A study published in Nature today announces the 2011 discovery of Australopithecus deyiremeda a hominid that lived between 3.3 and 3.5 million years ago. The species is represented by a maxilla, mandible and dentition found in the Woranso-Mille area of the Afar region of Ethiopia about 22 miles from the spot where the remains of Australopithecus afarensis were...

149 stone flakes, hammers and anvils, found off at the Lomekwi 3 site on the shores of Lake Turkana, appears to have been crafted more than 3.3 million years ago — 500,000 years before our genus Homo. The authors reported their findings in Nature this week. Sonia Harmand and her team accidentally stumbled upon the ancient artifacts after taking...

At last week's Biology of Genomes meeting in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, Qiaomei Fu, a palaeogenomicist at Harvard Medical School, raised the concept that modern humans were mating with Neanderthals right near the time they became extinct. She and her team estimate that 5–11% of the genome of the 40,000 year old mandible from...

My first understanding of Cahokia and pre-Columbian cities of the Americas came from the book 1491. Between 1050 and 1200 A.D., Cahokia was North America's largest and most prominent cultural center north of Mexico. It wielded economic power and religious influence from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. A new paper published in...