Archaeology articles within Nature

Featured

  • Comment |

    Anthropology isn't in the crisis that parts of the media would have you believe, but it must do better, argue Adam Kuper and Jonathan Marks.

    • Adam Kuper
    •  & Jonathan Marks

  • News & Views |

    What role did the Arabian peninsula play in the expansion of our species out of Africa? An archaeological site in the United Arab Emirates provides tantalizing new evidence that supports an early human migration from Africa.

    • Michael D. Petraglia

  • News Q&A |

    Nature talks to the archaeologist behind controversial claims that ancient teeth could rewrite human evolution.

    • Haim Watzman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using DNA from a finger bone, the genome of an archaic hominin from southern Siberia has been sequenced to about 1.9-fold coverage. The group to which this individual belonged shares a common origin with Neanderthals, and although it was not involved in the putative gene flow from Neanderthals into Eurasians, it contributed 4–6% of its genetic material to the genomes of present-day Melanesians. A tooth whose mitochondrial genome is very similar to that of the finger bone further suggests that these hominins are evolutionarily distinct from Neanderthals and modern humans.

    • David Reich
    • , Richard E. Green
    •  & Svante Pääbo

  • News & Views |

    Phylogenetic methods of evolutionary biology can be used to study socio-political variation mapped onto linguistic trees. The range of political complexities in Austronesian societies offers a good test case. See Article p.801

    • Jared Diamond

  • News |

    Revamped conservation effort aims to correct mistakes made in preserving cave paintings.

    • Declan Butler

  • Letter |

    The earliest direct evidence for stone tools is between 2.6 and 2.5 million years old and comes from Gona, Ethiopia. These authors report bones from Dikika, Ethiopia, dated to around 3.4 million years ago and marked with cuts indicative of the use of stone tools to remove flesh and extract bone marrow. This is the earliest known evidence of stone tool use, and might be attributed to the activities of Australopithecus afarensis.

    • Shannon P. McPherron
    • , Zeresenay Alemseged
    •  & Hamdallah A. Béarat

  • News & Views |

    How far back in the human lineage does tool use extend? Fossil bones that bear evidence of butchery marks made by stone implements increase the known range of that behaviour to at least 3.2 million years ago.

    • David R. Braun

  • News |

    Russell L. Ciochon and his team are in Indonesia investigating the geological source and age of one of the world's biggest caches of Homo erectus.

    • Miriam Frankel

  • News & Views |

    A site in Norfolk, UK, provides the earliest and northernmost evidence of human expansion into Eurasia. Environmental indicators suggest that these early Britons could adapt to a range of climatic conditions.

    • Andrew P. Roberts
    •  & Rainer Grün

  • News |

    Radioactive isotopes nail the timeline of Egyptian dynasties.

    • Richard Lovett

  • News Feature |

    The explosion in commercial archaeology has brought a flood of information. The problem now is figuring out how to find and use this unpublished literature, reports Matt Ford.

    • Matt Ford

  • News |

    Stone tools reveal that hominins lived on the Indonesian island of Flores a million years ago.

    • Rex Dalton

  • Letter |

    Evidence for hominin activity on Flores, Indonesia, has been thought to go back at least 800,000 years, as shown by fission-track dating at Mata Menge in the Soa Basin. However, new research at another locality in the Soa Basin uses the more accurate technique of 40Ar/39Ar dating to show that hominins were living on Flores at least a million years ago.

    • Adam Brumm
    • , Gitte M. Jensen
    •  & Michael Storey

  • Books & Arts |

    We need realism, not positivity, to learn lessons from past societal demises, urges Jared Diamond.

    • Jared Diamond

  • News & Views |

    Big and beautiful microfossils have been extracted from rocks that are more than 3 billion years old. They offer tantalizing hints about the antiquity of the eukaryote lineage of organisms that includes ourselves.

    • Roger Buick

  • News |

    Experts question claims that malaria and osteonecrosis contributed to Pharaoh's decline.

    • Declan Butler

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