“Before the last glacial period, Neanderthals had diverse maternal lineages. As ice sheets advanced and habitable territory shrank, survivors appear to have concentrated in a climate refugium in ...

Ancient DNA is turning Europe’s deep past from a sketch into a family album. Instead of guessing who first called the continent home, researchers can now read genetic traces from teeth, bones and cave ...

Richards’ colleague, Rozenn Colleter, believes that their method of combining isotopic analysis, biochemical markers, and an economic metric allowed the team to determine the increasing degree of ...

Researchers at the University of Huddersfield have used ancient DNA to reveal that hunter-gatherers in one part of Europe survived for thousands of years longer than anywhere else on the continent—and ...

In 2023 a research group from Aarhus University in Denmark found that light woodland and open vegetation dominated Europe's temperate forests before Homo sapiens. In a new study, recently published in ...

Recent archaeological discoveries are challenging established narratives of human origins and creativity. A 64,000-year-old cave art found in Europe is compelling scientists to rethink timelines of ...

Some 4,000 years ago, as ancient civilizations such as the Minoans in Crete and the Neo-Sumerian Empire in Mesopotamia were shaping cultures in Europe and the Middle East, human biology itself was ...

A new study claims to have identified the first speakers of Indo-European language, which gave rise to English, Sanskrit and hundreds of others. By Carl Zimmer In 1786, a British judge named William ...