Archaeology

Milk fat compounds found on pottery shards indicate that Africans were engaged in dairy farming by about 7,000 years ago. Cynthia Graber reports

A new technique can estimate a body's volume and weight based on laser scans of its skeleton. Sophie Bushwick reports

Differences in developmental timing may have given birds their big eyes, big brains and smaller size

The ninth-century wall paintings predate existing Mayan astronomical records by hundreds of years

Rather than search for an acoustic motivation behind its structure, new research aims to better understand how ancient people might have used Stonehenge

Compression fossils reveal that these Mesozoic insects with serrated mouthparts were 10 times bigger than today's fleas, but lacked jumping legs

Melting glaciers could liberate ancient microbes

Books and recommendations from Scientific American

Scientific American editor Kate Wong talks about the recent conference of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Portland, Ore., where subjects included killer chimps, unprecedented fossil sharing among researchers and divergent hominid foot forms

Ancient reptiles owed huge size more to their eggs than to a benign environment.

The release of life-forms in cold storage for eons raises new concerns about the impacts of climate change