Was it the fire that caused tuberculosis?
Homo erectus first managed to control fire about 400,000 years ago and this fact, of vital importance in human evolution, may be directly related to tuberculosis, according to biologists Rebecca Chisholm and Mark Tanaka of the University of New South Wales (Australia). Most infectious diseases (AIDS, malaria, Ebola...) leapt from other animals to humans. However, according to biologists, when the human being controlled the fire, the relationships between human beings narrowed and the lungs weakened due to smoke. These conditions were ideal for safe Mycobacterium tuberculosis (in the image) to mutate and become the most lethal infectious disease.
Ethiopia, 24 November 1974. Lucy's skeleton was found in Hadar, one of the oldest traces of human ancestors. The Australian hominid of Australopithecus afarensis is between 3.2 and 3.5 million years old.
So they considered it the ancestor of species, the mother of all of us. In... [+]
A group of archaeologists from the University of Berkeley, California, USA. That is, men didn't launch the lances to hunt mammoths and other great mammals. That was the most widespread hypothesis so far, the technique we've seen in movies, video games ...
But the study, published... [+]
Geissenkloesterle (Germany), 42,000 years ago. Those living in the cave of the Danube basin made a flute with bird bones and mammoth ivory. At the same time, the inhabitants of the cave of Divje Babe in Slovenia also made a flute with the femur of a bear. These are the oldest... [+]
In the south of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, in the cave of Leang Karampuang, archaeologists from the Griffith and Southern Cross universities and the Indonesian National Agency have discovered a painting of three anthropomorphic figures and a boar. According to the study... [+]
Two years ago, the Catalan archaeologist Edgard Camarós, two human skulls and Cancer? He found a motif card inside a cardboard box at Cambridge University. Skulls were coming from Giga, from Egypt, and he recently published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, his team has... [+]
Since they discovered the corpse of Ötzi in the Alps in 1991, the 5,000 years preserved in very good condition have been used for numerous investigations. From the beginning, the 61 tattoos he had on his skin were the ones that cared for him. Experts believed these tattoos were... [+]
Between 1992 and 2006, in the waters of Lake Bracciano of Rome, the site of La Marmotta del Neolitico was excavated early. They recently published in Plos One magazine a study on the five piraguas found there. It is estimated that the boats are between 7,000-7,500 years... [+]
In the Gulf of Mecklenburg, in Baltic waters, archaeologists identified in 2021 a stone structure of almost a kilometre. Now a team of interdisciplinary researchers has published a study on the wall in the journal PNAS.
The structure is about 10,000 years old and has come to... [+]
This weekend I visited a cave with prehistoric paintings. Paints made with iron oxide and manganese about 30,000 years ago. These visits seem interesting to me to relocate our place as human beings in the world, they are an opportunity to rethink the “development” of recent... [+]
Willendorf (Austria), 1908. At a site in the Wachau Valley, archaeologist Josef Szombathy found a small anthropomorphic statue of a woman about 11 cm, carved in stone and dyed with red ochre.
Since then, it is the best-known venusi of the Paleolithic and has been analyzed from... [+]
Researchers at Freie Universität in Berlin have found the oldest Siberian fortress in history, 8,000 years ago. It has long been believed that the strengths have risen to the height of the Neolithic Revolution because of the stabilization of communities by agriculture.
But... [+]