Tech

Is the “Dragon Man” skull actually from a new hominin species?

Enlarge / The Harbin skull (left) and the Dali skull (right). (credit: Ni et al. 2021) The reported discovery of a new hominin species from China created a lot of buzz last week. Its discoverers—paleoanthropologists Xijun Ni, Qiang Ji, Chris Stringer, and their colleagues—say that a skull discovered near Harbin, in northeast China, has a […]

Tech

Mexico City’s “tower of skulls” could tell us about pre-Columbian life

Last month, archaeologists in Mexico City unearthed the eastern façade of a tower of skulls near the 700-year-old site of the Templo Mayor, the main temple in the former Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan. It’s a morbidly sensational find, but it’s also a potential treasure trove of information about the people who died at Tenochtitlan […]