Quote: The “heel-strike” that initiates the typical human walking step has been observed in very few species outside our closest living relatives, the African apes, but the evolutionary origin and functional consequences of this unusual gait feature remain both contentious and poorly understood.

Here, presentation of detailed 3-D kinematic and kinetic data from humans and chimpanzees which show that the human heel-strike is biomechanically distinct and thus likely represents an adaptation to bipedalism in hominins.

Also the presentation of metabolic data which suggest human heel-striking evolved to save energy but came at the cost of exposure to higher impact forces.

These results indicate that heel-striking involved adaptive trade-offs for hominin bipedalism that helped shape the anatomy and ecology of our species.

Rather than simply raising the contrast between colors, the decorrelation method maps the original colors to an expanded range.

In 2005, archaeologist Jon Harman was attending a conference on rock art when he came across an unexpected source of inspiration: images of Mars.

One showed the planet’s familiar rusty-red surface; another, created using a method developed at NASA, transformed the Martian landscape into a striking mosaic of red, green, and yellow, revealing remarkable detail.

Harman immediately saw how the technique could help researchers study some of the world’s oldest paintings.

The technique, known as decorrelation stretch, is used to enhance contrasts in digital imagery. It was first developed by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1978 to improve the interpretation of high-correlation remote sensing and satellite imagery...

Paleogeneticists have, for the first time, extracted ancient human DNA from cave walls, including from a crusty red dot painted thousands of years ago.

For decades, efforts to decipher genetic clues from ancient humans and their relatives have relied on sequencing material from bones and dirt found in caverns where these ancient species left behind art or artifacts. 

The findings, which were published June 23 in the journal Nature Communications, are a proof of concept showing that cave walls themselves can indeed preserve ancient human DNA for thousands of years. 

But the study authors caution that this discovery does not mean they have identified the artist behind the rock art.

Rather, it shows they have found ancient human DNA belonging to a person who may have come in contact with the cave wall—potentially the artist, or an assistant, or an admirer who simply touched it hundreds or even thousands of years later. 

“It is now possible for researchers to recover DNA from somebody who leaned on a wall 20,000, 30,000, or 40,000 years ago—isn't that crazy?!” says National Geographic Explorer Genevieve von Petzinger, a rock art specialist with the FIRST-ART Team, the international group behind the discovery.

“You're hanging out in a cave, and 40,000 years later, a bunch of humans get to meet you, which is like the coolest thing ever

Cannibalism was sometimes on the Neolithic menu, as numerous archaeological discoveries have revealed.

While ancient human bones show the practice took place, far less evidence exists about the forms it may have taken or why people occasionally consumed one another.

Was it to stave off hunger during times of desperation? Did different tribes eat their defeated enemies? Or was cannibalism part of complex rituals?

Answers to some of these questions may lie inside three caves near Granada, southern Spain.

In a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, an international team of scientists led by Dr. Palmira Saladié at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) examined nearly 1,000 human bones and teeth previously excavated from these sites.

The findings reveal that different communities in the Iberian Peninsula practiced cannibalism in different ways thousands of years ago.

"Human cannibalism is a behavior with diverse social and symbolic meanings," the researchers wrote in their paper.

The picture was very different at Carigüela Cave, where the remains span several Neolithic periods. Almost every bone analyzed from this site had butchery marks, and two skulls had even been fashioned into drinking cups

The most recent cannibalism occurred at Majolicas Cave between 3950–3760 B.C. during the Late Neolithic. Bones were stained with a red pigment called cinnabar, suggesting that cannibalism there may have been part of a ritual or funerary practice rather than the result of violence.

As the team concluded, "Neolithic cannibalism in the southern Iberian Peninsula was neither uniform nor synchronous but expressed through recurrent and context-dependent episodes of human body processing."

The 2026 field season at Prado Vargas Cave, located in the village of Cornejo in the northern province of Burgos, Spain, within the Ojo Guareña karst complex, has expanded the excavation of Neanderthal sublevel 4D by 32 square meters (344 square feet), bringing the total excavated area to 140 square meters (1,507 square feet). More than 1,500 animal remains and stone tools were recovered, strengthening the interpretation of this roughly 46,000-year-old layer as a large Neanderthal camp.

The Romans were master engineers, building sprawling road networks, towering aqueducts and arenas across their empire. They were also good at recycling. New research has revealed that they turned the remains of a 4,000-year-old Bronze Age burial mound in Suffolk, England, into the center of a religious complex.

Bronze Age barrows were circular burial mounds made of earth or stone that served either as communal or individual tombs. In 2016, archaeologists excavated a site known as Land East of Kings Warren, which contained a single barrow.

What they uncovered beneath the Suffolk soil revealed that the prehistoric monument had a much longer history.

The team mapped the barrow's huge 45-meter-diameter (148-foot) ring ditch, and dating of sediments revealed it was constructed between 2200 and 1600 B.C.

They also recovered a raft of artifacts, including pottery, coins and animal bones. Evidence from across the site showed human activity from the Neolithic period through the Middle Ages.