“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 ...
Prehistoric humans underwent three major migration events across Eurasia, influencing the genetic diversity of present-day Europe. These include the arrival of hunter-gatherers approximately 45,000 ...
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 ...
Painstaking archaeological exploration is a familiar, often widely admired, method of unearthing history. Less celebrated, but also invaluable, is the piecing together of fragments of ancient ...
How do we understand past societies? For centuries, our main sources of information have been pottery sherds, burial sites and ancient texts. But the study of ancient DNA is changing what we know ...
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 ...
The history of the Albanian people has long been debated, as they first appear in historical records in the eleventh century CE and their language is not closely related to any surviving Indo-European ...
More than 1,600 ancient genomes have helped to trace the roots of a host of genetic traits found in modern Europeans. The genomes suggest that many characteristics — including a heightened risk for ...