Hunter-gatherer societies on the Iberian Peninsula were making sophisticated baskets with decorative geometric patterns 9,500 years ago, more than 2,000 years earlier than previously thought, researchers in Spain have reported. The researchers also said that sandals that were found in the same cave as the baskets represent the “earliest and most diverse set of plant-based […]
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For a big annual conference on anthropology, Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, put together several panelists around a controversial theme: that their discipline was in the midst of erasing discussions of sex, which they believe is binary — either male or female. Dr. Lowrey invited a slate of speakers and […]
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Millions of years ago, this desert in Peru was a gathering place for fantastical sea creatures: whales that walked, dolphins with walrus faces, sharks with teeth as large as a human face, red-feathered penguins, aquatic sloths. They reproduced in the gentle waters of a shallow lagoon buffered by hills that still wrap across the landscape […]
Read More Millions of years ago, this desert in Peru was a gathering place for fantastical sea creatures: whales that walked, dolphins with walrus faces, sharks with teeth as large as a human face, red-feathered penguins, aquatic sloths. They reproduced in the gentle waters of a shallow lagoon buffered by hills that still wrap across the landscape […]
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Espen Finstad was trudging through mud in the Jotunheimen mountains of eastern Norway this month when he happened upon a wooden arrow, bound with a pointed tip made of quartzite. Complete with feathers, it was so well-preserved that it looked as if it could have been lost just recently. But Mr. Finstad, a glacial archaeologist […]
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Nearly half a million years ago, humans in Africa were assembling wood into large structures, according to a study published Thursday that describes notched and tapered logs buried under sand in Zambia. The discovery drastically pushes back the historical record of structural woodworking. Before, the oldest known examples of this craft were 9,000-year-old platforms on […]
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The Punan people of the island of Borneo were once rumored to have tails, so elusive did they seem to their neighbors in the 19th century. Unlike the Indigenous farmers, who lived in long houses, the Punan roamed the island’s northern rainforest in family groups, hunting bearded pigs, harvesting starchy plants and gathering forest products […]
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Heat in Greece in summer was expected, but its intensity startled me. Wherever I went — Athens, Aegina, Delphi, the Peloponnese — the grass was parched, brittle and hay-colored, and seemed ready to catch fire. The air was hot and dry. At the sanctuary, evening brought relief. We were seated under the open sky on […]
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Millions of years ago, a simian ancestor of humanity decided to climb a tree. It may have been looking for a meal, escaping a predator or seeking a shady place to rest. Later, like anyone who has ascended high into a forest’s canopy, our relative discovered that getting down in one piece is less simple […]
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