History

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

Michelle Langley, Griffith University Can you imagine walking 14,000km? Trekking across wide savannas, down creek beds, along mountain chains in terrain that is new and home to foreign types of plants and animals? Can I eat this? What is that? This long excursion – once thought only to have been attempted late in the journey

Julie Dunne, University of Bristol The honeybee is the world’s most important pollinator of food crops and beekeeping plays an important global economic role. Around 1.6 million tonnes of honey is produced annually and wild honey is also known to be widely collected by foragers globally. Hive products like honey, beeswax, bee larvae, pollen and

John McNabb, University of Southampton East Africa is famously the birthplace of humankind and the location where our ancient hominin ancestors first invented sophisticated stone tools. This technology, dating back to 2.6m years ago, is then thought to have spread around Africa and the rest of the Old World later on. But new research, published