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Stone artifacts painstakingly shaped into spheres were part of the daily lives of early humans for more than two million years. They have been unearthed by archaeologists in East Africa, humanity's ancestral home, and they litter prehistoric sites across Eurasia from the Middle East to China and India. Yet experts have been puzzled by their function since the early days of research into our evolutionary history. Now, an international team of archaeologists led by Tel Aviv University archaeologist researcher Ella Assaf, has produced evidence that these enigmatic artifacts were used for a very specific purpose: breaking the bones of large...

In 1953, a significant burial site belonging to the Battle Axe Culture was found when constructing a roundabout in Linköping. 4,500 years ago, a man and a woman were buried together with a child, a dog and a rich set of grave goods including one of the eponymous battle axes. "Today, we call this site 'Bergsgraven'. I have been curious about this particular burial for a long time. The collaboration of archaeologists with geneticists allows us to understand more about these people as individuals as well as where their ancestors came from," says archaeogeneticist Helena Malmström of Uppsala University, lead...

AKSON RUSSIAN SCIENCE COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION—Russian scientists studied the Zhokhov site of ancient people, which is located in the high-latitude Arctic, and described in detail the way of life of the ancient people who had lived there. It turned out that, despite the sparsely populated area, the ancient people had communicated with representatives of other territories and had even exchanged various objects with them through some kind of the fairs. Zhokhov Island, located at 76º N in the New Siberian Islands, 440 kilometers north of the modern coast of the East Siberian Sea, belongs to the High Arctic. Here, the Zhokhov...

Researchers in South Africa have revealed the earliest direct evidence of human-made arrows. The scientists unearthed 64,000 year-old "stone points", which they say were probably arrow heads. Closer inspection of the ancient weapons revealed remnants of blood and bone that provided clues about how they were used. The team reports its findings in the journal Antiquity. The arrow heads were excavated from layers of ancient sediment in Sibudu Cave in South Africa. During the excavation, led by Professor Lyn Wadley from the University of the Witwatersrand, the team dug through layers deposited up to 100,000 years ago.

Site provides evidence for ancient comet explosion JOEY HOLLEMAN; McClatchy Newspapers Published: October 7th, 2007 01:00 AM COLUMBIA, S.C. – For the second time in less than a decade, a South Carolina river bluff holds evidence pointing to a theory with history-rewriting potential. Microscopic soil particles from the Topper site near Allendale might hold a tiny key to a big theory: that comet-caused explosions wiped out the mammoths and mastodons, prompted the last ice age and decimated the first human culture in North America about 12,900 years ago. The comet theory first began generating a buzz at an international meeting...

Ishi  The Last Yahi   In August 1911, Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi Indian tribe, walked out of the foothills near Mount Lassen... leaving behind his Stone Age world... and entered twentieth-century California society. From 1911 - 1916, Ishi resided at the Anthropology Museum of the University of California Affiliated Colleges on Parnassus Heights in San Francisco (now the site of the University of California, San Francisco), sharing knowledge about his culture and beliefs with Anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodore T. Waterman, as well as Surgeon Saxton T. Pope. Graciously collaborating with the anthropologists, Ishi provided...