In Iraq, local officials are rushing to prepare ancient monuments for tourists. “In Saddam’s time we dealt with officials who had a primary school education. They didn’t even know who Nebuchadnezzar or Hammurabi was. Now in some of these provinces we suffer from the same problem,” said Qais Hussein Rashid, chairman of the national board […]

Two new Hobbit studies published in Nature support classifying Homo floresiensis as a new species. The first suggests that the tiny, small-brained, flat-footed tool-makers descended from an undocumented hominin more primitive than Homo erectus. The second study examined the evolutionary process known as insular dwarfing, and concluded that adapting to an island environment can shrink […]