When I started learning about the Ice Age, the oldest known cave art dated to about 35,000 years ago—now it’s closer to 41,000 years. And while they seemed like a fairly intelligent…

In some sense, Lee Rogers Berger found himself and the drowning woman at the same time. The Georgia native had just returned home after dropping out of Vanderbilt University, where…

Who will say ‘corpse’ to his vivid cast?
 Who will say ‘body’ to his opaque repose? —Seamus Heaney, “Grauballe Man” (1975) One Saturday in the spring of 1950, brothers…

In August 1856, limestone quarry workers blasting out the entrance to the Feldhofer grotto in the Neander Valley of west-central Germany found a set of skeletal remains. Assuming the…

Sometime in the 1860s, five recent Oxford graduates took a trip to Egypt. Together they sailed down the Nile, a tourist attraction even then. To remember their trip, they bought a…

Stone steps descended into the ground, and I walked down them slowly as if I were entering a dark movie theater, careful not to stumble and disrupt the silence. Once my eyes adjusted…

The domestication of wild grains has played a major role in human evolution, facilitating the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture. You might think…

It was the 18th-century scientist Carolus Linnaeus that laid the foundations for modern biological taxonomy. It was also Linnaeus who argued for the existence of Homo troglodytes,…

What is home? This is a deceptively simple question. Is it the place where you were born? Is it where you happen to live right now? Does it have to be a dwelling, or can it be a spot…

Three thousand years ago, an expansive ceremonial complex dominated life in the steep Andean valley of Chavín de Huántar, Peru. It was the center of an enigmatic cult where psychotropic…