More than 40,000 years ago, Ice Age humans were carving repeated patterns of dots, lines, and crosses into tools and small ivory figurines. A new computational study of more than 3,000 of these ...

Over 40,000 years ago, our early ancestors were already carving signs into tools and sculptures. According to a new analysis ...

Ancient carvings once thought decorative may actually be early attempts to record information. Their statistical complexity matches that of proto-cuneiform, pushing the origins of writing-like systems ...

Learn how researchers analyzed 3,000 Paleolithic symbols to uncover structured information comparable to early writing systems.

Traveling West embodied the United State's 19th century expansionist tendencies. Traveling East might have been an appropriate tendency for early humans living in what is now Europe near the end of ...

Around 30,000 years ago, a hunter-gatherer left behind what may be a "personal toolkit" in what is now the Czech Republic, a new study finds. Researchers uncovered the extraordinary cluster of ...

Until now, at least 14 different species have been assigned to the genus Homo since it emerged in Ethiopia some 2.8 million years ago, revealing branching evolutionary stories of survival, intermixing ...

Thousands of stone tools discovered in a South African cave reveal that Ice Age humans had developed sophisticated fabrication techniques about 20,000 years ago, according to a report in the Journal ...

According to this interpretation, eyed needles, one of the symbols of the Paleolithic age, were not simple tailoring tools but also instruments for the social and cultural development of prehistoric ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. About 30,000 years ago, humans arrived in Japan's southern Ryukyu Islands, 110km from Taiwan. The archaeological record hasn't ...

Continuous landmasses, now submerged, may have made it possible for early humans to cross between present-day Turkey and Europe, new research of this largely unexplored region reveals. The findings, ...