously thought. A new study analyzed 83 bone tools found at sites along the Bay of Biscay and 90 additional bones from the Santa Catalina cave in Spain. The investigation relied on mass spectrometry and radiocarbon dating to determine that humans living in the region have been making whale-bone tools,...

According to a Live Science report, European hunter-gatherers traversed the Mediterranean Sea in primitive boats and visited North Africa much earlier than previously thought. A new study sequenced the DNA from nine individuals who lived in modern-day Algeria and Tunisia between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. The surprising results revealed that some of them may have been descended from Mesolithic Europeans. The genome of one particular man buried at the site of Djebba in Tunisia indicated that at least six percent of his DNA could be traced back to European hunter-gatherers. These results suggest that the individual's local ancestors mixed...

According to a Phys.org report, an international team of researchers from Simon Fraser University, the Greek Ministry of Culture, and the University of Bologna analyzed the chemical composition of collagen samples taken from human remains recovered from Franchthi Cave, a site that now overlooks Greece's Bay of Koilada.The cave was occupied over a period of about 40,000 years beginning in the Upper Paleolithic period. The remains in the study have been dated to the Mesolithic period, between 8700 and 8500 B.C., and the Neolithic period, between 6600 and 5800 B.C.Previous studies of human bones from the cave have indicated that...

CT-scan of bovid femur, showing three bone arrowhead fragments and poison substance. (Dr Aliénor Duhamel/CC BY-NC-ND) In 1983 archaeologists excavating a cave in South Africa discovered an unusual femur bone. It belonged to an unspecified antelope and was found to be 7,000 years old. X-rays revealed that three modified bone arrowheads had been placed into the marrow cavity. At the conclusion of the 1983 excavation the bone, together with other artefacts recovered from the cave, was placed in the University of the Witwatersrand's Archaeology Department storerooms. It lay there until 2022. That's when new archaeological investigations began at the site...

Claims that we ought to subscribe to a low-carb, high-protein 'paleo diet' are typically based on assertions our ancestors avoided complicated plant processing in favor of simpler meals consisting of meats, nuts, fruit, and raw vegetables. "...nonsense ..."

The Caveman Diet, also known as the Paleo Diet, is a weight-loss craze where calorie-counters pick foods they think early humans may have eaten. For most followers, this means a meat-heavy diet. But a new study suggests that if you truly want to eat like a caveman, you should be steering clear of red meat. Contrary to popular belief, researchers from Bar-Ilan University say that early humans were not solely focused on animal protein. Instead, cavemen were mostly vegetarians whose diets featured plant-based foods including acorns, cereals, legumes, and aquatic plants. 'This discovery underscores the importance of plant foods in...

New research suggests that dozens of Bronze-Age era Britons were killed in an attack unlike any previous known to archaeologists studying that time period and location. The research on human remains from Charterhouse Warren in southwest England, conducted by a team of researchers from multiple institutions including Oxford University, was published in Antiquity, a journal of world archaeology. It found that at least 37 Bronze Age-era men, women and children were "killed and butchered" and then cannibalized, with their bodies then thrown down a nearly 50-foot deep natural shaft. While archaeologists have found the remains of Bronze Age and later...

Researchers found direct evidence that Clovis people relied heavily on mammoths for food, using isotopic analysis to confirm 40% of a Clovis mother's diet came from mammoths. The study highlights how hunting large animals supported the Clovis people's mobility and rapid spread, while also contributing to the extinction of Ice Age megafauna...The study, featured on the Dec. 4 cover of the journal Science Advances, employed stable isotope analysis to reconstruct the diet of the mother of an infant found at a 13,000-year-old Clovis burial site in Montana. Previously, researchers inferred prehistoric diets primarily through indirect evidence, such as stone tools...

An extremely rare example of megalithic rock art was recently identified in northern Israel's Yehudiya Nature Reserve inside a 4,200-year-old stone burial chamber. The unique discovery of a clearly composed, artistic rendering of a herd of animals is shifting the way archaeologists think about the little-understood peoples who created the thousands of massive stone burial chambers, or dolmens, that dot northern Israel's Golan and Galilee... "These megalithic structures were built more than 4,000 years ago. They are ancient burials and they were built by a group of people of whom the only thing we know is that they built their...

A new study led by a University of Arizona researcher is one step closer to an answer on how Indigenous people in the Americas interacted with early dogs and wolves.The study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances and based on archaeological remains in Alaska, shows that people and the ancestors of today's dogs began forming close relationships as early as 12,000 years ago – about 2,000 years earlier than previously recorded in the Americas..."People like me who are interested in the peopling of the Americas are very interested in knowing if those first Americans came with dogs," Lanoë added....

A study team led by researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) says that a 7,000-year-old weapon kit consisting of two bowstrings believed to be the oldest ever found in Europe and a set of three wood arrows discovered in the Cave of Los Murciélagos in Albuñol, Granada, reveals an “unprecedented degree of precision and technical mastery” in their construction. When describing the complexity of the bowstrings, which were woven together from the tendons of three different animal species, Raquel Piqué, a researcher in the Department of Prehistory of the UAB and coordinator of the study, said that “this...

‘Focaccia’ seasoned with animal fat baked in an experimental replica husking tray. Credit: Sergio Taranto Late Neolithic communities in the Fertile Crescent baked large, seasoned breads using grooved husking trays. Analysis of archaeological remains highlights a six-century culinary tradition involving cereal processing and communal meals. A study led by researchers from the UAB and the University La Sapienza in Rome reveals that during the Late Neolithic, between 7000 and 5000 BCE, fully agricultural communities in the Fertile Crescent region of the Near East developed a complex culinary tradition. This tradition included baking large loaves of bread and “focaccias” with various...

Archaeologists in the Iberian Peninsula have discovered a 65,000-year-old tar-making "factory" engineered by Neanderthals — a feat pulled off 20,000 years before modern humans (Homo sapiens) set foot in the region, a new study finds. The sticky tar helped Neanderthals produce glue to make weapons and tools. The so-called factory — a carefully designed hearth — enabled the Neanderthals to precisely control the fire and manage the temperature of the flame that produced their gooey creations.... ...the newfound hearth, seemingly dug into the floor of a cave in what is now Gibraltar, shows that Neanderthals were skilled engineers who had...

Japan has been inhabited by people since about 35,000 years ago. Roughly 16,500 years ago a group of Neolithic hunter-gatherers, referred to as the "Jomon" culture, developed a complex society including the production of pottery and jewellery.About 3,000 years ago, rice cultivation in paddy fields was introduced to Japan. This saw the beginning of the Yayoi period which ended around the year 300 CE. After the Yayoi came the Kofun period (300–538 CE)...The authors note that the current consensus based on DNA evidence from modern Japanese people is that there was 2 or 3-way mixing between the indigenous Jomon people...

How did early hunter-gatherers manage to survive in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth, and could pieces of one of the world's oldest pots hold a clue?Prof Alice Roberts journeys to Asia, the world's greatest land mass, and attempts to replicate ancient survival techniques that appear to have been passed down through many generations. With little precedent and only the most primitive resources available, our ancestors' innovation and experimentation was vital for their success.This clip is from Incredible Human Journey (2009).What Turned Hunter-Gatherers Into Empire Builders? | 4:44BBC Timestamp | 785K subscribers | 6,728 views | November 13,...

According to a statement released by the University of Tübingen, an international team of researchers has studied the effects of climate change on hunter-gatherers living in Europe between 47,000 and 7,000 years ago by analyzing their teeth with a machine learning algorithm called Pheno-ABC. "This has allowed us to collect an unprecedented dataset [including some 450 prehistoric humans from all over Europe] that is significantly larger than previous skeletal and genetic datasets," said Hannes Rathmann of the University of Tübingen. The researchers focused on inheritable features of teeth, such as their shape, the ridge and groove patterns on the chewing...

Newsweek reports that an early farming settlement dated to about 7,000 years ago has been discovered on a plain between two streams in the central Czech Republic. Daniel Pilař of the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic said that the well-preserved settlement, including traces of longhouses and pits full of pottery and tools, was identified during the construction of a barn. The site is thought to have been home to perhaps a dozen people who cultivated plants and raised cattle, yet still hunted and gathered food as well. "Regarding the use of houses, it...

Broken, charred and still crusted with nearly 8000-year-old food, the remnants of ancient pottery found across northern Eurasia wouldn’t be mistaken for fine china. But the advent of this durable technology—used to cook and store abundant plant and animal resources—was a huge step forward for hunter-gatherers in this part of the globe. It was also home-grown, new research suggests.For decades, researchers believed pottery arrived in Europe along with agriculture and domesticated animals, as part of a “package” of technologies that spread northward from Anatolia beginning about 9000 years ago. Pots found in Northern Europe dating around the same time were...