Enlarge / This chert bladelet still has a remnant of its bone haft attached. (credit: Wang et al. 2022) We know the oldest human cultures only from their most durable parts: mostly stone tools, sometimes bone. Show an experienced Pleistocene archaeologist a chert blade, and they can probably tell you which hominin species made it, […]
Enlarge (credit: Slimak et al. 2022) According to a recent study, a child’s tooth unearthed from an old layer of a cave floor in Southern France belonged to a member of our species. If so, the tooth is now the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens living in Europe, and its presence means that our species […]
Enlarge (credit: Gimranov et al. 2021) During the last Ice Age, more than 100 cave bears died in Imanay Cave, a 100-meter-long corridor of stone in Russia’s southern Ural Mountains. The dead bears, along with a cave lion and a few other Pleistocene mammals, left behind nearly 10,000 bones, which have mostly worn down to […]
Enlarge (credit: Crevecoeur and Antoine 2021) When archaeologists in the 1960s unearthed a 13,400-year-old cemetery at Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, it looked like they’d stumbled across the aftermath of a large-scale battle fought during the Pleistocene. At least half the people buried at the site, which straddles the banks of the Upper Nile, bore the […]
Enlarge / Detailed rock-art recording by ARKENAS archaeologist in Maros-Pangkep. (credit: Adhi Agus Oktaviana) The limestone caves and rock shelters of Indonesia’s southern Sulawesi island hold the oldest traces of human art and storytelling, dating back more than 40,000 years. Paintings adorn the walls of at least 300 sites in the karst hills of Maros-Pangkep, […]
Enlarge Between 125,000 and 70,000 years ago, people began to do some very modern things: collecting small objects for no practical reason, decorating things with pigments, and storing water and possibly even food in containers. The oldest known sites with evidence of those behaviors are along the coastline of southern Africa. Today, most of those […]
Enlarge (credit: Luna) Dogs tagged along with the first humans to venture into the Americas, according to a recent study that analyzed existing collections of canine and human DNA. The results suggest that people domesticated dogs sometime before 23,000 years ago in Siberia, where isolated groups of wolves and people were struggling to survive the […]
Enlarge (credit: Brumm et al. 2021) A pig painted on the wall of an Indonesian cave is the world’s oldest figurative art—that is, it’s the oldest known drawing of something, rather than an abstract design or a stencil. The 45,500-year-old ocher painting depicts a Sulawesi warty pig, which appears to be watching a standoff between […]
Expand / / The puppy stays are dried outside but largely intact because of being buried in permafrost. (charge: Government of Yukon) This Ice Age Lady puppy does not seem {} a feral predator, but what with her little pet teeth and tender small ears. Based on her DNA, but the eldest pup, called Zhùr, […]
Expand In Wilamaya Patjxaan archaeological site in southern Peru, archaeologists discovered the skeleton of a young lady whose individuals buried her having a seekers’ toolkit, such as projectile points. The Locate motivated University of California Davis archaeologist Randall Haas and his colleagues to have a close look at additional Pleistocene and early Holocene hunters from […]