Archaeology

Hint: it took chain saws, feathers and lots of latex, says vertebrate palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Brusatte

Fragments of edible marine snail shells found in Lebanon support the idea that ancient humans went from Africa to Europe through the Levant. Cynthia Graber reports

Skull fragments dating back 430,000 years appear to be those of the world's first known murder victim, based on the damage observed. Dina Maron reports

The Australopithecine lived about 3.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia, around the same time as Australopithecus afarensis

In 1994 researchers made a mummy. Now scientists have reverse engineered the process to figure out how it's done, with the mummy makers still around to tell them how they did. Cynthia Graber reports

Factors that drove the evolution of our intellectual capacity are also implicated in the memory disorder

Genetic information from a 35,000-year-old wolf bone found below a frozen cliff in Siberia is shedding new light on humankind's long relationship with dogs

Sometimes, the pathway to a new idea becoming universally accepted requires a steady stream of little nudges, small pebbles thrown into the lake.

A couple of weeks ago I hatched a plan to write about all the neat new dinosaur-themed studies that had just appeared in print; I began by penning my thoughts on the Brontosaurus issue.

A catalogue of the genetic differences between woolly mammoths and elephants reveals how the ice age giants braved the cold

Recent fossil discoveries fill in long-standing holes in Tyrannosaurus rex’s family tree

For many decades, scientists have tried to understand the past by doing as our forebears did. One important endeavor in what is called experimental archaeology involves moderns crafting Stone Age tools by chipping away at rocks.