Anthropology

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.

An international team of anthropologists has uncovered a 38,000-year-old engraved image in a southwestern French rockshelter--a finding that marks some of the earliest known graphic imagery found in Western Eurasia and offers insights into the nature of modern humans during this period.

Leprosy is a bacterial infection caused by Mycobacterium leprae or Mycobacterium lepromatosis. It has afflicted humans for thousands of years, reaching epidemic levels during the Middle Ages, and people continue to be affected by the disease today. However, the genetic origins of the disease are not well understood.

Using visualisation technology developed at Linköping University under the auspices of Visualization Center C, visitors to the British Museum can reveal the murder of the mummified Geberlein Man, 5,500 years ago. This world-leading technology has been described in a prestigious journal of computer science, Communications of the ACM.

The timing of the first entry of humans into North America across the Bering Strait has now been set back 10,000 years.

People are fascinated by the use of forensic science to solve crimes. Any science can be forensic when used in the criminal and civil justice system – biology, genetics and chemistry have been applied in this way.

Eight hundred years ago, in a hardscrabble farming community on the outskirts of what was once one of the fabled cities of the ancient world, Troy, a 30-year-old woman was laid to rest in a stone-lined grave.

A new study from the George Washington University's Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology (CASHP) found that whereas brain size evolved at different rates for different species, especially during the evolution of Homo, the genus that includes humans, chewing teeth tended to evolve at more similar rates.

It might not be something you want to think about very often, but it turns out that the way we treat our dead in the modern age is heavily influenced by the way our ancestors treated theirs.