News by Subject Social & Behavior

Ancient tools and bones discovered in China by archaeologists suggest early humans left Africa and arrived in Asia earlier than previously thought.

This project, the result of a five-year collaboration between the Universities of Seville, Huelva, Cardiff and the Museum of Valencina, includes a statistical modelled complex of the radiocarbon datings to give a more precise approximation of the time of use of the Valencina site, and to know in a more detailed manner the social processes and cultural phenomena that occurred there

Goat domestication was a mosaic -- not a singular -- process, with capture from the wild impacting genetic diversity in different regions of the Fertile Crescent. These wild populations have left different genetic legacies in Asian, African and European populations today. Farmers were selecting specific traits in goats such as coat color and production ability as early as 8,000 years ago.

An international team of scientists reports the oldest unambiguous hunting lesions documented in the history of humankind. The lesions were found on skeletons of two large-sized extinct fallow deer killed by Neandertals about 120,000 years ago around the shores of a small lake (Neumark-Nord 1) near present-day Halle in the eastern part of Germany.

The advent of food production took place in the Near East over 10,000 years and sparked profound changes in the ways human societies were organized. A new study, published in the journal PloS One by Prof. Cheryl Makarewicz of Kiel University and Prof. Bill Finlayson of the University of Reading, demonstrates that specialized buildings regularly featured in the world's earliest agricultural villages and were key to maintaining and enhancing community cohesion.

Following the trail of Siberian pioneers, archaeologists from the University of Tyumen have investigated the camp on Karachinsky Island, the Lower Tobol River, where, according to chronicles, Yermak and his Cossacks spent a winter. The AMS Laboratory at the University of Arizona analysed wood samples and dated the found dugout to the middle of the 17th century, while Yermak's campaign took place in the years 1581-1585.

Smartphones and touchscreens could turn museum visits into a digital and multimedia experience. In the months ahead, an example of this can be seen in Admont Abbey in Austria. In a special exhibition, the abbey is presenting fragments of the 'Admonter Abrogans', a Latin-German dictionary from the period of around 800. The cultural treasures have been made accessible through a multi-media presentation, which researchers of the Institute of Creative\Media/Technologies at St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences (Austria) has designed.