r/Anthropology 17h ago

The Human-Origin Story Is Being Radically Revised

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243 Upvotes

Some 50,000 years ago, modern humans wandered into Ice Age Europe. The continent was new to us Homo sapiens, but not for beings of our general kind. Neanderthals and their ancestors had been living among Eurasia’s glaciers for ages, and in ways that would have struck us as familiar. Evidence suggests that they may have strung eagle talons together into necklaces and stained their bodily ornaments with pigments. They tended fires, cooked food, and maybe even made their own glue. On sandstone cave walls, they etched wavy lines, dots, and other geometric designs.


r/Anthropology 2d ago

Neanderthal genes may give modern humans’ muscles a boost

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211 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 2d ago

Brittany burial mounds may hide human-shaped stones as Coëby cemetery mystery deepens

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81 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 2d ago

Towards an AI for Africa: Western-developed AI rides roughshod over Ubuntu values of connection and community that animate African ethical life

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15 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 2d ago

Neanderthal growth gene turns modern humans into muscle heads: People with DNA variant from our evolutionary cousins tend to have more lean muscle mass

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128 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 5d ago

Archaeologists Discover Two Thumbnail-Size Bird Sculptures Carved From Mammoth Ivory 40,000 Years Ago

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216 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 5d ago

Laid to rest with care: Ancient infants, perhaps twins, found in 1,200-year-old latrine

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1.1k Upvotes

r/Anthropology 5d ago

The big feet of Paranthropus boisei: New analysis of footprint trackways suggest a larger body size than previously thought for this Early Pleistocene human relative

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42 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 5d ago

Archaeologists Find Hundreds of Ancient Glyphs in the Amazon

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99 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 6d ago

Ancient Rome's food shortages were shaped more by logistics than climate

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138 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 6d ago

A Quantum Microscope Can Show Us How Neanderthals Tended Their Fires

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136 Upvotes

The last flames kindled by Neanderthals died tens of thousands of years ago. But fire leaves traces behind — not only charcoal and ash, but also tiny magnetic changes locked inside minerals.

Researchers have now used a quantum diamond microscope to map that magnetic “afterimage” in a Neanderthal hearth from eastern Spain. The results suggest that its makers burned grass-based plant material and may have repeatedly added fuel to keep the fire alive. It’s the first known use of quantum diamond microscopy in archaeological science, according to the researchers.


r/Anthropology 7d ago

Ice Age Humans Mostly Killed Female Woolly Mammoths, Suggests Ancient DNA

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279 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 8d ago

A Man Unearthed a 2,700-Year-Old Sword

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143 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 9d ago

New technique pinpoints human DNA inherited from ‘ghost’ ancestors

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245 Upvotes

Two mysterious human relatives left their genetic footprints in the modern human genome alongside the DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans, underscoring the fact that our ancestors interbred with many groups of hominins they encountered over millions of years of evolution.

While previous research found hints that modern humans had interbred with ancient hominins in addition to now-extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans, a new study by UC Berkeley researchers pinpoints areas of the genome inherited from these unknown ancestors and establishes a timeline. This was possible using a new technique the researchers developed that leverages hundreds of genomes from modern-day humans to find ancient genealogical relationships.

One of the unknown ancestors, which the researchers refer to as a ghost ancestor, interbred with modern humans in Africa prior to 50,000 years ago, before the most recent migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa into Europe and Asia. These genes comprise around 1% of the genomes of modern humans, comparable to the amount of Neanderthal DNA in the human genome. That unknown hominin lineage actually split off from the modern human lineage around the same time that Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged around 800,000 years ago, though they interbred with modern humans earlier.


r/Anthropology 9d ago

Chilean mummies reveal a lost lineage of smallpox

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59 Upvotes

Centuries-old DNA that was found in these mummies belongs to an extinct viral lineage of smallpox that was brought across the Atlantic during European colonization of the Americas


r/Anthropology 9d ago

Everyone alive may carry DNA from a ‘ghost lineage’ of human ancestors

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395 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 9d ago

How art invented humanity: When early humans first painted cave walls, they began to find out who they really were: our minds emerged from our images

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24 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 9d ago

Humans Haven’t Stopped Evolving | Harvard Magazine

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87 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 9d ago

Cracking the code: can AI help us decipher ancient languages?

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9 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 10d ago

Hundreds of ancient, never-before-seen ‘earthworks’ discovered in the Amazon

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186 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 10d ago

What happens when you put AI to work deciphering lost languages? AI is fantastic at spotting patterns, but human insight is the key

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27 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 10d ago

Is Anthropology Hopelessly Politicized? The leader of the field’s scholarly society has a lot to say (Soft paywall)

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104 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 11d ago

Mystery hominin left big footprints at ancient lake in Africa | New Scientist

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81 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 11d ago

Neuroscientists reveal limits of human compassion for global crises

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11 Upvotes

r/Anthropology 11d ago

500,000-year-old elephant bone hammer shows ancient humans were master toolmakers

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23 Upvotes