Anthropologists had long believed humans migrated to the Americas in a relatively short period from a limited area in northeast Asia across a temporary land corridor that opened across the Bering Strait during an ice age.

But government archaeologist Alejandro Terrazas says the picture has now become more complicated, because the reconstruction more resembles people from southeastern Asian areas like Indonesia.

MSNBC

As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.

New York Times

A team of Spanish and Portuguese researchers has carried out molecular genetic analysis of the Y chromosome (transmitted only by males) of the aboriginal population of the Canary Islands to determine their origin and the extent to which they have survived in the current population. The results suggest a North African origin for these paternal lineages which, unlike maternal lineages, have declined to the point of being practically replaced today by European lineages.

ScienceDaily

Archaeologists on Tuesday unveiled what they think are the remains of Roman emperor Nero’s extravagant banquet hall, a circular space that rotated day and night to imitate the Earth’s movement and impress his guests.

MSNBC

The new trove includes items that one expert in Anglo-Saxon artifacts said brought tears to her eyes: gold items weighing 11 pounds, and 5.5 pounds of silver. Tentatively identified by some experts as bounty from one of the wars that racked Middle England in the seventh and eighth centuries, they included sword pommels and dagger hilts, scabbard bosses and helmet cheekpieces, Christian crosses and figures of animals, eagles and fish.

New York Times

The remains of a 9,000-year-old hunter-gatherers’ house, uncovered during construction at an airport, have been unearthed in Great Britain’s Isle of Man. The house was surrounded by buried mounds of burnt hazelnut shells and stocked with stone tools, according to archaeologists working on the project and a report in the latest British Archaeology.

MSNBC

Adventurers who conquered Mount Everest successfully launched a replica of an ancient Philippine boat Saturday that they will use to sail around Southeast Asia and possibly to Africa to promote Filipino pride and unity.

The replica of the balangay — a wooden-hulled boat used in the archipelago about 1,700 years ago — was built in 44 days by native Badjao boat-builders from the southernmost Philippine province of Tawi Tawi using traditional skills handed down through the generations.

MSNBC

Stone Age humans were adept chemists who whipped up a sophisticated kind of natural glue, a new study says. They knowingly tweaked the chemical and physical properties of an iron-containing pigment known as red ochre with the gum of acacia trees to create adhesives for their shafted tools.

National Geographic

Humans, not climate change, were responsible for the extinction of giant kangaroos and other massive marsupials in Tasmania more than 40,000 years ago, according to new research.

National Geographic

Contrary to a long-held belief that Aborigines were isolated, northern communities may have interacted with visitors, such as the Makassans — indigenous people from the city of Ujungpandang (Makassar) on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

National Geographic