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Parasites from feasting at Stonehenge found in prehistoric faeces

20 May 2022

A study of ancient faeces uncovered at a settlement thought to have housed builders of Stonehenge suggests that parasites got consumed via badly-...

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Shanidar Z: what did Neanderthals do with their dead?

18 Feb 2020

Archaeologists have unearthed a Neanderthal skeleton in a famous cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. They say the new discovery provides a unique opportunity to...

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Direct genetic evidence of founding population reveals story of first Native Americans

03 Jan 2018

Direct genetic traces of the earliest Native Americans have been identified for the first time in a new study. The genetic evidence suggests that...

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Cambridge University Women’s Boat Club Openweight crew rowing during the 2017 Boat Race on the river Thames in London. The Cambridge women’s crew beat Oxford in the race. The members of this crew were among those analysed in the study.

Prehistoric women’s manual work was tougher than rowing in today’s elite boat crews

29 Nov 2017

The first study to compare ancient and living female bones shows that women from early agricultural eras had stronger arms than the rowers of...

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Detail of one of the burials from Sunghir, in Russia.

Prehistoric humans are likely to have formed mating networks to avoid inbreeding

05 Oct 2017

Early humans seem to have recognised the dangers of inbreeding at least 34,000 years ago, and developed surprisingly sophisticated social and mating...

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Right: Exterior of Devil’s Gate, the cave in the Primorye region near the far eastern coast of Russia. Left: One of the skulls found in the Devil’s Gate cave from which ancient DNA used in the study was extracted.

Ancient DNA reveals 'genetic continuity’ between Stone Age and modern populations in East Asia

01 Feb 2017

In contrast to Western Europeans, new research finds contemporary East Asians are genetically much closer to the ancient hunter-gatherers that lived...

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Artist’s reconstruction of Saccorhytus coronarius, based on the original fossil finds. The actual creature was probably no more than a millimetre in size

Bag-like sea creature was humans’ oldest known ancestor

30 Jan 2017

A tiny sea creature identified from fossils found in China may be the earliest known step on an evolutionary path that eventually led to the...

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The fieldwork was conducted during the winter because the frozen lake surface provided the researchers with a solid (but freezing) platform for drilling into the sediment

Textbook story of how humans populated America is “biologically unviable”, study finds

10 Aug 2016

Using ancient DNA, researchers have created a unique picture of how a prehistoric migration route evolved over thousands of years – revealing that it...

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Cave painting, Isla de Mona

'Extreme sleepover #17' – going underground in search of zombies

04 Mar 2016

Lucy Wrapson reports on her fieldwork analysing the curious cave paintings found on Isla de Mona, in the Caribbean, and their equally enigmatic...

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Prehistoric ‘book keeping’ continued long after invention of writing

14 Jul 2014

An ancient token-based recording system from before the dawn of history was rendered obsolete by the birth of writing, according to popular wisdom...

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Cambridge galleries, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology shortlisted for Art Fund Prize

04 Apr 2013

The Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (MAA) has been announced as one of the ten finalists for the prestigious Art Fund Prize for Museum of...

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Mammals vs dinosaurs

15 Mar 2013

Were dinosaurs really the most exciting and interesting creatures ever to roam the planet? Zoologist Nick Crumpton tells the Cambridge Science...

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