Brian Handwerk
When was North America colonized by prehistoric humans? These New Mexico fossils upend the timeline
Fossilized ancient footprints found at White Sands National Park humanize them, revealing the actions of their lives in ways that ...
Lactose tolerance: Early humans couldn’t easily process milk and cheese. How, why and when did that change?
Just 5,000 years ago, even though it was a part of their diet, virtually no adult humans could properly digest ...
Evolution of lactose tolerance: How humans (recently) became able to digest milk, cheese and other dairy products
In a study published [July 27] in Nature, researchers compared archaeological evidence for 9,000 years of European milk use with genetics, and found ...
Human evolutionary timeline: Key moments in the emergence of our species
The long evolutionary journey that created modern humans began with a single step—or more accurately—with the ability to walk on ...
How extreme environmental changes spurred early human evolution
[A]fter hundreds of thousands of years of stability, dramatic shifts occurred [in the East African Rift Valley] beginning about 400,000 ...
Strange cave-fellows? Unexpected discovery suggests 3 early human species lived together in South Africa
Two million years ago, three different early humans—Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the earliest-known Homo erectus—appear to have lived at the same time in ...
Our ancestors may have evolved the ability to talk 27 million years earlier than we thought
Some scientists have theorized that it only became physically possible to speak a wide range of essential vowel sounds when ...
3.8-million-year-old Australopithecus anamensis skull found in Ethiopia may redefine branches of human evolution
Spotting the intact Australopithecus skull in the Ethiopian dirt caused paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie to literally jump for joy. … The ...
‘Interesting puzzle’ created by hand tools found near long-vanished Arabian rivers
Nearly 200,000 years ago, at the confluence of two long-vanished river systems in the heart of Arabia, people climbed a ...
450,000-year-old teeth help piece together human family tree
Crime-drama fans know that forensic scientists can ID the remains of long-missing persons by examining their teeth. To solve even ...
Why probiotics may or may not help you—and could even harm you
From pickles and candy bars to pills and protein powders, probiotics are touted as a health boon in all flavors ...
Alpha: Examining Hollywood’s tale of dog domestication
Long ago, before your four-legged best friend learned to fetch tennis balls or watch football from the couch, his ancestors ...
Tracing human evolution through the foods we eat
You aren’t what you eat, exactly. But over many generations, what we eat does shape our evolutionary path. “Diet,” says ...
Hungry? That might be the microbes talking
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Hear that little voice ...