Starry Skies Network

An unusual discovery of mammoth bones on a rural Oskaloosa farm has experts studying prehistoric life excited about scientific discoveries that may lie with the massive beast.

Dr. Tao Deng from Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his team report a well-preserved skeleton of a 4.6 million-year-old three-toed horse (Hipparion zandaense) from the Zanda Basin, southwestern Tibet. Morphological features indicate that the Zanda horse was a cursorial horse that lived in alpine steppe habitats.

Carnivory is behind the evolutionary success of humankind. When early humans started to eat meat and eventually hunt, their new, higher-quality diet meant that women could wean their children earlier. Women could then give birth to more children during their reproductive life, which is a possible contribution to the population gradually spreading over the world.

A famous trail of footprints once thought to have been left behind by a family of three human ancestors may have actually been made by four individuals traveling at different times.

Our human ancestors did come from Africa but left the continent to spread across the world via a different route than first thought, scientists have revealed.
A six-year study mapping genetic patterns found that people who ended up in Europe, Asia and Oceania got there by crossing the sea to Arabia around 70,000 years ago.

While most studies have concluded that a cold climate led to the short lower legs typical of Neanderthals, researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that lower leg lengths shorter than the typical modern humans let them move more efficiently over the mountainous terrain where they lived. The findings reveal a broader trend relating shorter lower leg length to mountainous environments that may help explain the limb proportions of many different animals.

Did climate change or humans cause the extinctions of the large-bodied Ice Age mammals (commonly called megafauna) such as the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth?

Paleontologists found mammoth bones and a Clovis point, made by the oldest culture in the Americas and dating back at least 11,500 years, in northern Mexico, the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH, said.

Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany have documented species differences in the pattern of brain development after birth that are likely to contribute to cognitive differences between modern humans and Neanderthals.

Neanderthals may have been underdeveloped mentally compared to modern humans, but in one respect they outperformed us: in the number of sex partners.

Dr. Steven Holen, curator of archaeology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, has determined that five tusks found last Thursday in the Ziegler Reservoir are from mastodons.

Paleontologists have discovered that a close relative of Velociraptor hunted the dwarfed inhabitants of Late Cretaceous Europe, an island landscape largely isolated from nearby continents.

A reinterpretation of the fossil record suggests a new answer to one of evolution’s existential questions: whether global mass extinctions are just short-term diversions in life’s preordained course, or send life careening down wholly new paths.

For some European cavemen, human meat wasn’t a ritual delicacy or a food of last resort but an everyday meal, according to a new study of fossil bones found in Spain.

The most robust statistical examination to date of our species’ genetic links to “mitochondrial Eve” — the maternal ancestor of all living humans — confirms that she lived about 200,000 years ago.

Archaeologists in the Philippines have unearthed a 67,000-year-old human bone in a discovery they claim proves the area was settled by man 20,000 years earlier than previously thought.