Can You Smell Handshakes?
Why do people shake hands? A Weizmann Institute study suggests one of the reasons for handshakes may be to discretely sniff each other.
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Archaeologists at Ancient Roman Gold Mines
Archaeologists in Spain studying Las Médulas, the largest known ancient Roman gold mine, found a bigger operation than previously thought.
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Underwater Archaeology, Ancient Shipwreck
An underwater archaeology team has retrieved new finds from an ancient Greek ship that sank over 2,000 years ago.
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Prehistoric Human Settlements at the Bottom of the Sea
Researchers are studying the remains of human ancestors and prehistoric human settlements now submerged beneath Europe’s coastal seas.
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Nok Culture Pottery Adds Clues to Ancient Diets
What is the ancestry of your food? New research has traced the origins of leafy greens and other plants in ancient West African cuisine back more than 3,500 years.
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Uncovering the Secrets of the Egyptian Geniza With Citizen Science
Classify and transcribe fragments of medieval manuscripts with the Scribes of the Cairo Geniza citizen science project.
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Do Mummies Decompose?
Do mummies decompose? Why or why not? Find out how mummification works, and what happens to a human body when it doesn’t work so well. By Shayna Keyles As long as life has existed, so has death—and decomposition. Many cultures throughout history sought to prevent that ugly part of passing with mummification. But is it possible to actually prevent decomposition, or does mummification just slow things down? To find out, we’ll explore different methods of mummification by examining mummies from around the world. But first, we’ll learn a bit more…
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Ancient Teeth Raise Questions about Human Origin
The ancient teeth of a human ancestor are unlike anything ever found in Europe or Asia and will force us to reexamine the theory that humans originated from Africa. Teeth fossils were discovered near the German town Eppelsheim in a former riverbed of the Rhine. Due to sheer confusion, researchers held off on publishing their research for the past year—that is, until they released a preprint detailing the teeth today. We spoke with the study’s lead author, Herbert Lutz, to find out more about the work. ResearchGate: What’s so exciting…
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Ancient Crops Reveal Asian Colonization of Madagascar
By Neha Jain @lifesciexplore For decades, the colonization of Madagascar has been one of the most puzzling mysteries of human history. Although Madagascar is only a few hundred kilometers from the east coast of Africa, the language spoken there, known as Malagasy, belongs to the same group of languages spoken in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands located thousands of kilometers away. This linguistic affinity suggests that Madagascar was colonized by settlers from Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Genetic and cultural evidence also support this theory. However, no concrete evidence has…
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Modern Humans, Meet Your Denisovan Ancestors
Do you have Denisovan DNA? New research suggests that some present-day humans derive more of their ancestry from Denisovans than from Neanderthals.
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