The promise of ancient DNA sits at the edge of a scientific cliff: one step is awe, the next is hype. For decades, researchers chased tiny, damaged fragments pulled from bones, teeth, and even permafrost, trying to stitch together stories long erased by time. Now those stories are starting to point at the mechanics of ...
The idea still pulls at the child in all of us: a thunderous footfall, a shadow across the ferns, a heartbeat that isn’t ours. Science has learned to read ancient worlds with astonishing clarity, yet the dream of reviving a true, non-avian dinosaur remains tangled in hard limits. We have fossils with feathers, footprints frozen ...
A skull pulled from deep time can still jolt the present. Curators whisper about its mix of features; researchers argue over what, exactly, those features mean. Is this the face of an encounter between modern humans and Neanderthals, or just the tricky overlap of traits we’ve long learned to expect in the Pleistocene? The mystery ...
You’ve probably heard that everyone outside Africa carries a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA. Yet you might not realize that this is just one piece of a much larger puzzle about our human ancestry. The story goes far deeper than most people imagine, stretching back hundreds of thousands of years and involving multiple encounters between ...
A groundbreaking expedition to Antarctica’s Denman Glacier has revealed how ancient DNA (aDNA) can help scientists predict the future of Earth’s ecosystems. As climate change accelerates, researchers are turning to genetic material preserved in marine life to reconstruct past environments and anticipate how ecosystems might respond to ongoing environmental shifts. The study, led by Australian ...
People thought that leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, came to the Americas with European colonizers hundreds of years ago. But a new study that is changing the way we think about this has come out. Researchers looking at 4,000-year-old skeletons from Chile have found genetic proof of Mycobacterium lepromatosis, a rare and severe form ...
Archaeologists have been arguing for years about the social structure of Çatalhöyük, a big Neolithic settlement in Turkey that was around from 7100 to 6000 BCE. Was it a society where women were in charge, or was it something else? Finally, a new study published in Science has answered this question. The study shows that ...
Frozen in Siberian permafrost, originally believed to be among the earliest domesticated dogs, the “Tumat Puppies” enthralled researchers and dog enthusiasts alike for more than ten years. However, a ground-breaking new study reveals they were actually wolf sisters with a surprising last meal, woolly rhinoceros, shattering that assumption. This finding not only changes their narrative ...
From the bones of individuals living 6,000 years ago deep in Colombia’s highlands, a genetic mystery has emerged. Their DNA tells a different story than any other one without clear ancestors or descendants in the modern society. These prehistoric people unearthed on the Bogotá Altiplano challenge our understanding of American population distribution. Whales: they were ...
The plague has tormented mankind like a shadow for millennia, wiping off whole populations in waves of destruction. Up to half of the population in Europe in the 14th century, the Black Death alone claimed an estimated 25 million lives. Still, the bacterium causing the epidemic, Yersinia pestis, never really disappeared despite its terrible toll. ...
