Anthropology

A new study of human genomic diversity suggests there may have in fact been two successful dispersals out of Africa, and that a “trace” of the earlier of these two expansion events has lingered in the genetics of modern Papuans.

Unique protein markers in hair could be used alongside DNA profiling for human identification, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Glendon Parker from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA, and colleagues.

Geography and ecology are key factors that have influenced the genetic makeup of human groups in southern Africa, according to new research discussed in the journal GENETICS, a publication of the Genetics Society of America.

Before the infamous Black Death, the first great plague epidemic was the Justinian plague, which, over the course of two centuries, wiped out up to an estimated 50 million (15 percent) of the world's population throughout the Byzantine Empire----and may have helped speed the decline of the eastern Roman Empire.

Isotopic analysis of teeth may identify signs of starvation in human tissues from 19th century Irish workhouse residents, according to a study from the University of Bradford, United Kingdom, and colleagues.

Dozens of people buried in mass graves in an ancient mound in Cahokia, a pre-Columbian city in Illinois near present-day St. Louis, likely lived in or near Cahokia most of their lives, researchers report in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Researchers at McMaster University have found a rich new record of vitamin D deficiency, one that resides in the teeth of every person and remains viable for hundreds of years or more.

The transition from hunter-gatherer to sedentary farming 10,000 years ago occurred in multiple neighbouring but genetically distinct populations according to research by an international team including UCL.

Was early human behavior influenced by their observations of monkeys using stone tools?

More than 4,000 years ago, a proto-globalization process started in the Indian Ocean, one of the outcomes being a great human migration of African and Asian peoples spreading across the Indian Ocean to inhabit the fourth largest island in the world, Madagascar.

A new study of the University of Cambridge anatomy collection suggests that the bodies of foetuses and babies were a "prized source of knowledge" by British scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries, and were dissected more commonly than previously thought and quite differently to adult cadavers.

Oxford University researchers are closer to solving a decade-old mystery after discovering that a set of genes they are studying play a key role in early human development.

Researchers from the University of Oxford have revealed that the genetic ancestries of many of sub-Saharan Africa's populations are the result of historical DNA mixing events, known as admixture, within the last 4,000 years.

International research team led by Mainz paleogeneticists demonstrates that farming was spread into and across Europe by people originating in modern-day Greece and Western Turkey.

A research team co-led by a scientist at New Zealand's University of Otago has sequenced the first complete mitochondrial genome of a 2500-year-old Phoenician dubbed the "Young Man of Byrsa" or "Ariche".