Category Archives: Archaeology

What Do Hair Salons Have to Do with Prayer, Magic, and the Development of Literacy?

It turns out, the first complete sentence ever written by a human (at least, as of what we know now) concerned hair. New archaeological evidence — discovered in Israel in 2016 and analyzed recently — confirms that “the oldest instance of a sentence written using the alphabet is on an

We Are All Africans

An impressively interdisciplinary team of geneticists, biological anthropologists, archaeologists, and geologists has just published an article detailing the genetic makeup of a man who lived in Ethiopia some 4,500 years ago. Why is this relevant today? The analysis shows close genetic ties between some contemporary Sardinian farmers, German farmers from

A Tale of Two Chins

Cell phones . . . couches . . . gyms and community centers . . . archaeologists of the future will unearth countless artifacts and buildings that will testify to the nature of our lives as social creatures. Recently, anthropologists have argued for evidence of a different sort that tells a