Feature Channels: Archaeology and Anthropology

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A common type of geographic mapping software offers a new way to study human remains.

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A genetic mutation that occurred thousands of years ago might be the answer to how early humans were able to move from central Africa and across the continent in what has been called “the great expansion,” according to new research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.

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A dictionary of thousands of words chronicling the everyday lives of people in ancient Egypt — including what taxes they paid, what they expected in a marriage and how much work they had to do for the government — has been completed. The ancient language is Demotic Egyptian, a name given by the Greeks to denote it was the tongue of the demos, or common peopl

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A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides new evidence and support for a theory introduced in 2007 that suggested a comet may have exploded over Canada 12,900 years ago (the Younger Dryas Boundary), killing off the Clovis people and large animals and sending the earth back into an ice age. It refutes a study in 2009 that failed to replicate the findings of the 2007 study. The key findings in this new study resulted from sampling done at UofSC's archaeological site known as Topper.

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Sharon DeWitte, an athropologist at the University of South Carolina, has been studying medieval skeletons at the Museum of London since 2003, each year unlocking more clues to the mystery that surrounds the Black Death.

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A team of University of South Carolina archaeologists dive, map and complete first survey of the prolonged Civil War naval battle that took place in Charleston Harbor in 1861 - 1865.

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A new analysis of complex interactions between humans and the environment preceding the 9th century collapse and abandonment of the Central Maya Lowlands in the Yucatán Peninsula points to a series of events that have lessons for contemporary decision-makers and sustainability scientists.

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– A team of scientists that used a method of analyzing proteins from samples is the first to detect an immune response from a 500-year-old Incan mummy. Completed at the Proteomics Center, Stony Brook University, the process led to the first positive evidence of active pathogenic infection in an ancient sample of a 15-year-old girl who exhibited an immune response consistent with chronic respiratory infection. Their findings are reported in the PLoS One article “Detecting the Immune System Response of a 500 Year-old Inca Mummy.”

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A new study indicates that mass extinctions affect the pace of evolution, not just in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe, but for millions of years to follow. The study will appear in the August issue of the journal Geology.

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You are what you eat, and that seems to have been true even 2 million years ago, when a group of pre-human relatives was swinging through the trees and racing across the savannas of South Africa.

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Australopithecus sediba, believed to be an early relative of modern-day humans, enjoyed a diet of leaves, fruits, nuts, and bark, which meant they probably lived in a more wooded environment than is generally thought, a surprising find published in the current issue of Nature magazine.

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A 2 million-year-old mishap that befell two early members of the human family tree has provided the most robust evidence to date of what at least one pair of hominins ate.

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Baylor professor organizes a field school to a Texas border town to exhume bodies of those that died while crossing the border for the purpose of identification and repatriation to Mexico.

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An unofficial summer school course in archaeology is just a hyperlink away at "Hopkins in Egypt Today," a free educational website showing a dig in progress throughout June.

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Anthropologists working in southern France have determined that a 1.5 metric ton block of engraved limestone constitutes the earliest evidence of wall art. Their research shows the piece to be approximately 37,000 years old and offers rich evidence of the role art played in the daily lives of Early Aurignacian humans.

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Excavating for the first time in the sprawling complex of Xultún in Guatemala’s Petén region, a team of archaeologists discover house whose inside wall are covered with tiny red and black glyphs that appear to represent the various calendrical cycles charted that extend beyon 2012.

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George Washington University Professor Jeffrey P. Blomster’s latest research explores the importance of the ballgame to ancient Mesoamerican societies. Dr. Blomster’s findings show how the discovery of a ballplayer figurine in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca demonstrates the early participation of the region in the iconography and ideology of the game, a point that had not been previously documented by other researchers. Dr. Blomster’s paper, Early evidence of the ballgame in Oaxaca, Mexico, is featured in the latest issue of Proceedings in the National Academies of Science (PNAS).

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One of the world’s most important fossils has a story to tell about the brain evolution of modern humans and their ancestors, according to Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk.

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Researchers uncover cognitive strategies that support cross-cultural competence regardless of personality traits.

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A new University of Florida study that determined the age of skeletal remains provides evidence humans reached the Western Hemisphere during the last ice age and lived alongside giant extinct mammals.

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Aerobic exercise triggers a reward system in the body of mammals built for endurance – like humans – but not other creatures, a new study from the University of Arizona and Eckerd College says.

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Maximum running speed is the most important variable influencing mammalian eye size other than body size, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.

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The oceans teemed with life 600 million years ago, but the simple, soft-bodied creatures would have been hardly recognizable as the ancestors of nearly all animals on Earth today.

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Equipped with a GigaPan robotic camera mount and Stitch software, an ASU media team trekked to the Mesoamerican ruins of Teotihuacán to capture the essence and magnitude of this ancient city, once one of the largest in the world.

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The NSF-funded research will be presented at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Memphis, Tenn.

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It seems that “Lucy” was not the only hominin on the block in northern Africa about 3 million years ago.

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A team of Cleveland scientists has found a 3.4 million-year-old partial foot fossil in the Afar region of Ethiopia, showing that "Lucy," Australopithecus afarensis, and a much different-looking early hominin lived in the area at the same time. The discovery is in the March 29 issue of Nature.

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Though Tsimane men have a third less baseline testosterone compared with U.S. men, Tsimane show the same increase in testosterone following a soccer game, suggesting that competition-linked bursts of testosterone are a fundamental aspect of human biology.

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Western Europe has long been held to be the "cradle" of Neandertal evolution since many of the earliest discoveries were from sites in this region. But when Neandertals started disappearing around 30,000 years ago, anthropologists figured that climactic factors or competition from modern humans were the likely causes. Intriguingly, new research suggests that Western European Neandertals were on the verge of extinction long before modern humans showed up. This new perspective comes from a study of ancient DNA carried out by an international research team. Rolf Quam, a Binghamton University anthropologist, was a co-author of the study led by Anders Götherström at Uppsala University and Love Dalén at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

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Western Europe has long been held to be the “cradle” of Neandertal evolution since many of the earliest discoveries were from sites in this region. But when Neandertals started disappearing around 30,000 years ago, anthropologists figured that climactic factors or competition from modern humans were the likely causes. Intriguingly, new research suggests that Western European Neandertals were on the verge of extinction long before modern humans showed up. This new perspective comes from a study of ancient DNA carried out by an international research team. Rolf Quam, a Binghamton University anthropologist, was a co-author of the study led by Anders Götherström at Uppsala University and Love Dalén at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

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Celtic burial mounds in southwest Germany, offer a glimpse of how Iron Age people lived in a time before written records were kept. Using both old-school archaeology and new technology, the researchers were able to reconstruct elements of dress and ornamentation and also social behavior of those aspiring status.

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UC archaeologists are the only U.S.-based researchers with a permit to excavate at Pompeii. What's more, the current UC-led excavation is the largest in the history of the site in terms of size of the area covered. See video and listen to podcasts for more.

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UC Riverside graduate student Young Hoon Oh will attempt to summit Mount Everest in May as part of the fieldwork for his anthropology dissertation on the types of communities mountaineers create — both philosophically and experientially — and the transformation of Sherpa society after nearly a century of aiding hundreds of international climbers.

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Research by WUSTL anthropologist Crickette Sanz, PhD, and colleague David Morgan, PhD, has spurred the Republic of Congo to enlarge its Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park boundaries to include the Goualougo Triangle. The Goualougo Triangle is a remote, pristine forest that is home to at least 14 communities of “naïve” chimpanzees with little exposure to humans.

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What draws us to the darker side? What compels us to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway and drives us to watch horror movies and television coverage of disasters? Eric G. Wilson, a literature professor and a lifelong student of the macabre, set out to discover the source of people’s attraction to the morbid, drawing on the perspectives of biologists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians and artists.

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UC Riverside graduate student's discoveries in the British Museum and on the Yucatan Peninsula prompt reinterpretation of women's roles in pre-colonial Mexico.

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Research by Santa Fe Institute Professor Jennifer Dunne is the first to examine in detail the feeding habits of human hunter-gatherers in the food webs on which they depended.

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The findings inside a cave and a key cultural and religious center for the ancient Maya will be presented at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in New York.

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St. Lawrence University Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Mindy Pitre asked dentists to donate teeth to help students learn identification techniques.

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A scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an anthropologist from the University at Albany teamed up to use ultra-modern chemical analysis technology at Rensselaer to analyze ancient Mayan pottery for proof of tobacco use in the ancient culture. Dmitri Zagorevski, director of the Proteomics Core in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) at Rensselaer, and Jennifer Loughmiller-Newman, a doctoral candidate at the University at Albany, have discovered the first physical evidence of tobacco in a Mayan container. Their discovery represents new evidence on the ancient use of tobacco in the Mayan culture and a new method to understand the ancient roots of tobacco use in the Americas.

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People and giant snakes not only target each other for food – they also compete for the same prey, according to a study co-authored by a Cornell University researcher.

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A University of Cincinnati-based journal devoted to research on papyri from Egypt sheds light on job training, prayer, dream interpretation and belief in magic in the ancient world.

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Millions of people across the United States will sit down Nov. 24 to a traditional Thanksgiving meal, including turkey, potatoes, squash, corn and cranberries. These foods have become synonymous with Thanksgiving, but how did they end up on tables from Maine to California? According to Bruce Smith, senior scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, much of what is eaten at Thanksgiving today came from Mexico and South America.

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WUSTL paleoanthropologist, colleagues develop artificial neural network model to predict location of fossil sites.

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Computational modeling that examines evidence of how hominin groups evolved culturally and biologically in response to climate change during the last Ice Age also bears new insights into the extinction of Neanderthals. The complex modeling was done at Arizona State University and the University of Colorado Denver. Published in Human Ecology.

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Johns Hopkins researchers have identified the first ankle and toe bone fossils from the earliest North American true primate, which they say suggests that our earliest forerunners may have dwelled or moved primarily in trees, like modern day lemurs and similar mammals.

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University of Cincinnati research examining the edgy intersection of fashion and crime is revealed at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal.

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In a study of wild primates, reported this week (Nov. 7, 2011) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist Karen B. Strier describes a monkey society where equality and tolerance rule and where sexually mature males, still living at home, seem to get helpful access to mates by the mere presence of their mothers and other maternal kin.

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A new partnership between the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and the Watermen's Museum in historic Yorktown Virginia lets schoolchildren use robotic subs to study shipwrecks from last major battle of the American Revolution.