Evolutionary Insights by Anthropology.net

In 2021, a metal detectorist named Peter Heads was working a field at Melsonby in North Yorkshire when he started pulling up pieces of corroded metal that didn’t fit any obvious pattern. Bent iron rings. Ornate copper-alloy fittings. Fragments of harness hardware. He contacted Tom Moore at Durham University. By the time excavation was complete in 2022, the site had yielded two separate deposits co...

Sometime around 3700 BCE, a group of Eneolithic steppe-dwellers did something deliberate and labor-intensive at a spot along the Velykyi Kuialnyk River in what is now southern Ukraine. They scraped the topsoil off a platform down to bare yellow loam. They dug a semi-circular ditch, leaving a causeway oriented toward the southwest. They arranged stones in an elongated east-west axis around the moun...

The oldest known piece of birch tar from Europe comes from the site of Königsaue, Germany, and dates to somewhere between 80,000 and 40,000 years ago. It bears finger impressions. Someone was working it, kneading it, pressing it warm against a stone tool to bind a handle. That same someone almost certainly had birch tar on their hands and skin for the duration of the process, and probably long aft...

The fire that destroyed part of Cabezo Redondo around 1450 BC was, archaeologically speaking, a piece of luck. The settlement sits on a hill in the Alto Vinalopó region of southeastern Spain, a few kilometers west of present-day Villena. When flames swept through the circulation area — an outdoor platform and street connecting several houses — they sealed everything beneath carbonized debris. Whea...

There is a gap in the fossil record just before the point where we’d expect to find our earliest ancestors, a window between roughly 10 and 6 million years ago when the lineage leading to humans was presumably doing something interesting locomotively. What we find in that window is mostly silence, punctuated by fragmentary teeth and jaw pieces from Africa and, increasingly, from unexpected places...

The burnt crust at the bottom of a cooking pot is not glamorous evidence. It is easy to overlook, difficult to analyze, and has spent most of archaeology’s history being scraped off and discarded. But a new study published in PLOS One by Lara González Carretero and colleagues at the University of York and the British Museum has spent considerable effort looking very closely at exactly these crusts...

There’s a stretch of your genome that’s almost entirely free of Neanderthal DNA. Not just sparse — nearly empty. The X chromosome, in person after person, population after population, looks like something scrubbed it clean of whatever contributions our Neanderthal relatives might have made. Geneticists have known about this for years. They called the gaps “Neanderthal deserts,” and most assumed th...

Three skulls found in the clay banks of the Han River in central China have just gotten a lot older. The fossils come from Yunxian, a site in Hubei Province that has been known since 1989, when local archaeologists turned up the first of two nearly complete Homo erectus crania during a survey. A third was found in 2021. Together they represent some of the most intact early hominin remains ever rec...

A Color That Does Not Belong The Gobi Desert is not known for glaze. Its archaeology is usually muted in tone. Stone tools. Plain ceramics. Weathered bone. So when archaeologists walking the Delgerkhaan Uul hills of southeastern Mongolia noticed two small ceramic fragments shimmering blue green against the dust, they knew they were looking at something out of place. Not just foreign, but far-trave...

The View from the Furrows For generations, Samos has been cast as a maritime star. Ancient authors praised its ships, its traders, its reach across the Aegean. But if you leave the harbors and climb into the low hills of the island’s southwest, that story begins to thin out. Here, the evidence does not arrive as temples or shipwrecks. It comes as pottery fragments, sun-bleached and broken, scatter...

A cave overlooking a vanished shoreline On the Atlantic edge of Casablanca, surrounded today by quarries and suburbs, there is a cave with an unassuming name: Grotte à Hominidés. For decades, archaeologists treated it as one more promising but frustratingly incomplete site from Africa’s deep past. Fossils from the right time period, roughly one million to 600,000 years ago, are notoriously rare. N...

A Fossil That Refused to Sit Still When Sahelanthropus tchadensis was first described in the early 2000s, it arrived with a skull and a question. Was this strange, flat faced ape an early member of the human lineage or simply an extinct cousin that happened to resemble us? At roughly seven million years old, Sahelanthropus sits close to the estimated split between humans and chimpanzees. If it wal...

A Hearth Where There Should Not Be One Archaeology often moves forward by millimeters. A trowel nicks an unusual surface. A researcher pauses before brushing away another layer. At Barnham, a Paleolithic site tucked into eastern England, those small moments eventually coalesced into something profound: the oldest convincing evidence that ancient hominins were not just tending fire, but making it....

A Cave Steeped in Deep Time La Pileta Cave in southern Spain is more than a dark hollow in the limestone hills of Málaga province. Inside its twisting passages, walls shimmer with images painted and carved by Homo sapiens across tens of thousands of years—horses, ibex, serpentine symbols, and human silhouettes stretching back to the Upper Paleolithic and forward into the Bronze Age. Discovered in...

For generations, archaeologists have traced early human migrations into Europe through familiar corridors: the Balkans, the Levant, and the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet the northeastern Aegean, dotted with olive groves and seaside towns, has remained an archaeological blank spot. Now a new survey of Ayvalık on Turkey’s northwestern coast points to a Paleolithic landscape where Homo sapiens and...

A Palace on the Edge of an Empire In the foothills of modern-day Tajikistan, 12 kilometers east of Panjikent, archaeologists have been piecing together a royal residence once at the heart of the Sogdian world. Known today as Sanjar-Shah, the palace belonged to a society that thrived as city-states along the arteries of the Silk Road. The Sogdians — merchants, colonists, and civic innovators — link...

In the foothills of the Pavlovské vrchy mountains of southern Moravia, archaeologists uncovered a quiet moment in time: a hunter’s toolkit from the Gravettian period, carefully bundled, forgotten, and buried for some 30,000 years. This is not a cache of ritual offerings or a communal workshop. It is the intimate record of a single person’s gear, frozen in soil and charcoal. The assemblage, publish...

The First Truly Global Material Stone, bronze, and iron all defined earlier chapters of human history, but they emerged regionally and spread unevenly across the globe. Plastic is different. It appeared almost everywhere at once in the mid-20th century. By the 1950s, plastics had entered households from São Paulo to Shanghai, joining the fabric of daily life with astonishing speed. A new study in...

Quartz Under Pressure Around 12,800 years ago, mammoths, mastodons, and saber-toothed cats still roamed North America. Then they vanished. Alongside them disappeared one of the continent’s most recognizable archaeological traditions: the Clovis technocomplex, defined by its fluted spear points and large-scale hunting strategies. A new study in PLOS One (Kennett et al. 2025) reports quartz grains d...

Seeds in the Rock On the island of Gran Canaria, farmers long ago carved grain silos into volcanic bedrock. In these hidden chambers, lentils sat undisturbed for centuries. Shielded from heat and moisture, their DNA persisted — a time capsule of a food tradition spanning two millennia. A new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science (Hagenblad et al. 2025) uses ancient DNA from thes...

The Tropical Puzzle in Our DNA Long before Homo sapiens left Africa, another hominin was roaming Eurasia. Denisovans, an extinct branch of our genus, inhabited a mosaic of landscapes stretching from the Siberian taiga to the subtropical forests of Southeast Asia. Their genes persist in modern humans, especially in Melanesia and Southeast Asia, where traces of Denisovan ancestry rise above 5 percen...

The Deep Past of Mummification Long before pharaohs wrapped their dead in linen or the Chinchorro people of coastal Chile painted their desiccated ancestors, small bands of hunter-gatherers in tropical Asia were carefully tending to their dead. They lived in humid monsoon climates where natural desiccation was impossible. Yet between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago they developed a method of preservati...

High in the mountains and across the scattered islands of Papua New Guinea lives a population whose DNA tells a story about the earliest dispersals of Homo sapiens . For decades, scientists debated whether these communities were descendants of a separate migration out of Africa or part of the same wave that gave rise to other non-African peoples. A new study in Nature Communications points toward...

A century ago, British doctors in colonial Africa were puzzled by goiter, a swelling of the neck linked to iodine deficiency, appearing in people living far from the sea. Yet this phenomenon had much deeper roots. Across thousands of years, shortages and surpluses of essential minerals such as iodine, iron, zinc, and calcium quietly sculpted the human genome. A new study in The American Journal of...

Beneath the soil of northern Latvia lies one of Europe’s largest Stone Age cemeteries. For decades, Zvejnieki has fascinated archaeologists for its hundreds of burials, red ochre stains, and pendants made from animal teeth. But the flaked stone tools—often seen as ordinary or utilitarian—sat largely ignored in museum drawers. A new multiproxy study published in PLOS ONE changes that, revealing a s...