Anthropology

The medieval cemetery in Ii Hamina in northern Finland on the Iijoki river was originally discovered by accident. A recent study examined the isotope compositions of the teeth of the dead. It turned out that the population in the small village survived throughout the 15th and 16th centuries despite the Little Ice Age.

In Turkey, Carved Skulls Provide the First Evidence of a Neolithic "Skull Cult": Three carved skull fragments uncovered at a Neolithic dig site in Turkey feature modifications not seen before among human remains of the time, researchers say.

Skeletal evidence shows that, hundreds of years after the Roman Republic conquered most of the Mediterranean world, coastal communities in what is now south and central Italy still bore distinct physical differences to one another - though the same could not be said of the area around Rome itself.

Forensic anthropology researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a technique that can provide an approximate age for juveniles and young people based on an X-ray of the frontal sinus region of the skull.

A new report by Smithsonian archaeologists identifies a bone tumor in the upper right arm of an adolescent who was buried in about 1300 AD in a trash heap at a site in western Panama called Cerro Brujo or Witch Hill.

New genomic tools are enabling researchers to overturn long-held beliefs about the origins of populations, a researcher will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today (Monday). Dr Eran Elhaik, Assistant Professor of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK, will say that new technologies are enabling scientists to track the origins and migrations of populations with increasing accuracy.

Who are you? A parent? An artist? A veteran? There are lots of different aspects of identity, and it takes more than just one to make you you. Ancient people were just as complex, but until recently, archaeologists didn't have a clear way to capture all the nuances of human identities from the past outside of broader labels like gender and social status.

Prehistoric human migration was mainly driven by human wanderlust and population pressures but relied critically on the habitability of available land.

Research from The Australian National University (ANU) has cast doubt on a method used in forensic science to determine whether skeletal remains are of a person who has given birth.

A NEW article co-authored by experts at the University of Huddersfield bolsters a theory that the spread of agriculture throughout Europe followed migration into the Mediterranean from the Near East more than 13,000 years ago - thousands of years earlier than widely believed.

A study of the DNA in ancient skeletal remains adds to the evidence that indigenous groups living today in southern Alaska and the western coast of British Columbia are descendants of the first humans to make their home in northwest North America more than 10,000 years ago.

Analysis of isotopes in bones and teeth from fifth-century cemeteries suggests that nomadic Huns and Pannonian settlers on the frontier of Roman Empire may have intermixed.

The Lomonosov Moscow State University anthropologists have put forward an assumption that the Scythian gene pool was formed on the basis of local tribes with some participation of populations, migrated to the northern Black Sea region from Central Asia. The research results have been published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

A piece of research has applied standard geological techniques and methods at an architectural site in Zaragoza to establish the diet of individuals

New research indicates that Baltic hunter-gatherers were not swamped by migrations of early agriculturalists from the Middle East, as was the case for the rest of central and western Europe. Instead, these people probably acquired knowledge of farming and ceramics by sharing cultures and ideas -- rather than genes -- with outside communities.