News by Subject Archaeology

Today's peace symbols go back to antiquity -- according to archaeologists, peace images were widespread, especially during wars, despite glorification of war. The oldest peace treaty attests to long negotiations instead of triumphant victory.

Biologists have been puzzled by the evolutionary adaptation behind a common tooth trait of northern Asians and Native Americans: shovel-shaped incisors. A UC Berkeley analysis of archeological specimens shows that nearly 100 percent of early Native Americans had shoveled incisors, and genetic evidence pinpoints the selection to the Beringian standstill 20,000 years ago. Leslea Hlusko proposes that a trait linked to shoveling, mammary duct growth, was selected to provide vitamin D and fat to infants.

A close examination of 3.6-million-year-old hominin footprints discovered in Laetoli, Tanzania, suggests our ancestors evolved the hallmark trait of extended leg, human-like bipedalism substantially earlier than previously thought.

Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and other recent human relatives may have begun hunting large mammal species down to size - by way of extinction - at least 90,000 years earlier than previously thought, says a new study published in the journal Science. The magnitude and scale of the extinction wave surpassed any other recorded during the last 66 million years, according to the study.

Scientists have long wondered why the physical traits of Neanderthals, the ancestors of modern humans, differ greatly from today's man. Now, a research team led by a professor at the University of New England in Australia, with the aid of an anatomy and fluid dynamics expert at NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State University (NYITCOM at A-State), may have the answer.

University of Otago paleontologists are rewriting the history of New Zealand's ancient whales by describing a previously unknown genus of baleen whale, alive more than 27.5 million years ago and found in the Hakataramea Valley, South Canterbury.

A recent study published in an esteemed academic journal indicates that volcanic eruptions in the mid 500s resulted in an unusually gloomy and cold period.

Researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology (NIGP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their colleagues from Germany and the UK reported scale architectures from Jurassic Lepidoptera from the UK, Germany, Kazakhstan and China and Tarachoptera (a stem group of Amphiesmenoptera) from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber.