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...

Renewable energy comes from matter that nature produces and replenishes constantly. The power generated through this source does not significantly threaten the environment, especially in comparison with fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, which take more than millions of years to

When I began studying human prehistory in the mid-1990s, little did I know that I would witness a paradigm shift in our understanding of when the first humans settled in Western Eurasia firsthand. At the time, I was preparing my master’s thesis about 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...

In early August 2023, a succession of wildfires ignited within the state of Hawaii, primarily affecting the island of Maui. It is considered “one of the worst natural disasters in Hawaii’s history, and the nation’s deadliest wildfires since 1918.” Driven by powerful winds, these...

Access to solar power is increasing in rural parts of the U.S., partly with the support of farmers who lease out their land for utility-scale solar arrays. This farm-to-solar trend known as “agrivoltaics”—defined by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as “the co-location...

There’s a paradigm shift underway in our understanding of the past 4 million years of human evolution: ours is a story that includes combinations with other Homo species, spread unevenly across today’s populations—not a neat and linear evolutionary progression. ...

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has announced it will lay off about 6 percent of its global workforce. Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent his employees a letter warning of imminent layoffs and saying how “deeply sorry” he was. He offered for workers to...

Discoveries in the fields of human origins, paleoanthropology, cognitive science, and behavioral biology have accelerated in the past few decades. We occasionally bump into news reports that new findings have revolutionary implications for how humanity lives today—but the information for the most part is still...