New DNA analysis gives more insight into the menu of prehistoric Greenlanders as far back as 2000 BC. Researchers found that bowhead whales, caribou and walrus were essential to survival of early Greenlanders. There weren’t any whale bones found around the investigated sites, which suggests that people scavenged whale meat elsewhere. Previously, information about the […]
Tag: archaeology
Human hunting contributed to cave lions’ extinction
One of the largest species of lions that ever lived, the Eurasian cave lion, became extinct around 14,000 years ago. For the first time, a new study finds a possible explanation for the decline of cave lions: hunting by Paleolithic humans. Cueto and colleagues examined nine fossilized cave lion toe bones from the Upper […]
Stones broken by wild monkeys add an edge to early-human tool use theories
As seen in the video, wild bearded capuchin monkeys also adopt a stone-on-stone percussion technique to produce stone flakes similar to early-human stone tools. Broken stones with distinct sharp edges are thought to be a precursor to more sophisticated tool use by early humans. However, a recent Oxford study found that sharp-edged stones may not […]
