History Flashback takes a look at historical “found footage” of all kinds—newsreels, instructional films, even cartoons—to give us a glimpse into how much things have changed, and how much has remained the same. In the scorching summer heat of small-town Dayton, TN, in July of ...read more
Most people know about the theory that a giant asteroid contributed to killing off the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago, but perhaps less well known is that an earlier mass extinction event helped to give rise to the reign of dinosaurs. A new study, published in the journal ...read more
Social Darwinism is a loose set of ideologies that emerged in the late 1800s in which Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was used to justify certain political, social, or economic views. Social Darwinists believe in “survival of the fittest”—the idea that ...read more
The Scopes Trial, also known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was the 1925 prosecution of science teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution in a Tennessee public school, which a recent bill had made illegal. The trial featured two of the best-known orators of the era, William ...read more
An international team of scientists uncovered the microfossils of the speck-size creature they are calling Saccorhytus coronaries in Shaanxi Province, central China. According to their findings, published this week in the journal Nature, Saccorhytus lived 540 million years ago, ...read more
The fossils were found in 2013 by two amateur cavers spelunking through the recesses of the Rising Star cave system, located 30 miles northwest of Johannesburg. The fossil-rich region has been called the “Cradle of Humankind” thanks to the past discovery of extinct hominins. The ...read more
Old World monkeys, one of the two main monkey groups, belong to the family Cercopithecidae, which is related to apes and humans. They are distinguished from New World monkeys by the form of the nose: Like apes and humans, Old World monkeys have narrow noses with downward-facing ...read more
John T. Scopes was a 24-year-old physics, chemistry and math teacher at the public high school in Dayton, Tennessee, when local community leaders persuaded him to answer the ACLU’s call for a defendant in a test case challenging the Butler Act. That law, passed in March 1925, ...read more
Under a searing African sun on January 29, 2013, an international team of paleoanthropologists scoured a dusty plateau looking for clues to the origins of mankind. Aboveground, the surrounding Ethiopian landscape at the northern end of the Rift Valley looked barren, but the field ...read more
While alcohol (called dietary ethanol by scientists) is a toxin, humans are able to tolerate a moderate amount of it without getting sick. We owe this ability to digestive enzymes, particularly alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme (ADH4), which are found in our guts, throats and tongues. ...read more
Anatomically modern humans first evolved some 200,000 years ago, but many of the traits we associate with early civilization—like bone and antler tools, grindstones, projectile weapons, fishing and the widespread use of fire—didn’t crop up until around 40,000-50,000 years ago, ...read more
According to long-established opinion among scientists, the human lineage emerged a little more than 2 million years ago, as the forests on the African continent retreated and the dry savanna expanded. In order to survive, our ape-like ancestors were forced to adapt key human ...read more
Ever since the mid-1800s, scientists have known that a major event occurred around 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period and the beginning of the Triassic. Fossil evidence had mounted by that time indicating that the boundary marked a major change in the ...read more
1. Darwin was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln. Both Darwin and Lincoln were born on February 12, 1809, but in much different settings. While America’s 16th president was born in a rude log cabin in the Kentucky wilderness, Darwin was born in a grand Georgian house on an ...read more
More than 200 million years ago, west Texas was a swampy, tropical rainforest with tall conifers, lush ferns and bountiful lakes. Today the region is dry and scrubby, but the dusty soil of the windswept plains still possesses evidence of the prehistoric creatures that once roamed ...read more
In 2004, a team of paleontologists in the Canadian Arctic excavated fossils belonging to a crocodile-like fish called Tiktaalik roseae. The discovery intrigued the scientific community because of the fish’s unusual makeup: Though it had scales and gills, it also had strong ...read more
The 5-inch (12.5-centimeter) hind-toe bone fragment that the team used to decipher the ancient horse’s genetic code was unearthed in the Thistle Creek region of the Yukon’s Klondike gold mines. Because the fossil bone was preserved in permafrost, the horse’s DNA remained very ...read more
As part of the study, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), an international team of scientists re-examined previously tested animal fossils from Neanderthal-era sites in southern Iberia (modern-day Spain), a region believed to have been one ...read more
In the first half of the 20th century, experts thought they had pinned down the evolutionary history that culminated in our species, Homo sapiens. According to conventional wisdom, our direct ancestor Homo erectus—first discovered in Indonesia in 1891—branched off from the common ...read more
In human “natural fertility societies,” meaning groups that don’t use birth control, women breastfeed their children for an average of 27 months—until toddlers reach 2 years and a few months in age. While this may seem like a decent amount of time, it’s only a tiny fraction of ...read more
Fire control changed the course of human evolution, allowing our ancestors to stay warm, cook food, ward off predators and venture into harsh climates. It also had important social and behavioral implications, encouraging groups of people to gather together and stay up late. ...read more
Descended from flying seabirds similar to today’s albatrosses, penguins have been gliding through the world’s oceans and waddling across its shores for some 61 million years. While the first penguin fossil appeared in 1859, paleontologists and other experts have struggled to ...read more
Horses have left their stamp on many aspects of human history, from transportation and communication to warfare and agriculture. Nevertheless, experts know very little about how, when and where people first harnessed the power of these versatile and graceful creatures. Although ...read more
A cracked tooth was more than just an annoyance for Smilodon fatalis, otherwise known as the saber-toothed cat or tiger. The fearsome felids, which disappeared 10,000 years ago, used their pairs of 7-inch-long maxillary canines to dispatch large game with repeated slashes to the ...read more