There's a federal law that says Native American bones held by museums or other institutions have to be returned to the tribe they are associated with - if the tribe can prove the bones are in fact…

A new dating method found that "Peking Man" is around 200,000 years older than previously thought.  So how did he adapt to the cold of even a mild glacial period? The Zhoukoudian, China, site of…

Not only have horses been domesticated longer than we thought but they were also milked, says an article in Science. The researchers have traced the origins of horse domestication back to the Botai…

To the historian, English is a fascinating language.  Unlike most of the languages of Europe, it underwent an almost complete makeover following the Norman invasion (1066 and All That).  As…

When Evo Morales, Bolivia's first president of Indian origin, was appointed in 2006 he initiated a "decolonising revolution."   Now, in a new thesis in social anthropology at the University of…

Ancient footprints show that some of the earliest humans walked like us and did so on anatomically modern feet 1.5 million years ago.  This anatomical interpretation is the conclusion of Rutgers…

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Beer-Sheva have determined that the once prevalent custom of female genital mutilation (FGM) among the Bedouin population in the Negev has…

Contrary to the TV sitcom where the wife experiencing strong labor pains screams at her husband to stay away from her, women rarely give birth alone. Today, there are typically doctors, nurses and…

A mystery is solved for me today: the "flies" on my rice paper plant flowers are the wild native bees that make honey! The ancients of the Americas hunted for the honey of the…

Investigators from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and a Bolzano colleague have written another chapter in a murder case over 5,000 years old. New investigations  reconstructed the…