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Roger S. Seymour Anthropologists have been curious about the evolution of human intelligence for many decades. The main lines of research have involved archaeological finds concerning the use of fire, tools and so on. But what about looking for evidence in fossil skulls, the place where the brain resided? The volume of the human brain […]

Ian Moffat, Flinders University If you bumped into a Homo erectus in the street you might not recognise them as being very different from you. You’d see a certain “human-ness” in the stance, and his or her size and shape might be similar to yours. But their face would be flatter, with a more obvious

John Giblin, UCL It may be small enough to sit in the palm of your hand, but even now – nearly 800 years after it was lost to sight in what is now South Africa – the Golden Rhinoceros of Mapungubwe has powerful symbolism. It’s a representation of one of the region’s most physically powerful

Darren Curnoe, UNSW Sydney Twelve thousand years ago everybody lived as hunters and gatherers. But by 5,000 years ago most people lived as farmers. This brief period marked the biggest shift ever in human history with unparalleled changes in diet, culture and technology, as well as social, economic and political organisation, and even the patterns

Amy Prendergast, The University of Melbourne This article is part of our occasional long read series Zoom Out, where authors explore key ideas in science and technology in the broader context of society and humanity. Watching the weather for today and tomorrow is relatively easy with apps and news programs – but knowing what the

Darren Curnoe, UNSW Sydney You might say it’s the ultimate prize of science, to discover when, where and why humans evolved. For a long time, the evidence has been overwhelming that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and later spilled out of the continent to settle the rest of the planet. But is the story of

Sarah Wurz, University of the Witwatersrand; Joshua Kumbani, University of the Witwatersrand; Justin Bradfield, University of Johannesburg, and Neil Rusch, University of the Witwatersrand The Middle and Later Stone Age, which lasted from about 300 000 to 300 years ago in South Africa, was an important time for the African continent. During this period humans

Peter Hiscock, University of Sydney The discovery of evidence of the world’s oldest axe is reported by my colleagues and I in a paper published in Australian Archaeology this week. As often happens, this announcement was the result of a surprisingly long process, and yet it has shocked some archaeologists. The response to it reveals

Joshua Kumbani, University of the Witwatersrand Music has been part and parcel of humanity for a long time. Not every sound is musical, but sound has meaning and sometimes the meaning of sound is specific to its context. But when it comes to archaeology there is scant evidence of music or sound producing artefacts from