Researchers have identified a mutation on human chromosome 21 responsible for the condition microcephalic osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type II. At the end of their article on the discovery in Science, the team suggests that this mutation might account for the stature and brain size of Indonesia’s hobbits, Homo floresiensis. But physical anthropologist Charles Hildebolt, who […]

Ian Gilligan of Australian National University agrees with the idea that Neanderthals didn’t survive the last Ice Age because they lacked good tools. He just thinks that those tools were for sewing, rather than for hunting. Thirty-two skeletons thought to belong to soldiers killed at the Battle of Aughrim in 1691 were discovered on the […]