In 2002, a crew of paleoanthropologists were working in northwestern Ethiopia when they came across chipped stones and fossilized animal bones — telltale signs of a place where ancient people had once lived.

After years of excavations, the researchers discovered that hunter-gatherers had indeed lived there 74,000 years ago. As described in a study published Wednesday in Nature, these ancient humans were remarkably adaptable. They made arrows to hunt big game. And when their world was turned upside down by a giant volcanic eruption, they adapted and survived.

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Menopause is all too familiar to women, but in other species it’s remarkably rare. Last year, scientists reported that females in a single population of chimpanzees live long past their reproductive years. But aside from chimps and humans, researchers have found clear evidence of menopause in only five species — all of them whales.

Scientists have long debated why menopause evolved. Perhaps it provided an evolutionary edge to females, or maybe it was a side effect of some other beneficial feature of their lives.

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When the biotechnology firm Colossal started in 2021, it set an eyebrow-raising goal: to genetically engineer elephants with hair and other traits found on extinct woolly mammoths.

Three years later, mammoth-like creatures do not roam the tundra. But on Wednesday, researchers with the company reported a noteworthy advance: They created elephant stem cells that could potentially be developed into any tissue in the body.

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Neanderthals may have vanished 40,000 years ago, but they are no strangers to us today. Their stocky skeletons dazzle in museums around the world. Their imagined personas star in television ads. When Kevin Bacon noted on Instagram that his morning habits are like those of a Neanderthal, he did not stop to explain that our ancient cousins interbred with modern humans expanding out of Africa.

But there’s no such familiarity with the Denisovans, a group of humans that split from the Neanderthal line and survived for hundreds of thousands of years before going extinct. That’s largely because we have so few of their bones. In a new review paper, anthropologists tally all of the fossils that have been clearly identified as Denisovan since the first discovery in 2010. The entire list consists of half a broken jaw, a finger bone, a skull fragment, three loose teeth and four other chips of bone.

Continue reading “On the Trail of the Denisovans” →