This study is a significant one for many reasons, not only showing differences in how offshoots of humanity’s family tree walked (with the Burtele foot being adapted for life in trees), but also having the potential to rewrite assumptions about who our ancestors really were.
And on the darker and stranger sides of hominin history, we also covered a case of gruesome prehistoric cannibalism, likely among neanderthals, and the interbreeding of modern humans with archaic humans such as 'hobbits'.
A hominid-foot hop forward in time and over the ocean to the U.S.-Mexico border also brought us news of stunning rock art, starting 6,000 years ago and spanning roughly 175 generations, that depicts Indigenous Americans’ conception of the universe. On display are creation stories, complex calendars and human-like figures stretched to the length of giant dachshunds.
Meanwhile in Ancient Egypt, the discovery of hundreds of misplaced funerary figurines suggests a pharaoh moved another ruler's body and stole his tomb. And in medieval Spain, a knight with an unusually elongated head likely had Crouzon syndrome that causes the premature fusing of skull bones, archaeologists have discovered.
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