In the 19th century, the Rosetta Stone allowed scholars to translate symbols left by an ancient civilization and decipher the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics.  But many mysteries remain about…

I promised myself that I would try to do a regular Wednesday blog about some aspect of my researches.  I thought I would start out with something I've been considering for awhile --…

It's Earth Day, in case you can't tell by our swanky green Earth logo in the header, and that means people will be thinking about Nature (the bitch, not the magazine) and our impact on her.   I…

In 1930, in the Highlands of New Guinea, a group of Australian brothers looking for gold stumbled across thousands of Stone Age people who had no concept of the outside world. They happened to bring…

Molecular anthropology—you probably haven’t heard of this discipline by name but I guarantee that you already find this particular field fascinating.  Therefore, I’d like to formally introduce…

The Rock And The Hard Place Of Homer The well-known expression: 'between a rock and a hard place' almost certainly has its earliest origins in Homer's Odyssey. In that saga, Ulysses has to take his…

The central African belt is a fascinating look back in time for humanity because the largest group of hunter–gatherers of Africa, the Pygmies, still inhabit the region and they coexist with…

Before the invention of boxed chocolates, Corvettes and bling-bling, all a man had to do for sweet lovin' was provide his special ladies with meat.  Studies of extant hunter-gatherer societies…

Long before they became famous as barbaric raiders, Vikings played nice with British and Irish culture, according to findings at a recent Cambridge University conference. The conference, entitled "…

A couple of years back I read a theory in Charles Pellegrino's book "Ghosts of Vesuvius" that has fascinated me since, that the Biblical story of Cain and Abel is an echo of the genocide of…