Bruce Bower, Science News Journalist Profile

Articles

Precolonial farmers thrived in one of North America’s coldest places

2 days 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

1 week 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 week 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

4 weeks 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.
A lion’s bite marks a fatal fight with a possible Roman-era gladiator

1 month 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.
Ancient horse hunts challenge ideas of ‘modern’ human behavior

1 month 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.
Denisovans inhabited Taiwan, new fossil evidence suggests

1 month 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.
Ancient Arabian cymbals ring up Bronze Age musical connections

2 months 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.