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Early Humans News -- ScienceDaily
Read about early humans in this anthropology news section. Early human development, early human migration, culture and more. Photos.

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Research \'final nail in the coffin\' of Paranthropus as hard object feeders
'); document.write('New research debunks a long-held belief about our ancestors\' eating habits.'); document.write('
DNA reveals the evolutionary history of museum specimens
'); document.write('Museum specimens held in natural history collections around the world represent a wealth of underutilized genetic information due to the poor state of preservation of the DNA, which often makes it difficult to sequence. An international team has optimized a method developed for analyzing ancient DNA to identify the relationships between species on a deep evolutionary scale.'); document.write('
Human environmental genome recovered in the absence of skeletal remains
'); document.write('Ancient sediments from caves have already proven to preserve DNA for thousands of years. The amount of recovered sequences from environmental sediments, however, is generally low, which complicates analyses. A study has now successfully retrieved three mammalian environmental genomes from a single soil sample of 25,000 years BP obtained from the cave of Satsurblia in the Caucasus (Georgia).'); document.write('
Ancient ostrich eggshell reveals new evidence of extreme climate change thousands of years ago
'); document.write('Evidence from an ancient eggshell has revealed important new information about the extreme climate change faced by human early ancestors.'); document.write('
This 5,000-year-old man had the earliest known strain of plague
'); document.write('The oldest strain of Yersinia pestis -- the bacteria behind the plague that caused the Black Death, which may have killed as much as half of Europe\'s population in the 1300s -- has been found in the remains of a 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer. A genetic analysis reveals that this ancient strain was likely less contagious and not as deadly as its medieval version.'); document.write('
Diversity of tiny bobtail squid driven by ancient biogeographic events, finds new study
'); document.write('Researchers took a close look at bobtail and bottletail squids to establish their evolutionary relationships and the timing of the divergence of different species.'); document.write('
How humans brought change to a tropical paradise
'); document.write('After centuries of human impact on the world\'s ecosystems, a new study details an example of how a common native bee species has flourished since the very first land clearances by humans on Fiji.'); document.write('
\'Dragon man\' fossil may replace Neanderthals as our closest relative
'); document.write('A near-perfectly preserved ancient human fossil known as the Harbin cranium sits in the Geoscience Museum in Hebei GEO University. The largest of Homo skulls, scientists now say this skull represents a newly discovered human species named Homo longi or \'Dragon Man.\' Their findings suggest that the Homo longi lineage may be our closest relatives -- and may reshape our understanding of human evolution.'); document.write('
A new type of Homo unknown to science
'); document.write('The bones of an early human, unknown to science, who lived in the Levant at least until 130,000 years ago, were discovered in excavations at the Nesher Ramla site, near the city of Ramla. Recognizing similarity to other archaic Homo specimens from 400,000 years ago, found in Israel and Eurasia, the researchers reached the conclusion that the Nesher Ramla fossils represent a unique Middle Pleistocene population, now identified for the first time.'); document.write('
Being Anglo-Saxon was a matter of language and culture, not genetics
'); document.write('Archaeologists have provided important new evidence to answer the question \'who exactly were the Anglo-Saxons?\' New findings based on studying skeletal remains clearly indicates the Anglo-Saxons were a melting pot of people from both migrant and local cultural groups and not one homogenous group from Western Europe.'); document.write('
3,000-year-old shark attack victim
'); document.write('Researchers reveal their discovery of a 3,000-year-old victim - attacked by a shark in the Seto Inland Sea of the Japanese archipelago.'); document.write('
Pleistocene sediment DNA from Denisova Cave
'); document.write('Researchers have analyzed DNA from 728 sediment samples from Denisova Cave. Their study provides unprecedented detail about the occupation of the site by both archaic and modern humans over 300,000 years. The researchers detected the DNA of Neandertals and Denisovans, the two forms of archaic hominins who inhabited the cave, and the DNA of modern humans who appeared around the time of the emergence of an archaeological culture called the Initial Upper Paleolithic around 45,000 years ago.'); document.write('
New method could reveal what genes we might have inherited from Neanderthals
'); document.write('Using neural networks, researchers have developed a new method to search the human genome for beneficial mutations from Neanderthals and other archaic humans. These humans are known to have interbred with modern humans, but the overall fate of the genetic material inherited from them is still largely unknown. Among others, the researchers found previously unreported mutations involved in core pathways in metabolism, blood-related diseases and immunity.'); document.write('
Ten years of ancient genome analysis has taught scientists \'what it means to be human\'
'); document.write('A ball of 4,000-year-old hair frozen in time tangled around a whalebone comb led to the first ever reconstruction of an ancient human genome a decade ago. The hair, which was preserved in arctic permafrost in Greenland, was collected in the 1980s. It wasn\'t until 2010 that evolutionary biologists were able to use pioneering shotgun DNA sequencing to reconstruct the genetic history of the hair. It sparked a \'decade of discovery.\''); document.write('
Early migrations of Siberians to America tracked using bacterial population structures
'); document.write('Early migrations of humans to the Americas from Siberia around 12,000 years ago have been traced using the bacteria they carried by an international team.'); document.write('