Bruce Bower, Science News Journalist Profile

Articles

‘Dragon Man’ skull may be the first from an enigmatic human cousin

1 week ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

Meet the new face, and braincase to boot, of Asia’s mysterious Stone Age denizens, the Denisovans. The nearly complete, roughly 146,000-year-old skull of an adult male was found nearly a century ago, possibly during bridge construction in Harbin, China. An earlier study claimed that the Harbin skull, nicknamed Dragon Man, represented a new species called Homo longi.
‘Dragon Man’ skull may be the first from an enigmatic human cousin

1 week ago | flipboard.com | Bruce Bower

NowFifteen years after the discovery of a new type of human, the Denisovan, scientists discovered its DNA in a fossilized skull. The key? Tooth plaque. When Qiaomei Fu discovered a new kind of human 15 years ago, she had no idea what it looked like. There was only a fragment of a pinkie bone to go …
DNA confirmed Chaco Canyon ties for a Pueblo tribe

1 week ago | snexplores.org | Bruce Bower

ancestor: A predecessor. It could be a family forebear, such as a parent, grandparent or great-great-great grandparent. Or it could be a species, genus, family or other order of organisms from which some later one evolved. For instance, ancient dinosaurs are the ancestors of today's birds. (antonym: descendant)artifact: Some human-made object (such as a pot or brick) that can be used as one gauge of a community’s culture or history.
Roman gladiators really fought big cats, ancient bite marks suggest

2 weeks ago | snexplores.org | Bruce Bower

3-D: Short for three-dimensional. This term is an adjective for something that has features that can be described in three dimensions — height, width and length. anthropologist: A social scientist who studies humankind, often by focusing on its societies and cultures. Britain: A shortened form for Great Britain, which is the collective name for England, Scotland, Wales and their associated islands.
Precolonial farmers thrived in one of North America’s coldest places

3 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

A laser eye-in-the-sky has uncovered vast, ancient farm fields in an unlikely place — the frosty forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Ancestors of present-day Menominee people, a federally recognized Native American tribe, grew maize and other crops in densely clustered earthen ridges from around 1,000 to 400 years ago, researchers report in the June 5 Science.
Males weren’t always bigger than females in this hominid species

4 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

An ancient, distant human cousin from southern Africa called Paranthropus robustus has for the first time revealed molecular clues to its evolutionary status. Protein sequences preserved in four partial P. robustus teeth from different individuals that lived roughly 2 million years ago indicate that larger and smaller fossils of this hominid species cannot always be classed as male or female, as previously thought, researchers report in the May 29 Science.
Humans used whale bones to make tools 20,000 years ago

1 month ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

Western Europeans crafted hunting weapons out of bones from whales stranded on the Atlantic shoreline between 20,000 and 14,000 years ago, researchers report May 27 in Nature Communications.
Neandertals may have hunted in horse-trapping teams 200,000 years ago

1 month 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.
British tin might have fueled the rise of some Bronze Age civilizations

1 month 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.
A Pueblo tribe recruited scientists to reclaim its ancient American history

1 month 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.