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A single Neanderthal-inherited amino acid change makes growth hormone receptors fire harder, and people carrying it today have more muscle, shorter jaw ramus height, and shorter tooth roots. Neanderthal biology, still running. 🧬🦴🔬 #Neanderthal #PaleoGenetics #HumanEvolution
Growth Hormone, Faster Growth, and a Neanderthal in the Gym
A Neanderthal-derived receptor variant makes cells grow faster, and some people alive today are still carrying it around
anthropology.net
New parietal fragments from Gran Dolina give Homo antecessor its first adult cranial thickness data. Total thickness looks modern-human-like, but the layer proportions tell a stranger, more mosaic story. 🦴🧠 #PaleoAnthropology #HumanEvolution #Atapuerca www.anthropology.net/p/what-the-i...
What the Inside of an 850,000-Year-Old Skull Can Tell You
Three parietal fragments from Gran Dolina just gave Homo antecessor its first adult cranial profile, and the layers inside its skull look surprisingly familiar
anthropology.net
Two premature infants, maybe twins, were buried inside an abandoned Roman latrine at Ephesos over 1,200 years ago. Bioarchaeology shows it wasn’t disposal. It was careful, deliberate burial in the only sacred ground available to them. #Bioarchaeology #ByzantineHistory #Archaeology
Two Infants, a Sewer, and What Counts as Care in Byzantine Ephesos
A grave built inside an abandoned Roman latrine turns out to be one of the gentlest funerary arrangements archaeologists have found from the period.
anthropology.net
An AI trained on 8,340 charred seeds from 18 Chinese sites now classifies ancient crops with 90% accuracy, by learning the same size-first trick archaeobotanists use at the microscope. #Archaeobotany #AncientDNA www.anthropology.net/p/teaching-a...
Teaching a Machine to Sort Five Thousand Years of Charred Seeds
An AI system trained on 8,340 charred seed images now does in seconds what took archaeobotanists years to learn
anthropology.net
Scientists just found DNA from two human relatives we’ve never found a single fossil of, hiding in modern genomes. One mixed with us in Africa 800,000 years ago; the other reached us secondhand, through Denisovans. #paleoanthropology #humanevolution #ancientDNA www.anthropology.net/p/two-ghosts...
Two Ghosts in the Genome
How a new method for reading DNA’s family tree found evidence of ancient human relatives who left no bones behind
anthropology.net
Two mummified bodies from colonial-era Chile just yielded the first ancient smallpox genomes from the Americas, a now-extinct viral lineage whose evolution stalled for two centuries, then rebounded right as vaccination began. #ArchaeoGenetics #AncientDNA #SmallpoxHistory
Two Bodies From Chile Just Rewrote the Genetic History of Smallpox in the Americas
A now-extinct viral lineage, recovered from a mummified Inca-colonial community, gives colonization-era disease history its first direct molecular anchor
anthropology.net
Ancient DNA from 521 woolly mammoths reveals a stark pattern: natural deaths skew male, but Ice Age human accumulation sites are 70% female. The bones were hiding a hunting signature all along. #Paleogenomics #IceAgeArchaeology #WoollyMammoth www.anthropology.net/p/why-ice-ag...
Why Ice Age Hunters Kept Hunting the Female Mammoths
What the sex ratios buried in 521 mammoth genomes reveal about who got hunted, and why
anthropology.net
Sixteen sheep teeth, one desert city. Isotope analysis at medieval Dzhankent shows herders staggering births and foddering flocks year-round to keep a Silk Road capital fed through Aral Sea winters. #Archaeology #SilkRoad #Zooarchaeology www.anthropology.net/p/provisioni...
Provisioning Yengi-kent: How Sheep Teeth Reveal an Urban Survival Strategy on the Aral Sea’s Silk Road Frontier
Isotope analysis of sixteen sheep molars shows medieval herders staggering births and foddering flocks year-round to keep a desert trading city fed
anthropology.net
Two 40,000-year-old bird figurines from Hohle Fels Cave, Germany, are the smallest Ice Age carvings ever found — thumbnail-sized, yet packed with detailed, specific posture and anatomy. #Archaeology #IceAgeArt #Paleolithic www.anthropology.net/p/two-thumbn...
Two Thumbnail-Sized Birds, Carved 40,000 Years Ago
What a pair of miniature ivory figurines from Hohle Fels Cave reveal about the earliest known figurative art
anthropology.net
A LiDAR survey of the Amazon just revealed a civilization ten times larger than expected: 24,000+ earthworks, up to 3 million people, and a forest reshaped by human hands for 1,500 years. #Archaeology #Amazon www.anthropology.net/p/a-civiliza...
A Civilization for Three Million People Left Almost No Trace Above Ground
New LiDAR surveys reveal that the Aquiry, a network of societies in southwestern Amazonia, built tens of thousands of monumental earthworks and shaped the rainforest for fifteen centuries
anthropology.net
Did humans invent pet-keeping, or refine a primate trait? A new study of 427 cases shows primates adopting, grooming & bonding across species. With female-skewed care mirroring ethnographic data, our bond with animals is older than Homo sapiens. #Anthropology #Primatology #Domestication
Primatology.net@primatology.net · last wk.Monkeys grooming dogs. Lemurs adopting other lemurs. A capuchin troop that raised a marmoset for 10 months. A new study of 427 cases suggests pet-keeping’s roots run deeper than Homo sapiens. 🐒🐾 #Primatology #AnimalBehavior #Evolution www.primatology.net/p/when-a-mon...
Flat head syndrome in babies today is showing up in fossil skulls over a million years old, including a “hobbit” with a chimp-sized brain. What it reveals about ancient childcare. #Paleoanthropology #HomoErectus #HumanEvolution www.anthropology.net/p/what-flat-...
What Flat Heads Tell Us About a Million Years of Difficult Babies
Skull deformity turns out to be a surprisingly direct fossil record of parental exhaustion
anthropology.net
New study compares 60 ethnographic and 49 archaeological societies and finds burying the dead at home was far more common in the deep past than anthropologists realized, before colonialism and religious conversion reshaped the practice. #Archaeology #Bioarchaeology #Ethnography #Burials #Culture
The Dead Who Lived With You
What a new study of burials worldwide reveals about the strange, recent split between homes for the living and places for the dead
anthropology.net
A cave 4,000m up in Ladakh just revealed a lost population: people with ancestry split almost perfectly between South Asians and Tibetans, mixing began ~2800 years ago, and one still carries a Denisovan altitude gene. #AncientDNA #Paleoanthropology #Archaeogenetics
Ancient Genomes from a Cave Above the Clouds Reveal an Unknown Himalayan Population
How a scatter of bones 4,000 meters up in Ladakh rewrote the genetic history of a mountain crossroads
anthropology.net
2,700 years ago at an Iron Age cemetery in Italy, men ate more meat than women, some people were buried far from home, and rich graves didn’t mean richer diets. Isotopes tell a different story than the grave goods do. #Archaeology #IronAge #Bioarchaeology www.anthropology.net/p/what-148-s...
What 148 Skeletons from an Iron Age Cemetery Reveal About Who Really Ate Well
Grave goods lied. Isotopes didn’t.
anthropology.net
Malta’s Mesolithic foragers shouldn’t have survived a thousand years on an island that small. New modeling shows the population was too small to be self-sustaining, meaning repeated sea crossings, not isolation, kept them there. 🏝️🧬🌊 #Archaeology #Mesolithic www.anthropology.net/p/maltas-imp...
Malta’s Impossible Mesolithic
What a population model reveals about foragers who shouldn’t have survived on a 252 square kilometer island for a thousand years
anthropology.net
Excavate a site and you destroy it. The data you record is the only version of that moment that will ever exist. A new study of Catalan archaeologists shows how they’re improvising ways to save it. #Archaeology #DataManagement #OpenScience
Every Excavation Is a Deadline You Didn’t Know You Had
Catalan archaeologists have built decades of careful, improvised systems for saving their data. Nobody ever taught them how.
anthropology.net
Why do some English vowels stay hard even after years of study? A Taiwan-led study finds the perception-production link isn’t one connection, it’s several, each tied to a different sound cue and shaped by native-language habits. #Linguistics #SecondLanguageAcquisition #Phonetics
When Your Ear Betrays Your Mouth: What Mandarin Speakers’ English Vowels Reveal About the Wiring Between Hearing and Speech
A phonetic imitation study finds that the link between how we hear a sound and how we produce it is not one connection but several, each tied to a different acoustic cue
anthropology.net
Eight sets of footprints, 1.43 million years old, found on an ancient Kenyan lakeshore reveal a hominin group larger than expected, possibly rewriting what we know about Paranthropus boisei body size and social behavior. 🦶🌍🔬 #Paleoanthropology #HumanEvolution #Turkana
Eight Sets of Footprints on a Vanished Shoreline
What 1.4-million-year-old tracks in Kenya reveal about a heavy-bodied hominin nobody expected to be this large
anthropology.net
Bones from non-elite Maya burials in Guatemala reveal a maize-heavy diet that held steady for centuries, even as cities collapsed around them. Isotope analysis rewrites who we think fed the ancient world. #Archaeology #MayaCivilization #Bioarchaeology www.anthropology.net/p/what-the-b...
What the Bones of Ordinary People Say About the Maya Diet
Away from the great cities, small communities in southeastern Petén ate a maize-heavy diet that barely changed for six centuries, even as their political world collapsed around them
anthropology.net
A new study of 72,000 Han Taiwanese genomes caught natural selection acting in real time, including two opposite selection signals inside the cancer gene BRCA1 itself. Evolution isn’t finished with us. #HumanEvolution #Genomics #NaturalSelection www.anthropology.net/p/a-cancer-g...
A Cancer Gene That Is Still Fighting Its Own Past
A version of a haplotype under active elimination, sitting next to a version of the same gene under active promotion
anthropology.net
A 385 kg Iberian bear once filled a niche cave bears never occupied. New fossil and island biodiversity research both point to the same lesson: today’s “natural” baselines are already reshaped by millennia of human pressure. #Paleoecology #Archaeogenetics #HumanEvolution
The Baseline That Keeps Moving
What shrinking Iberian bears and vanishing island birds have in common: neither ecosystem was ever as “natural” as it looked
anthropology.net
A new @science.org study finds language diversity peaked 1,000–3,000 years ago at ~10x today’s levels, then collapsed with the rise of empires, not colonialism. Most of what humans once said is gone without a trace. #Linguistics #HumanEvolution www.anthropology.net/p/the-world-...
The World Once Had Tens of Thousands of Languages. Almost All of Them Are Gone.
A new model suggests linguistic diversity peaked not in the deep Paleolithic, but during the age of empires — and that the languages we speak today are survivors of a bottleneck, not a representative
anthropology.net
Ancient Egypt had zero wild baboons, yet imported and deified one species while ignoring another. New spectroscopy shows why: the sacred baboon’s hair spectrally matches moonlight. #Egyptology #Archaeology www.anthropology.net/p/the-baboon...
The Baboon That Glows Like the Moon
How spectroscopy solved a 3,000-year-old puzzle in Egyptian zoomorphism
anthropology.net
A new study followed Aboriginal preschoolers learning Noongar through “yarning circles” that blend storytelling with fluid multilingual speech. Researchers call it translingual yarning pedagogy & it’s reshaping how language revitalization gets taught. #LanguageRevitalization #IndigenousEducation
A Kangaroo Puppet, a Noongar Word, and the Grammar of Belonging
How a year inside a Perth playgroup reshaped what counts as language education
anthropology.net
In Kyushu’s 6th-7th century tombs, horses are painted with sex, detail, and individuality. The humans riding them? Faceless stick figures. A new @antiquity.ac.uk study argues this wasn’t a lack of skill, it was the point. #Archaeology #Kofun www.anthropology.net/p/in-kyushus...
In Kyushu’s Painted Tombs, the Horses Get Faces and the People Don’t
The dead were never meant to be recognized as individuals here — they were meant to become ancestors
anthropology.net
Long before food enters the equation, ape diplomacy begins with a touch. A new study reveals pre-feeding physical reassurance—from embraces & kisses to mouth-to-finger contact—predicts who gets fed in chimps & bonobos. Essential reading on the roots of human cooperation. #Primatology #Anthropology
Primatology.net@primatology.net · 2w agoBefore chimps and bonobos compete over food, they touch each other first, embraces, kisses, even fingers placed in mouths. A new study in Proc. R. Soc. B finds this reassurance predicts who gets fed. #Primatology #Bonobo #Chimpanzees www.primatology.net/p/the-reassu...
Nine Basque caves, 500 painted figures, one hidden rule: bison face left, horses face right, and it’s not about handedness. New network analysis finds real grammar in Paleolithic cave art. #Paleoanthropology #CaveArt #Archaeology www.anthropology.net/p/bison-face...
Bison Face Left, Horses Face Right: A Hidden Grammar in Magdalenian Cave Art
A network analysis of 500 figures across nine Basque caves finds that Paleolithic artists weren’t just choosing what to paint, but following rules about how
anthropology.net
A cave in Armenia, tools too small to notice, and a 50,000-year-old puzzle: were its Middle Paleolithic visitors settling in or just passing through? Turns out the answer was hiding in the debris. #Paleoanthropology #Archaeology #MiddlePaleolithic www.anthropology.net/p/small-flak...
Small Flakes, Long Journeys: What a Cave in Armenia Reveals About Middle Paleolithic Mobility
Inside Ararat-1 Cave, obsidian fragments smaller than a fingernail are rewriting how we think about Neanderthal-era movement across the Caucasus
anthropology.net
A cave in GunaiKurnai Country holds 25,000 years of burnt grass, laid down layer by layer, plus a standing stone erected 2,000 years ago. New phytolith evidence backs up what oral tradition always said. #Archaeology #IndigenousKnowledge #Archaeobotany www.anthropology.net/p/grasses-of...
Grasses of Grief and Ghosts: What 25,000 Years of Ash Tell Us About Ritual at Cloggs Cave
A Australian cave site shows people burning grass, deliberately and repeatedly, for longer than agriculture has existed anywhere on Earth
anthropology.net