People reached the Mediterranean island at least 8,500 years ago.

Island ecosystems are biodiversity-rich, but face an alarming level of exposure to global change. We found that by 2050, climate change will be the dominant threat for 65% of islands; 22% will be affected primarily by land-use change; and 13% will face greater threats from biological invasions. We call for these ecosystems to be incorporated into global biodiversity conservation strategies and for their protection to be strengthened.

The legacy of Luca Cavalli-Sforza on human evolution

We challenge the view that our species, Homo sapiens, evolved within a single population and/or region of Africa. The chronology and physical diversity of Pleistocene human fossils suggest that morpho...

Malaria has shaped human habitat choice, exchange, and dispersal since the late Pleistocene in sub-Saharan Africa.

In the recent past, evolutionarily speaking, every other kind of hominin, from the Neanderthals of western Eurasia to the ‘hobbits’ of Flores, became …

Measuring technological complexity across species, as well as across temporal and spatial scales, is an ongoing challenge among authors who work on primatological, archaeological, and/or ethnographic ...

Homo sapiens emerged in Africa around 300 − 200 thousand years ago (ka). Although the earliest H. sapiens fossils are associated with the Middle Stone Age (MSA), lithic technologies considered diagnos...

Subscribe to citation updates from Westward expansion of pearl millet agriculture into the Lac de Guiers basin, Senegal, by c. AD 200

Thousands of years before the invention of compasses or sails, prehistoric peoples crossed oceans to reach remote lands like Malta and Australia. Doing so meant striking out in unknowable conditions. ...

Humans can thrive in nearly all terrestrial environments, exhibiting exceptional ecological flexibility among primates. However, it remains unclear how and when this flexibility first emerged in the h...

Hindcasted species distribution modelling of baboons illuminates potential refugia across Africa and Arabia, with predicted maxima and minima of habitable ranges pulsed by orbital precession and obliq...

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When it comes to reforestation, planting a diversity of tree species could have a plethora of positive effects on forest health and resilience, climate mitigation and biodiversity. That’s based on res...

Analysis of species distribution models in a pan-African database comprising chronometrically dated archaeological sites over the past 120,000 years shows major expansion in the human niche from 70 ka...

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The legacy of Luca Cavalli-Sforza on human evolution

Evidence reveals that people reached Malta 8,500 years ago. Hunter-gatherers made the long trip there 1,000 years before agricultural societies arrived.

A chance discovery led to evidence of a vanished people - and the epic sea voyages they were never supposed to have undertaken.

Ghar-e Boof represents an exceptional Paleolithic site in the southern Zagros Mountains. Due to its long Late Pleistocene sequence that spans from ca. 81 ka until the Epipaleolithic, the site offers a...

Pastoralism spread through cultural diffusion into the Green Sahara, where an isolated, distinct North African ancestry persisted.

The Commission has launched a call for proposals to support the growth of a European Network of Fact-Checkers, in line with President von der Leyen’s 2024–2029 political guidelines, which introduced…

Ancient DNA from the eastern Maghreb (Tunisia and Algeria) dating between 15,000 and 6,000 years ago shows that this region was far less affected by external gene flow than the rest of the Neolithic Mediterranean, including not only Europe but also the western Maghreb (Morocco).