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Archaeologists have discovered evidence of ancient transport technology in the Americas, suggesting that early North Americans used travois-like sleds for transport nearly 22,000 years ago.New findings by Bournemouth University researchers Matthew Robert Bennett, a Professor of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, and Sally Christine Reynolds, an Associate Professor in Hominin Palaeoecology, identifies the use of simple handcarts, possessing no wheels, that were employed during the late Ice Age near modern day White Sands, New Mexico.The adoption of such a device significantly predates the first known use of the wheel, which is believed to have occured in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago...The footprints...

About 23,000 years ago, a group of children and teenagers left footprints along Lake Otero in what is now southern New Mexico – perhaps they were fetching water for adults hunting a mammoth or the massive ground sloth that roamed the area in those days. This week, a team of researchers from White Sands National Park, the National Parks Service and others published an article in the journal Science, which concludes that those children’s footprints were the oldest known human tracks ever found in North America. Imprints of the tiny toes were found along outcrops of the since-dried-up lake, which...

The discovery of butchered bones belonging to a glyptodont, a giant relative of the armadillo, suggests that humans were living in Argentina 20,000 years ago. Ancient humans may have butchered and eaten a giant armadillo-like creature around 20,000 years ago in what is now Argentina, a new study finds. The discovery of the butchered bones supports a growing body of evidence that people spread throughout the Americas much earlier than previously assumed. During the Late Pleistocene epoch (129,000 to 11,700 years ago), ice sheets and glaciers covered much of the planet, particularly during the Last Glacial Maximum, a period around...

An ancient human ancestor whose name honours Cecil Rhodes should be renamed in an effort to decolonise science, experts have argued. The species homo rhodesiensis, named after Rhodesia – which in turn took the name of the British imperialist – should be called homo bodoensis, scientists say. The reclassification is partly a bid to shed colonial associations – as well bring clarity to a confusing chapter of human evolution.... ...Rhodes was an imperialist, businessman and politician who played a dominant role in southern Africa in the late 19th century, driving the annexation of vast swathes of land. The long-running Rhodes...

In 2022, researchers stumbled upon the footprint site near the northern tip of North Africa while examining boulders at a nearby pocket beach. A team of archaeologists have unveiled the discovery of the oldest human footprints ever recorded in North Africa and the southern Mediterranean. The footprints, dating back an astonishing 90,000 years, were found on a beach in Larache, Morocco, by a multinational team led by Moncef Essedrati, a research professor and laboratory director at the French University of Southern Brittany. "Between tides, I said to my team that we should go north to explore another beach," Essedrati told...

Archaeologists from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the Leibniz Zentrum für Archäologie and Leiden University say they have found cut marks on the bones of two beaver species from the 400,000-year-old hominin open air site of Bilzingsleben in central Germany. Their results demonstrate a greater diversity of prey choice by Middle Pleistocene hominins than commonly acknowledged, and a much deeper history of broad-spectrum subsistence than commonly assumed, already visible in prey choices 400,000 years ago...They used magnifying glasses and digital microscopes to analyze 2,496 remains (1,963 teeth and 533 cranial and postcranial bones and bone fragments) of two beaver species:...

A recent DNA research on the bones of a boy who lived along the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia shows... that Native Americans share much of their genetic material with Middle Easterners and Europeans...Published in the journal Nature, the study of the genome of the boy, who lived twenty-four thousand years ago, shows that fully one-third of his DNA was from West Eurasian peoples linked to the Middle East and Europe....The study... could help clear up some long-standing mysteries regarding... some genetic singularities.Co-author and ancient DNA specialist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen states "these results were a...

The Neolithic period of northern Arabia is known in part from the monumental stone structures and accompanying cave art, as well as the remains of hearths indicating temporary settlement. But there is much we do not know about the character and timing of settlement before the spread of animal pastoralism (c. 6000 BC).Researchers have recently discovered new, enigmatic carvings that shed light on this ancient history.Five panels totaling nine large life-size specimens have so far been identified. The camels have frequently had other camels carved over them or had their features and proportions improved, which suggests the site was used...

Human footprints found in New Mexico are about 23,000 years old, a study reported, suggesting that people may have arrived long before the Ice Age’s glaciers melted. Ancient human footprints preserved in the ground across the White Sands National Park in New Mexico are astonishingly old, scientists reported on Thursday, dating back about 23,000 years to the Ice Age.The results, if they hold up to scrutiny, would rejuvenate the scientific debate about how humans first spread across the Americas, implying that they did so at a time when massive glaciers covered much of their path.Researchers who have argued for such...

Researchers excavated human footprints out of a small bluff next to a dried-up playa lake and radiocarbon-dated embedded seeds to around 23,000 years ago. Their results suggest that people entered the Americas thousands of years earlier than the accepted estimate....some of these prints could be tens of thousands of years old, making them potentially the best evidence yet that people reached the Americas far earlier than once believed. Radiocarbon dating of seeds surrounding the prints suggests that they were made during the Last Glacial Maximum, when massive ice sheets are thought to have blocked any passage from the Bering Land...

The footprints at White Sands were dated by examining the seeds of an aquatic plant that once thrived along the shores of the dried-up lake, Ruppia cirrhosa, commonly known as ditchgrass. According to research published Thursday in the journal Science and co-authored by Bustos, the ancient ditchgrass seeds were found in layers of hard earth both above and below the many human footprints at the site, and they were radiocarbon-dated to determine their age. The tracks at one location have been revealed as both the earliest known footprints and the oldest firm evidence of humans anywhere in the Americas, showing...

In January 2020, Jeff Pigati and Kathleen Springer, both research geologists at the U.S. Geological Survey, went to New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin at White Sands National Park to see about some footprints. These weren’t just any footprints; the fossilized tracks represent the oldest human footprints in North America. What’s more, Tularosa Basin, about 20,000 years ago, was in the midst of what’s known as the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). During this chilly, final part of the Pleistocene Era, the global sea level was about 400 feet lower and glaciers covered 25 percent of Earth’s land. Their mission was to find...

The New York Times proclaimed in a recent article that humans caused catastrophic wildfires in California, leading to a large and tragic loss of life. The author seemed to blame these fires on man-made climate change and pointed to evidence of humanity’s negative effect on the environment by citing a peer-reviewed study in a prestigious academic journal. The science is clear, the article argues: Human beings caused one of history’s great tragedies through their careless disregard for the environment.

A team of paleontologists... analyzed the fossilized jawbone, partial skull and some leg bones of a hominin dated to 300,000 years ago.The fossils were excavated at a site in Hualongdong, in what is now a part of East China. They were subsequently subjected to both a morphological and a geometric assessment, with the initial focus on the jawbone, which exhibited unique features—a triangular lower edge and a unique bend.The research team suggests that the unique features of the jawbone resemble those of both modern humans and Late Pleistocene hominids. But they also found that it did not have a chin,...

A team of archaeologists, palaeozoologists, geologists, sedimentologists, archaeobotanists and palaeogeneticists from the Institute of Archaeology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, found hundreds of blades made from either radiolarite, flint or limnosilicite, in addition to bone needles and the bones of various animals in the remains of a large hearth or fire within the cave.The researchers also found faunal and archaeobotanical remains, as well as bones from species of chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra), deer (Cervus elaphus) and wild horse (Equus ferus). More than a dozen bones have traces of cut marks, cracking for marrow extraction and smoothing with stone tools...Most of...

Species of the horse genus Equus first appeared on the North American continent during the Pliocene era and spread to and across Eurasia beginning around 2.5 million years ago. They disappeared from the Western Hemisphere during the megafauna extinction event at the end of the Pleistocene and the last glacial period. The return of equids to the Americas through the introduction of the domestic horse (Equus caballus) is documented in the historical literature but is not explored fully either archaeologically or genetically. Historical documents suggest that the first domestic horses were brought from the Iberian Peninsula to the Caribbean in...

Researchers from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) have identified the remains of a mammoth in the town of Los Reyes de Juárez, Mexico.The mammoth was uncovered in one of the towns municipal cemeteries whilst workers were preparing new graves.Upon further inspection, biologist Iván Alarcón Durán identified that they were the bones of megafauna from the Pleistocene, with initial studies suggesting the remains are an elderly male Columbian mammoth.The Columbian mammoth (mammuthus columbi) inhabited North America as far north as the northern United States and as far south as Costa Rica during the Pleistocene epoch. DNA studies shows...

A new study suggests that a million years ago, glaciers began sticking more persistently to their beds, triggering cycles of longer ice ages. Here, ice discharged from Iceland’s Breiðamerkurjökull glacier on its way to the Atlantic ocean. Credit: Kevin Krajick/Earth Institute Why did glacial cycles intensify a million years ago? Researchers find clues on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean. Something big happened to the planet about a million years ago. There was a major shift in the response of Earth’s climate system to variations in our orbit around the Sun. The shift is called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. Before the...

Entombed in a limestone shelf of South Africa’s Rising Star Cave, the fragmented skull of a Homo naledi child has suggested that the prehistoric species may have been more similar to modern humans than previously thought. Two new studies, published this week in the journal PaleoAnthropology, have revealed new details about the mysterious Homo naledi people, based on a set of fossils first discovered in 2017, which are believed to be that of a young Homo naledi of 4- to 6-years-old. An international team of researchers has estimated the child would have lived between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago, before...

The remains were found in a remote part of the cave that suggests the body had been placed there on purpose, said Professor Guy Berger. JOHANNESBURG — The fossil remains of an early hominid child who died almost 250,000 years ago have been discovered in a cave in South Africa by a team of international and South African researchers. The team announced the discovery of a partial skull and teeth of a Homo naledi child who died when it was approximately four to six years old. The remains were found in a remote part of the cave that suggests the...