History

Vanessa Hayes, University of Sydney Where was the evolutionary birthplace of modern humans? The East African Great Rift Valley has long been the favoured contender – until today. Our new research has used DNA to trace humanity’s earliest footsteps to a prehistoric wetland called Makgadikgadi-Okavango, south of the Great Zambezi River. Our analysis, published in […]

Anna M. Kotarba-Morley, Flinders University; Alison Crowther, The University of Queensland; Mike W Morley, Flinders University, and Nicole Boivin, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History The medieval settlement of Unguja Ukuu, on the Zanzibar Archipelago off the coast of Tanzania, was a key port in an extensive Indian Ocean trade network that

Alison Crowther, The University of Queensland and Patrick Faulkner, University of Sydney Africa is often referred to as the cradle of humankind – the birthplace of our species, Homo sapiens. There is evidence of the development of early symbolic behaviours such as pigment use and perforated shell ornaments in Africa, but so far most of

Peter Hiscock, University of Sydney How and when did humans colonise the globe? This question has become one of the key concerns of archaeologists, geneticists and human biologists. And now the latest archaeological discovery in Oman in the Arabian Peninsula – distinctive Nubian stone tools – offers a new twist in the emerging story. In

Chapurukha Kusimba, American University Sometimes you run across a grimy, tattered dollar bill that seems like it’s been around since the beginning of time. Assuredly it hasn’t, but the history of human beings using cash currency does go back a long time – 40,000 years. Scientists have tracked exchange and trade through the archaeological record,