Music is usually considered as a universal art form. It is found in virtually all human cultures and its use is associated with many different human tasks, from the most sacred to the most profane. Its elusive nature has haunted thinkers for millennia. Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras, among others, devoted much of their time to […]
Authors: M. Hervella & C. de la Rúa do research and teach at the Genetics, Physical Anthropology and Animal Physiology Department of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). After the dispersal Out of Africa of modern humans, around 50–70 thousand calendar years before present (ky cal BP for short) or earlier based on fossil […]
A 1 million-year-old fire lit by human ancestors was discovered in 2012 in the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa. The soil of the cave yielded several dozen stone tools, microscopic plant ashes and burned bone bits. It is supposed that a member of the Homo genus, perhaps Homo erectus , made a fire that produced […]
The nose is one of the strangest structures of human anatomy. It is much more different from our closest relatives than other parts of the body, it is sexually dimorphic, being on average larger in males than in females, and it is different among different hominin species and among different ethnic groups. Size and shape […]
Anthropology • Biology • Evolution • Genetics
Neanderthals ( Homo neanderthalensis ) were a species –some say a subspecies although most authors consider there is enough evidence to consider them as a separate species– of human closely related to us. They were firstly discovered in a cave in the Neander Valley («Tal» in German), about 12 km east of Düsseldorf. There is […]
As everybody knows, the people from Bilbao are born wherever they want. And, according to one of the most captivating conjectures in contemporary archaeology, this might have been so in a totally unexpected way even from many millennia ago. The conjecture I am referring to is the ‘Solutrean hypothesis’ about the first human population of […]
A lot has been said and written about what makes women physically attractive, from having full lips and/or breasts to being shorter than a man, to having a symmetrical face to having a low waist-hip ratio (WHR), all being indicators, at least in theory, of potential reproductive fitness . For instance, a low WHR has […]
Authors: Maria-José Iriarte-Chiapusso is an Ikerbasque research professor at the Department of Geography, Prehistory and Archaeology, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Álvaro Arrizabalaga is a lecturer of Prehistory in the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Archaeology has been defined as the “Science of Trash”. However fortunate or unfortunate that definition might be, it […]
Author: Alvaro Arrizabalaga received a BA in History (Vitoria, 1988) and a Master in CRM -Archaeology option- (Vitoria, 1992) at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). He finished his PhD in Prehistory ( La industria lítica del Paleolítico superior inicial en el oriente cantábrico ) in 1995. He has been a lecturer of Prehistory […]
We shall close with this entry our series (I, II, III) about the origins of Islam, indicating some further interesting facts about the Qur’an. 4) By Muhammad’s time, the Arabic alphabet contained no marks for vowels; furthermore, some groups of consonants were written with exactly the same character (e.g., the symbols for sounds b, t […]