Human ancestors were making spears to hunt 500,000 years ago – 200,000 years earlier than previously thought, a study has revealed. The collaborative study, published in the journal Science, found the stone-tipped weapons at the South African archaeological site of Kathu Pan 1. Attaching stone points to spears (known as “hafting”) was an important advance…
Early human ancestors in central Africa 3.5 million years ago ate a diet of mostly tropical grasses and sedges, finds new research. The study suggests our relatives were mostly plant-eaters before they evolved a taste for meaty flesh. The study focused on Australopithecus bahrelghazali, which had quite a set of teeth. “No African great apes,…
The highly influential environment activist Bill McKibben is proposing a fossil energy divestment campaign, on the model of the international anti-apartheid dis-investment campaign that successfully brought pressure on South Africa’s white-only regime. McKibben was among the organizers who brought the planned Keystone pipeline to a standstill last year, and he has been the leading figure…
Astronomers have discovered what they believe to be a rogue planet floating through space without a star. The super-Jupiter, called CFBDSIR2149, has a mass four to seven times that of our own gas giant, and is probably a scorching 800 or so degrees Fahrenheit. It appears to sit in a moving group of stars that,…
A group of researchers led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has discovered the first scientific evidence of genetic blending between Europeans and Asians in the remains of ancient Scythian warriors living over 2,000 years ago in the Altai region of Mongolia. Contrary to what was believed until now, the results published in PLoS ONE…
For the past five billion years, the expansion of the Universe has been speeding up, powered by the mysterious repulsive force known as “dark energy.” But thanks to a new technique for measuring the three-dimensional structure of the distant Universe, astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have made the first measurement of the cosmic…
The simplicity of modern life is making us more stupid, according to a scientific theory which claims humanity may have reached its intellectual and emotional peak as early as 4,000 BC.
Archaeologists argue that drought caused by climate variation played a major role in the decline and fall of Mayan civilization.
The rate of star formation in the universe has dropped to just 3% of its long-ago peak, and there’s no end in sight to the decline, a new study finds. A team of astronomers has determined that the rate of star birth peaked around 11 billion years ago, just 2.7 billion years after the Big…
Archaeologists say they have unearthed an almost 2,400-year-old golden hoard in an ancient Thracian tomb in northern Bulgaria. The treasure was found near the village of Sveshtari, 250 miles northeast of Sofia. Team leader Diana Gergova said that among the artifacts, dating back to the end of the fourth or the beginning of the third…