On this blog, we’ve explored key aspects of the Pleistocene across multiple regions—South America, North America, Australia, and part of Asia. Today, we turn to Europe, a continent that has received perhaps the most attention in paleontological and Paleolithic research. The disproportionate wealth of information we have about Europe’s history is not only because of […]
When someone thinks of Slavic people, Russians are probably the first group that comes to mind. Given the fact that they are the most populous Slavic-speaking ethnicity by a wide margin and the one with the greatest visibility in history and politics, this is hardly surprising. Therefore, it might be shocking for some to find
A study came out recently which identifies a previously unknown lineage of humans from North Africa which was present during the last wet Saharan period. This lineage is most closely related to North African foragers from the genetically distinctive Iberomaurisian culture, although it differed from them in some ways. It is more closely related to
See the forests in the pictures above? They are located in the Sikhote-Alin mountains in the Russian Far East. While undoubtedly scenic, a person not familiar with biodiversity in this part of the world may not understand what is so special about them. After all, they more or less just resemble forests in much of
Welcome to part 2 of this series on Late Pleistocene American extinctions. In Part 1, we introduced the debate regarding the Late Pleistocene extinctions in the Americas and thoroughly explained why humans were not simply a factor, but the main factor in the demise of megafauna. In this section, we will explore the evidence for
There are few places on the planet as distinctive as Australia. With its isolated geographical location and iconic landscapes, it captures the imagination of people the world over. Picturesque red deserts, glistening beaches, and Eucalyptus woodlands may provide its most characteristic scenery, but arcane rainforests, snow-covered mountains, and much more can be found on the
One of the most contentious debates in all of archeology is when and how the Americas were first settled. For a while, it was claimed that the first people in the Americas were the “Clovis”. They were a group of big-game hunters with distinctive hunting tools that allegedly bypassed formidable glaciers through an inland ice-free
Genetic analysis can provide incredible and often counterintuitive discoveries about the relationships between and within species and their unique ancestral histories. A study was published 3 years ago which explored the genomes of three Pleistocene black bear genomes found in eDNA in central Mexico and compared them to genomes of black bears in the eastern,