Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania is a place of historic significance in human prehistory. Most prominent fossils found here include Paranthropus boisei, Homo erectus. Homo habilis and Homo sapiens. This site is very rich in stone tools. Till now, the stone tool assemblage included simple tools like chipped pebbles and flakes, choppers and hammer-stones which were Read More

There is a general scientific consensus  that homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals and that the Eurasians retained 1-2%  of the Neanderthal genes. The East Asians have about 20% more Neanderthal genes than their European brethren which suggests a longer duration of their intermixing with Neanderthals. There are many hypotheses about the extinction of Neanderthals which Read More

All of us experience pain some time or the other in our lives may be due to injury, fatigue or cuts in the body. The nerve cells in the body which respond to extremes of temperature, pressure and injury are called nociceptors. Scientists wonder why the males and females respond differently to the same painful Read More

The human ancestors split up from the chimpanzee line some 6-7 million years before present, however, this date may extend earlier than that but not later in any case. Around the time of split between human and chimpanzee ancestors, a new bipedal hominid appeared on the scene. It was Orroron tugenensis and can be considered Read More

Homo naledi was one of the earliest extinct hominids having small-brains who lived in South Africa some 335,000 to 236,000 years ago. The first discoveries of this fossil were made from Rising Star Cave system in South Africa by Lee Berger and his team in 2013. Interestingly no tools or fossils of other animals were Read More

Many scientists believed in sexual division of labor during human evolution where men were mainly hunters and women were mainly gatherers. Nobody can debate the acumen of females in identification of different varieties of colours of objects. This expertise of women prompted researchers to believe that during the course of human evolution, women were mainly Read More

Recently a controversy has erupted in anthropology circles about dropping a panel on “Let’s Talk About Sex Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology” from a conference proposed by Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor at the University of Alberta. The panelists believe that the biological sex is binary either male or Read More

Rising Star cave system near Johannesburg in South Africa, the home of Homo naledi, a new hominin find, is a part of UNESCO World Heritage Site. It has yielded numerous fossil hominin ancestors and is considered to be the motherland of modern humans who had migrated in waves to inhabit all parts of the globe. Read More

For a long time, the use of tools was considered as one of the basic hominin characteristics. But now it is ascribed to nonhuman primates as well such as chimpanzees, macaques and capuchin monkeys. These primates use the tools to obtain food using twigs to collect ants and insects, and stone tools to break open Read More

Tim Ryan Maloney and colleagues reported in the Nature magazine on September 7, 2022, the case of surgical removal of the lower limb of a child some 31000 years BP. The find of skeletal remains was of a person laid to rest in a burial from Liang Tebo cave, which is located in East Kalimantan, Read More

Svante Pääbo, a Swedish human geneticist has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the year 2022 for his work on sequencing Neanderthal Genome. His work is based on 40000 year old extracted DNA from Neanderthal bones. There was a great risk of this DNA being contaminated with living human DNA. To Read More

Agriculture first started around 10000 years from now and perhaps that may be the time when humans started clearing the forests for agriculture. But could the clearing of forests and manipulating the environment has happened earlier than the agricultural societies? Authors Roebroeks and colleagues published a paper in Science Advances in December 2021 throwing light Read More

Students of anthropology have long been taught that tool-making is a human characteristic. But the social media is now abuzz with videos of monkeys using big stones to crush nuts to obtain their kernels. Jane Goodall’s elaborate research on chimpanzees has shown that they insert small twigs in ant-holes to fish them out. Ewen Callaway wrote an article in Read More

Almost all human population groups show sexual dimorphism in stature where females are significantly shorter than males.  Some exceptions do occur in populations living under stressful conditions where this sexual dimorphism is diminished. Very often the reason given for this situation is the impact of malnutrition which affects the females relatively less than the males Read More

David Julius’s and Ardem Patapoutian’s research on the genetic basis of the sensation of temperature and pressure has won them the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Food eaten at room temperature feels pleasant, however, when heated beyond a certain level, it feels hot and uncomfortable to the tongue and the mouth. When we Read More

Recently in a paper, Qiang Ji and his colleagues of Hebei GEO University, Shijiazhuang, China, claimed to have discovered a new human species in the form of a Late Middle Pleistocene Harbin cranium. This skull has reverberated the internet with various names as ‘Dragon man’ and ‘Homo longi’. The skull of this specimen was dumped Read More

The modern humans are supposed to have intermixed with Neanderthals and gene flow occurred among them around 60,000 to 50,000 years before present in the Southwest Asia region.On the possibility of regular mixing of modern humans with the extinct relatives like Neanderthals in Eurasia,VivianeSlon of the University of Tel Aviv in Israel said that it Read More

An interesting fact from Harappan culture about the consumption of cattle, pig and sheep/goat meat has come to light recently in a study conducted by Akshyeta Suryanarayan and her team. Harappan culture vessels provided evidence that ruminant meat, dairy products and fats from plants and animals especially non-ruminants were cooked in them and were the delicacies of these Read More

The German American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942), pioneered a school of thought popularly known as cultural history and suggested to study human evolution from bio-cultural perspective. He motivated his students to work and study human behavior of people in their natural habitats by focusing on the material artefacts, implements and cultural processes. He opined that Read More

It has been observed that 66-72% of human mothers cradle their babies on the left side. Whether left side cradling is unique among humans only or has it a similarity with other great apes also? John Manning and Andrew Chamberlain of the University of Liverpool studied this behavior among gorillas, orangutans and gibbons in zoos Read More

Corona virus disease (COVID-19) dramatically appeared in a Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. While treating the patients, the doctors noticed pneumonia-like symptoms which were difficult to treat. Detailed studies of patients have shown them to be infected with a novel corona virus which the WHO has finally named as ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome Read More

On December 11, 2019, Nature research journal, published a new discovery of a cave painting depicting a hunting scene from an Indonesian cave. It is estimated to be 44,000 years old and if this date is confirmed to be true then it would emerge as the humanity’s earliest cave art painting ever discovered. The picture Read More

William G. Kaelin Jr.                     Peter J. Ratcliffe                      Gregg L. Semenza Nobel Prize in Medicine for the year 2019 has been shared by three scientists; Drs. William G. Kaelin Jr., Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Read More

Obesity, hypertension and diabetes is affecting a lot of people worldwide which is taking the form of a pandemic. Many health conditions are interlinked which arise from the malfunctioning of the metabolic system of the body. The scientific community has named this condition as Metabolic Syndrome (MetS) or Syndrome X. National Heart, Lung and Blood Read More

Jessica Thompson and her colleagues proposed a new theory on human predatory patterns and the evolution of brain size in the Current Anthropology issue of February 2019. Fossil bones of large animals were found along with those of early hominins by Thompson from Dikika region of Ethiopia. An analysis of the animal bones revealed that Read More

People living peacefully in their native land everywhere in the world fondly call it as their motherlands. They love their land, rivers, hills, deserts, streams, lakes, animals and birds, flowers and crops and hold them close to their heart. The emotional attachment with the land of their ancestors and parents is unfathomable. We love the culture and customs Read More

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded jointly to James P. Allison, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, San Francisco, CA, USA and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. Their landmark discoveries in cancer cure with different but complimentary strategies is likely to immensely Read More

Cultural and physical diversity among the modern day humans is enormous and people wonder at the differences  in costumes, food habits and rituals of different communities and groups. This is in spite of the free availability of all types of information when almost everyone has the access to information. Cultural and physical diversity among the Read More

“My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all”. Stephan Hawking on his life’s philosophy. Professor Stephan Hawking one of the greatest minds of all times breathed his last on March 14, 2018 at the age of 76 years. At a young age Read More

What happens when physical activity levels in a community decrease drastically as a result of big transformation of a traditional agricultural economy to a mechanized society? Scientists at the CUNY Hunter College, New York, and University of Utah, Salt Lake City have come up with a conclusion that sizable increases in mean height, weight, and triceps skin fold thickness Read More

Flying in different time zones often upsets our mood, sleep and behaviour. It was earlier thought to be just a matter of fatigue in the body. But recent studies have pin pointed the exact physiological and molecular steps of how it works. We have a biological clock or circadian rhythm which is upset by such situations like that of Read More

A recent article published in The Guardian on fossil evidence has pushed back the date of appearance of modern humans like that of our species to 3,00,000 years from now. It is well over one lakh years earlier to the established date of the earlier finds. Till now the well established date of appearance of modern humans has Read More

The use of chemical weapons in Khan Shaykhun, southern rural Idleb, Syria, that killed more than 70 persons including a number of children is highly deplorable and a crime against humanity that  has angered the whole of the world. Different versions on who is responsible for it would be debated for long to get political Read More

Linguists, language experts and child-psychologists believe that children can learn better in their mother tongue but that doesn’t go against multilingual education. It has also been observed that children studying through multilingual system develop better thinking and skills than monolingual education systems. Parents and peer all can help the child understand the issues if it Read More

Tuberculosis outweighed HIV and malaria in global deaths  with an alarming figure of 1.4 million in 2015. Looking at the new cases, South East Asia and Africa accounted for about 60% of the reported cases  which were mainly distributed in India, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Pakistan and South Africa. Way behind the projected target of 4-5% Read More

The biodiversity has been on the decline very fast  in the  recent past due to large scale deforestation, mining, urbanization, warfare, migrations and  emission of gases. These  human activities have been affecting the survival of the isolated human tribes as well. Now, there are very few isolated human tribes living on the edge who are Read More

Lucy, considered to be the ancestor to all humanity was a very short creature about three and a half feet tall, weighing some 60 to 65 pounds and lived around 3.2 million years ago in Ethiopia. Perhaps the growth period among the australopithecines was much shorter than that of the modern day humans and hence simply by this Read More

Very interesting finds have come to light of violently killed humans from Lake Turkana in the Kenyan Rift Valley around 10000 years ago. A stunning discovery of skeletons of 27 persons who are believed to have been killed at the same time and are supposed to have suffered violent wounds has been reported recently (Nature 529, 394–398, 21 Read More

Ruthless exploitation of natural resources in the name of development took place exponentially during the last few decades globally. Those nations which were left behind in this race have now embarked upon a path of using the bounty of nature to extract maximum out of it and register a higher rate of national growth. Alarmed by Read More

The United Nations eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were agreed upon by the UN Member States to be achieved by the year 2015. Now the UN has taken stock of the situation during 2015 to gauge the progress we have made and compare it with the situation of 1990 thus judging it from a quarter Read More

Recent report of United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) indicated a large global rural population of 56 per cent having no access to critical healthcare. The disparity in healthcare widens when rural household conditions are coupled with poverty. Such instances abound in Africa where up to 83 per cent of the people don’t have these Read More

Setting the tone of development, the United Nations held a Millennium Summit during September, 6-8, 2000 at United Nations Headquarters in New York. Making it a grand success was the participation of 149 Heads of State and Government besides high-ranking officials from 40 other countries. The leaders of various nations agreed for a global partnership Read More

The current outbreak of Ebola in West Africa is the largest of all earlier outbreaks and is the cause of serious concern for all of us. The Ebola virus disease (EVD) is believed to be transmitted from wild animals to humans and then it spreads through human-to-human transmission. The disease is highly fatal with an Read More

El Niño events have been occurring for hundreds of years, but have recently become a point of huge concern for the human race and the global climate. For the fishermen of Peru and Ecuador, warm water currents on their coastline bring scarcity of fish and heavy rainfall which occurs every three four years and are Read More

Recently released report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has documented a vast number of studies and data to highlight the various health risks the people around the globe are likely to face because of the changes in climate. According to the findings of various studies, the human activities play an Read More

Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success”, Robert Costanza and colleagues write in Nature’s issue of 15th January 2014. This sounds interesting and make us think about it very seriously. The well being of every individual on earth should be the motto of all national governments. Gross Domestic Product was devised during Read More

The Globalization and Liberalization have brought about tremendous changes in the overall development scenario, consumption patterns and distribution of wealth throughout the world. While the rich are getting richer the poor have no hope of improving their lot. Health care delivery systems in many countries have become privatized. People have to spend a lot of Read More

The 17th World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences IUAES 2013) will be hosted by the University of Manchester, Manchester (UK) on August 5th-August 10th, 2013. The IUAES congress is held after every four years. The theme of the presentCongress is “Evolving Humanity, Emerging Worlds”.The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Read More

Modernization and rapid industrialization has resulted in a great change in the life style and food habits of people. One of the negative health outcomes of all this is the prevalence of high blood pressure among human populations throughout the world. The World Health Organization celebrates 7th April as the world health day and the Read More

The year 2013 has been declared by the United Nations as ‘International Year of Water Cooperation’ and March 22, 2013 would be celebrated as ‘World Water Day’. Water has been treated with great respect and piousness in many cultures of the world and therefore its conservation has been made the duty of each and every Read More

The field of Human Biology has taken giant strides during the last decade with the mammoth efforts of unraveling the mysteries of the sequencing of the Human Genome. About 20000 genes and three billion letters (bases) have been identified which are responsible for the way we look and are built and the way we function Read More

Last century has witnessed huge modifications in the diet of modern humans. Advances in Nutritional sciences and the expansion of food industry have made our foods more nutritious, palatable and tasty. The hunter gatherers of tropical forests, however, consume a very large variety of plant foods compared to that of the modern urban dwellers. To Read More

Anthropological Diversity Biological diversity is responsible for opening new vistas for evolutionary processes among living beings. Exploration of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Human Genomes of different ethnic groups and individuals is paving the way to understanding the complexity of different human diseases as well as specific traits. Recently a group of human geneticists Read More

Let me appreciate the efforts of the editorial board of the journal which worked extremely hard to live up to the expectations of the anthropology community by bringing out the very first issue of HUMAN BIOLOGY REVIEW during January 2012 as promised. The year 2012 has been designated as the International Year of Sustainable Energy Read More