Bruce Bower

1 week 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.

2 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

A fossil jaw originally netted by fishermen off the ocean floor near Taiwan’s west coast belonged to a member of a mysterious hominid population known as Denisovans, scientists report in the April 11 Science. Their new findings indicate that Denisovans, known from their ancient DNA and a handful of bones found at a couple of Asian sites, spread over a larger area than previously thought.

2 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

Ritually important musical practices resounded across Bronze Age cultures from Arabia to South Asia, a pair of unusual discoveries suggest. Excavations at a roughly 4,000-year-old settlement near the modern village of Dahwa in Oman have uncovered two copper cymbals with far-reaching cultural implications, say archaeologist Khaled Douglas of Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman, and colleagues.

3 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

Stone tools traditionally attributed to European and western Asian Neandertals have turned up nearly a continent away in southern China. Artifacts unearthed at a river valley site called Longtan include distinctive stone cutting and scraping implements and the rocks from which these items were struck. Until now, such items have been linked only to geographically distant Neandertals, says a team led by archaeologists Qi-Jun Ruan and Hao Li of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research in Beijing.

3 weeks ago | flipboard.com | Bruce Bower

NowThey likely never saw a second of actual battle. A metal detectorist recently discovered not one, but two bronze and wood daggers that experts dated to over 3,000 years ago. • Only the bronze portions of the instruments survived for so long buried in a German field. • Scholars believe the daggers weren’t …