Stories by Kate Wong

Kate Wong is an award-winning science writer and senior editor for features at Scientific American, where she has focused on evolution, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology and animal behavior. She is fascinated by human origins, which she has covered for nearly 30 years. Recently she has become obsessed with birds. Her reporting has taken her to caves in France and Croatia that Neandertals once called home to the shores of Kenya’s Lake Turkana in search of the oldest stone tools in the world, as well as to Madagascar on an expedition to unearth ancient mammals and dinosaurs, the icy waters of Antarctica, where humpback whales feast on krill, and a “Big Day” race around the state of Connecticut to find as many bird species as possible in 24 hours. Wong is co-author, with Donald Johanson, of Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins. She holds a bachelor of science degree in biological anthropology and zoology from the University of Michigan. Follow her on Bluesky @katewong.bsky.social

Scientific American Logo
July 30, 2013

Incas Intoxicated Sacrificial Children in Preparation for Death

She was killed at the age of 13 and placed in a mountaintop shrine in the Argentine high Andes–a sacrifice to the gods. There she lay for some 500 years until 1999, when archaeologists recovered her frozen body along with those of two other separately entombed children, a boy and a girl both between four [...]

Kate Wong

PreviousNext