Researchers once thought humans couldn't have migrated down from Siberia into North America during the last ice age. New findings suggest otherwise.

The backstories behind some of the most common superstitions are pretty silly, so why do we still do them today?

A study suggests our mysterious cousins, the Denisovans, first occupied Denisova Cave. Then Neanderthals and modern humans joined them later.

The oldest version of the plague that we know of infected a Stone Age hunter-gatherer millennia before the Black Death, a new study shows.

A human ancestor called Nesher Ramla homo occupied Israel and Arabia alongside humans at least 120,000 years ago, a new study says.

Advocates of the paleo diet assume that our human ancestors had a meat-heavy, low-carb diet. But research shows Neanderthals ate many starchy foods.

Researchers just sequenced the world's oldest known DNA, which came from mammoth teeth found in the Siberian permafrost.

Human hunters bagged more game than they could safely eat during the last Ice Age. Rather than waste the excess meat, they fed it to wolves, which evolved into domesticated dogs over time, a new study suggests. Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories. It’s hard to resist dogs when […]

A local resident from Yakutia, Siberia found the ancient carcass of a juvenile woolly rhino in melting permafrost. Researchers said the carcass is between 20,000 and 50,000 years old, and the most complete young woolly rhino ever found. Most of the rhino’s fur coat, hooves, and internal organs are intact […]

A gold miner in Canada’s Yukon found the 57,000-year-old body of a female wolf pup in melting permafrost. According to a new study, it is the most complete wolf mummy ever found. The wolf’s fur, teeth, and soft tissues are intact – only the eyes are missing. Researchers think the […]

Archaeologists discovered human skulls stacked in a tower buried in Mexico City. Aztecs used such towers, called tzompantli, to display skulls of people who were ritually sacrificed. Part of this tower, called Huei Tzompantli, was uncovered in 2015. The new discovery brings the total number of skulls in it – […]

As anthropologists discovered new fossils and artifacts in 2020, our understanding of human history has changed. Thirteen discoveries in particular offered new and sometimes perplexing insights into where we came from and who our ancestors were. This year, researchers found the earliest known example of mating between different human populations, […]

In a Tibetan cave, anthropologists discovered tools and DNA from ancient human ancestors called Denisovans. They found that Denisovans adapted to living in a high-altitude, low-oxygen environment about 120,000 years before modern humans in the region did. Modern-day Tibetans may have inherited some of those genetic adaptations. Last year, scientists […]

Reindeer herders recently discovered the carcass of an extinct cave bear in melting permafrost on a remote Siberian island. The bear’s body is preserved, with its teeth, internal organs, and even nose wholly intact. Researchers announced Monday that the ancient bear died 22,000 to 39,500 years ago. Scientists have unearthed […]

Our human evolutionary lineage includes many species and relatives, including Neanderthals and Denisovans. Scientists already knew that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. But a new study showed that the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans also interbred with a mysterious population of ancient humans […]

As anthropologists have discovered new species of human ancestors, our understanding of human history has changed. By sequencing the genomes from our Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins, scientists have also gained new insight into the genetic origins of our species. As researchers make more of these breakthroughs, the puzzle of who […]

Homo erectus fossils discovered on the island of Java come from a population that died between 117,000 and 108,000 years ago, researchers found. It’s the last known appearance of Homo erectus in the archaeological record. The individuals seem to have perished in a mysterious mass death, after which their bones […]