Unprecedented study confirms massive scale of lowland Maya civilization
Tulane University researchers, documenting the discovery of dozens of ancient cities in northern Guatemala through the use of jungle-penetrating Lidar (light detection and ranging)...
Lasers reveal a vast, sophisticated Maya civilization under the Guatemalan jungle
Maya civilization flourished for 2500 years in southern Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, but its location in an inaccessible forest has complicated efforts to fully...
Our taste for beer may go back 13,000 years
Researchers have discovered evidence of the earliest brew masters to date, a finding that might stir an old debate: What came first, beer or...
558 million-year-old fat reveals earliest known animal
Scientists have discovered molecules of fat in an ancient fossil to reveal the earliest confirmed animal in the geological record that lived on Earth...
A single gene mutation may have helped humans become optimal long-distance runners
Two to three million years ago, the functional loss of a single gene triggered a series of significant changes in what would eventually become...
The walking dead: Fossils on the move can distort patterns of mass extinctions
As sea levels change and move habitats, animals follow. Taking these shifts into account when analyzing the fossil record is crucial, researchers said.
Using the...
Half-billion-year-old fossils offer new clues to how life exploded on the sea floor
Stephen Pates, a researcher from Oxford University's Department of Zoology, has uncovered secrets from the ancient oceans.
With Dr. Rudy Lerosey-Aubril from New England University...
Scientists discover the oldest known abstract drawing from 73,000 years ago
The oldest known abstract drawing, made with ocher, has been found in South Africa's Blombos Cave—on the face of a flake of siliceous rock...
Lesson from Brazil: Museums are not forever
We now know what history going up in flames looks like.
On Sept. 2, the National Museum of Brazil lit up Rio de Janeiro’s night...
Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but profoundly changed Earth’s climate
Glaciers have long served as Earth’s predominant source of freshwater.
But glaciation has stopped in the present day, apparently partially because of the actions...