SciGlow | All Science News In One Place
SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
When it comes to our differences from Neanderthals, most of what we know comes from comparing fossils. But fossils can only tell us about bones and not whole living organisms. That’s changing thanks to a new paper from a team of genomics researchers at Vanderbilt, who have developed a first-of-its-kind computational method. Their approach uses … Read more
The discovery of a previously unknown species of pterosaur, which may have persisted as late as the Turonian period (90–93 million years ago), is reported in Scientific Reports this week. The fossil, which includes parts of the skull and five vertebrae and wing elements, is the most complete pterosaur specimen ever found in Australia. The findings suggest it … Read more
Microliths – small stone tools – are often interpreted as being part of composite tools, including projectile weapons, and essential to efficient hunting strategies of Homo sapiens. In Europe and Africa, the earliest appearance of these lithic toolkits are linked to hunting medium and large-sized animals in grassland or woodland settings, or as adaptations to … Read more
Understanding the causes and consequences of Late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions is increasingly important in a world of growing human populations and climate change. A new review, led by scholars at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, highlights the role that cutting-edge scientific methods can play … Read more
An international team of researchers has analyzed remains from ten archaeological sites in England, France, Germany, Russia, and Switzerland to gain insight into the different stages of the second plague pandemic (14th-18th centuries) and the genetic diversity of Yersinia pestis during and after the Black Death. In a study published in Nature Communications, the researchers reconstructed 34 Y. pestis genomes, … Read more
Fossil animal droppings, charcoal from ancient fires and bone fragments litter the ground of one of the world’s most important human evolution sites, new research reveals. The latest evidence from southern Siberia shows that large cave-dwelling carnivores once dominated the landscape, competing for more than 300,000 years with ancient tribes for prime space in cave … Read more
By this point, scientists have a pretty good handle on what kinds of big animals exist. Researchers still turn up new species of rats and insects, but most animals bigger than your hand are old news. But by looking at 90-year-old crocodile skulls in museum collections and double-checking with live specimens at a zoological park … Read more
In a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, a group of researchers argue that our evolutionary past must be understood as the outcome of dynamic changes in connectivity, or gene flow, between early humans scattered across Africa. Viewing past human populations as a succession of discrete branches on an evolutionary tree may be misleading, they … Read more
If you could travel back in time 100,000 years, you’d find yourself living among multiple groups of humans, including anatomically modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. But exactly what our Denisovan relatives might have looked like had been anyone’s guess for a simple reason: the entire collection of Denisovan remains includes a pinky bone, three teeth, … Read more
During the late 10th century BCE, the emerging Edomite Kingdom of the southern Levant experienced a “leap” in technological advancement, according to a study released September 18, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University, Israel and colleagues. This finding supports the use of a “punctuated equilibrium” model for the development … Read more