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This cave painting is thought to be 43,000 years old, making it 8,000 years older than any other known art. It was most likely the work of Neanderthals, who apparently discovered the DNA double helix 43 millennia before we did. More »
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The human genome carries an average of 1% to 4% Neanderthal DNA, which means our ancient human ancestors must have interbred with our extinct evolutionary cousins. That raises an obvious next question: why did humans have sex with Neanderthals? More »
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We are living through the golden years of apocalyptic storytelling, and nothing is immune from dystopia fever - even sex. In fact, the sexapocalypse has been with us since at least the days of Hieronymous Bosch, a 15th century Dutch painter famous for depicting the end of days in vast canvasses packed with tiny figures enjoying bizarre sexual scenarios. More recently, novels like The Handmaids Tale and comic Y the Last Man suggest that horrific gender scenarios will play a major role in our dark future. More »
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All across the globe, there are monuments and tourist attractions that transform our otherwise boring reality into a gleefully tumescent fantasia. Here are the world's most otherworldly phallic vacation destinations. More »
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Ashley Michelle Williams has a fascinating article over at theGrio about a recent study that offers evidence that the harsh conditions of slavery subjected the African American population to strong evolutionary pressures. This could help explain what appear to be recent mutations in the genomes of African Americans. Williams writes: More »
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Though desire and its associated effects - lust, love, aggression, ambition - are generally the purview of poets, that hasn't stopped generations of thinkers from trying to explain it scientifically (and pseudoscientifically). Can desire really be described using the scientific method? Here are ten ways that researchers have answered that question with a resounding "yes." More »
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In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Inca Empire was the largest South America had ever known. Centered in Peru, it stretched across the Andes' mountain tops and down to the shoreline, incorporating lands from today's Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru - all connected by a vast highway system whose complexity rivaled any in the Old World. Rich in foodstuffs, textiles, gold, and coca, the Inca were masters of city building but nevertheless had no money. In fact, they had no marketplaces at all. More »
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Did you know that there's a not unsubstantial corner of YouTube devoted to pornographic videos that aren't pornographic? And did you know that thousands of people click these painfully unsexy clips daily? More »
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This video documents an unplanned experiment in engineering and human nature. Workers at a construction site contemplate how to arrest a machine that will not stop spinning. Then more workers join in the contemplation… More »
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When Thomas Headland first met the world's longest snake, he was on the way to the toilet. He was living in the Philippine rainforest with a group of hunter-gatherers called the Agta. On the walk to the outhouse behind his hut, he stumbled across a reticulated python curled up on the trail. "The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I shouted for help," he recalls. At his cries, six to seven Agta jumped up from the surrounding bushes… and started laughing. Their new American neighbour had fallen for the old previously-killed-python-on-the-path gag. "I didn't know what jokers these people were at the time," says Headland. More »
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This isn't about odor — honestly, if the species that invented indoor plumbing doesn't smell better, we're in serious trouble. But we have a far better sense of smell than Neanderthals did, and that reveals some crucial differences in our brains. More »
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Now that we know for certain that early Homo sapiens had babies with Homo neandertalensis, it's time to get real about what it was probably like when those two groups of early humans met in Europe. Homo sapiens had just trudged up out of Africa, and Neandertals had been living in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. But they were still the same species, capable of forming families together - and of sharing cultural knowledge, too. More »
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From London to the Middle East riots have shaken political stability. Are the answers to be found in human nature? More »
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An ancient human skull found in China shows evidence of blunt force trauma, meaning some other human probably hit him on the head. Considering how old the skull is, this might as well be considered the invention of violence. More »
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Because we know you were dying to know. This video features Piers Gibbon — a British explorer, author, and National Geographic TV show host — describing the head-shrinking process long performed by the Shuar people of Ecuador and Peru. More »
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Sometimes it really pays to take a second look at old findings. The fragment of jaw bone pictured above, believed to have belonged to an anatomically modern human, was first discovered over 80 years ago in Kents Cavern, an archaeologically rich cave system located in South England. More »
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At what point does sex cease to function as a purely practical means of reproduction? In other words, by what process does sex become something more than just a biological imperative; when do things like eroticism and sexuality emerge in an anthropological context? More »
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The old idea of Neanderthals as a species of brutish primitives has already been pretty well exploded, but this is as good a nail in the coffin as any: Neanderthals were treating themselves to fancy foods 250,000 years ago. More »
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We know that humans aren't the only species to develop cultures, as other great apes can learn social behaviors and pass them down through multiple generations. Now it appears we all evolved the capacity for culture at the same time. More »
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The oldest ever evidence that early humans painted has been found in South Africa, in the form of two kits for mixing and forming ochre, a reddish pigment used to dye clothing, paint, and create face paint. More »
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At India's Sri Angalaparameswariamman Temple, villagers hung up a sign soliciting for donations for remodeling. Incidentally, they accompanied this sign with a 15-foot-tall statute of the goddess Angalaamman tearing out a woman's organs and bandying around a miniature naked manikin. More »
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Sociological research! Sometimes it involves staring at women's chests. Indeed, a recent study of 128 heterosexual Polish men has divined that fellows who are less interested in long-term relationships are more enthused by larger breasts. More »
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An interesting paper on the cultural dimensions of epilepsy among the Guaraní people of South America has recently come to our attention. More »
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Why are so many societies based on hierarchy rather than egalitarian values, despite the fact that evidence suggests ancient human communities were often fairly egalitarian? Stanford researchers wanted to find out. So they designed a computer simulation that compared two basic types of societies: egalitarian ones, in which all resources are shared equally, and hierarchical societies, in which some groups have greater access to resources than others. More »
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Shellfish has a surprisingly important place in our evolutionary story. One theory says shellfish fueled the expansion of our brains, while another gives it credit for saving our species. Turns out Neanderthals liked shellfish just as much as we did. More »
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We know that as ancient humans expanded into Eurasia, they began interbreeding with our Neanderthal cousins. But it now appears that the fun didn't start there - our ancestors also reproduced with precursors like Homo erectus and Homo habilis. More »
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Our hominid ancestors Homo erectus turned rocks like this into complex tools nearly two million years ago...hundreds of thousands years earlier than previously thought. The new find helps fill in some crucial blanks in our evolutionary history. More »
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Want to help transcribe ancient Greek texts from the comfort of your couch? Have no understanding of the Greek language? That's ok! With Egypt Exploration Society and Oxford University's Ancient Lives project, you can contribute to the work of researchers who are digitizing — and eventually decoding — the vast holdings of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a mysterious pile of Greek papers discovered in an ancient dump outside Egypt. And you can do it just by playing a puzzle game. More »
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Late last year, we learned that early humans and Neanderthals once shared Eurasia with a third hominin group, known as Denisovans. Now, the new discovery of a Denisovan toe bone might indicate that these three hominin groups were pretty much constantly interbreeding. More »
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There are many theories about how the Great Pyramid in Egypt was constructed, ranging from UFOs to elaborate ramps and machines. But none has ever fully explained how mere human effort could raise such an incredible structure. Until now. More »
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The extinction of the Neanderthals remains a matter of intense debate. Were we smarter than them? More warlike? Or perhaps we simply sexed them into extinction? The real answer might have more to do with our quantity than our qualities. More »
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This carving may not look like much, but it's possibly the oldest art ever found in Britain. The rock art appears to depict a reindeer with a spear sticking out of it. Hunter-gathers did tend to carve what they knew. More »
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In the year 79 AD, Italy's Mt. Vesuvius erupted with superheated ash that rained fiery death on several Roman cities nearby. But none was hit harder than vacation town Pompeii, which was buried in a thick layer of broiling ash in a matter of seconds. More »
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She's best known as the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God and one of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. But in her capacity as a folklorist, Zora Neale Hurston also recorded an encounter with a real-life zombie. More »
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One of the most basic differences separating us from other apes is our ability to walk fully upright, and that goes back to the emergence of the Homo genus 1.9 million years ago. At least...that's what we used to think. More »
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Should you meet your demise in Taiwan, a funerary option open to you is the Electric Flower Car (EFC), a wheeled, neon-lit platform upon which pulchritudinous women strip down to their skivvies for the benefit of audiences...both living and deceased. More »
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A mysterious cache of dozens of humans skulls discovered earlier this year in Dorset, England belonged to Viking raiders. Anthropologists figured this out when they examined the teeth, and found that elaborate patterns had been filed into them. More »
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Çatalhöyük is one of the world's most ancient settlements, founded in what is now Turkey around 7,500 BCE. New analysis of the village's dead reveals something strange about this ancient village: nobody cared very much about family ties. More »
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That's the question currently before the Church of England, as an archaeologist has proposed examining William Shakespeare's remains. If nothing else, this is our chance to find out whether Shakespeare wrote the greatest works in the English language...on weed. More »
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When modern humans left Africa roughly 100 thousand years ago, it was only the last of several waves of hominoid migration that had previously included the likes of Neanderthals and Homo Erectus. Now a tooth in Germany reveals the original hominoid migration. More »
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