Our ancestors’ ability to recognize water sources was crucial to their survival. As a result, the attraction to lustrous materials is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history and is evident among prehistoric artifacts, ancient civilizations, and modern consumer culture. ...

Amid the military posturing, economic sanctions, and political power struggles shaping the U.S.-China rivalry, intellectual property (IP) disputes remain a major battleground. In January 2025, Chinese company DeepSeek’s latest AI model helped wipe $1 trillion off the U.S. stock market by demonstrating how...

Palm oil is one of the most used vegetable oils in the world and is found in a large variety of packaged products, from shampoos and lipstick to cookies and frozen pizza. Unfortunately, the production of palm oil has been linked to severe environmental...

An ancient Greek myth tells the story of Prometheus, who, after molding humans out of clay and teaching them the fine arts of civilization, defied the Olympian Gods by stealing the secret of fire and offering it to humans. Prometheus paid dearly for this...

Twenty-three million years ago, our distant ancestors gained trichromatic color vision through means of a random genetic mutation. Trichromatic color vision and trichromacy refer to the ability to perceive color through three receptors in the eye, known as cones, which are sensitive to different wavelengths...

While the circumstances that led to the emergence of anatomically modern humans (AMH) remain a topic of debate, the species-centric idea that modern humans inevitably came to dominate the world because they were culturally and behaviorally superior to other hominins is still largely accepted. The...

Breakthrough anthropological and scientific findings have allowed researchers to better trace the outlines, and begin to fill in the blanks, of the human evolutionary story in recent decades. We’re now able to trace the long threads of the social and cultural processes that produced today’s...

Paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean has developed a comprehensive explanation based on a synthesis of research and archaeological evidence for what propelled H. sapiens to leave Africa about 70,000 years ago and colonize every part of the world, replacing other existing...

All of humanity can now take the Grand Tour: a travel circuit of global sites that help us understand ourselves and our history, made increasingly clear thanks to recent advances in archaeology and the sciences. The stops on this tour include archeological sites key to...

“I’m a poverty scholar, that houseless mama, that houseless daughter—all those people you don’t wanna see, never wanna be—look away from me. Whatcha gonna do, arrest me? I’m in your city.” ...