Bruce Bower

6 days ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

Neandertals formed sophisticated hunting parties that drove wild horses into fatal traps around 200,000 years ago. At Germany’s Schöningen site, wooden spears, double-pointed sticks, stone artifacts and butchered remains of more than 50 horses of various ages are some 100,000 years younger than previously thought, researchers report May 9 in Science Advances. Excavations of this material, now linked to a time when Neandertals inhabited Europe, occurred in the 1990s along an ancient lakeshore.

1 week ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

Where Bronze Age civilizations got large amounts of tin, a scarce metal, to mix with copper into the era’s namesake gold-colored metal has long puzzled archaeologists. A big part of the answer lies in Cornwall and Devon, two counties in southwestern England, a new study concludes. Farming communities began mining large tin ore deposits there around 4,200 years ago, say archaeometallurgist Alan Williams of Durham University in England and his colleagues.

2 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

Members of New Mexico’s Picuris Pueblo Tribal Nation have long told stories about having descended from ancient North American ancestors. Genetic evidence now backs up what Picuris people — but not archaeologists — knew all along and fleshes out lost pieces of the tribe’s past. The new results, published April 30 in Nature, came out of a collaborative study between Picuris Pueblo representatives and scientists.

3 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

As a fight to the death reached its end around 1,800 years ago, a victorious lion sank its teeth into a young man’s thigh bone. Those feline bite marks, preserved on a skeleton interred in northeast England, provide the first physical evidence of a Roman-era battle between a gladiator and a nonhuman animal anywhere in Europe, say forensic anthropologist Timothy Thompson of Maynooth University in Ireland and colleagues.

3 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

On a bright, late-summer day in north-central Europe around 300,000 years ago, a team of perhaps a couple dozen hunters got into their assigned positions for a big kill. Little did they know that remnants of this lethal event would someday contribute to a scientific rethink about the social and intellectual complexity of Stone Age life. Some of the hunters ascended a ridge where they gazed across a vast, marshy grassland below.