AncientPages.com – Humans are the only species to live in every environmental niche in the world – from the icesheets to the deserts, rainforests to savannahs. As individuals we are rather puny, but when we are socially connected, we are the most dominant species on the planet. Paloma de la Peña, Author provided New evidence from stone […]

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Scientists have puzzled over the origin of Namibia’s fairy circles for nearly half a century. It boiled down to two main theories: either termites were responsible, or plants were somehow self-organizing. Now, researchers from the University of Göttingen, benefitting from two exceptionally good rainfall seasons in the Namib Desert, show […]

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Tiny glᴀss beads discovered in mountain caves about 25 miles from the shores of Lake Malawi in eastern-central Africa provide evidence that European trade in the continent’s hinterland was built on Indigenous trade routes from the coast to the interior that had existed for centuries, according to a study co-authored […]

Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – Archaeologists in Georgia have found a 1.8-million-year-old tooth belonging to an early species of human. “The tooth was discovered near the village of Orozmani, around 100 km (62 miles) southwest of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, near Dmanisi where human skulls dated to 1.8 million years old, were found in […]

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – The Bantu Expansion transformed sub-Saharan Africa’s linguistic, economic, and cultural composition. Today, more than 240 million people speak one of the more than 500 Bantu languages. It is generally accepted that the ancestors of current Bantu speakers lived around 5,000 to 6,000 years before present in a region by the […]

AncientPages.com – Every person alive on the planet today is descended from people who lived as hunter-gatherers in Africa. The continent is the cradle of human origins and ingenuity, and with each new fossil and archaeological discovery, we learn more about our shared African past. Such research tends to focus on when our species, Homo sapiens, spread out to […]

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – The first detailed academic study of East African maritime traditions shows changes in boatbuilding techniques but the continuing use of wooden vessels by fishers. Researchers have used pH๏τogrammetry technology to document the watercraft using the Zanzibar Channel, on which so many livelihoods depend. A ngalawa. Credit: Lucy Blue Large local vessels—the mtepe, […]

Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – Historic graffiti of ships carved in an African fort were drawn by soldiers on guard duty watching the sea, University of Exeter experts believe. The southwestern tower of Zanzibar Fort, in which many of the ship graffiti are located. Credit: Alessandro Ghidoni The engravings, found in Tanzania’s Zanzibar archipelago and made […]

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – A new analysis of human remains that were buried in African archaeological sites has produced the earliest DNA from the continent, telling a fascinating tale of how early humans lived, traveled and even found their significant others. An interdisciplinary team of 44 researchers outlined its findings in “Ancient DNA reveals […]