Anthropology

A thousand years ago, Native Americans in South America used multiple psychotropic plants -- possibly simultaneously -- to induce hallucinations and altered consciousness, according to an international team of anthropologists.

Analysis of human remains from a Pre-Roman Celtic cemetery in Italy shows variations in funerary treatment between individuals that could be related to social status, but these variations were not reflected by differences in their living conditions. 

The largest study to date of ancient DNA from the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Portugal and Spain) offers new insights into the populations that lived in this region over the last 8,000 years.

Anthropologists have long made the case that tool-making is one of the key behaviors that separated our human ancestors from other primates.

Long before Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and even MySpace, early Mississippian Mound cultures in America's southern Appalachian Mountains shared artistic trends and technologies across regional networks that functioned in similar ways as modern social media, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Ancient cremated human remains, despite being deformed, still retain sexually diagnostic physical features, according to a study released January 30, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Claudio Cavazzuti of Durham University, UK and colleagues.

A study carried out in Bajondillo Cave (in the town of Torremolinos, in the province of Malaga) by an international team made up of researchers from Spain, Japan and the U.K. revealed that modern humans replaced Neanderthals 44,000 years ago.

Genomic analyses can reveal the geographic origins of indigenous Aboriginal Australian remains currently held in museums, a new study reports.

A team led by UC Davis researchers have come up with a new way to estimate the biological sex of human skeletal remains based on protein traces from teeth.

The early medieval period, from the 5th to the 10th centuries, is often called the Dark Ages. But in the age of legendary heroes such as Siegfried, even the middle and lower classes were healthier than their descendants in later centuries – even as late as the 19th-century industrial age.

The remains of a medieval skeleton has shown the first physical evidence that a fern plant could have been used for medicinal purposes in cases such as alopecia, dandruff and kidney stones.

Art often imitates life, but when University of Cincinnati anthropologist and geologist Kenneth Tankersley investigated a 2000-year-old carved statue on a tobacco pipe, he exposed a truth he says will rewrite art history.

Buried alive. Butchered. Decapitated. Hacked. Mutilated. Killed. Archaeologist Samuel K. Lothrop did not obfuscate when describing what he thought had happened to the 220 bodies his expedition excavated from Panama's Playa Venado site in 1951.

Researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) have uncovered a previously unconfirmed population boom across South East Asia that occurred 4,000 years ago, thanks to a new method for measuring prehistoric population growth.

In the realm of evolutionary biology and survival of the fittest, cooperation is a risky business. Yet humans do it on a scope and a scale unmatched by any group in the animal world.