Ancient humans may have used bone tools to make fruit smoothies

September 9th, 2009 LONDON - Scientists have found a handful of ancient human skulls, dating back to about 1.8 million years ago, at an archaeological site two hours from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, which throws into doubt that Africa was not the sole cradle of humankind. According to a report in The Independent, the skulls, jawbones and fragments of limb bones suggest that our ancient human ancestors migrated out of Africa far earlier than previously thought and spent a long evolutionary interlude in Eurasia - before moving back into Africa to complete the story of man.

July 22nd, 2009 LONDON - A new research has suggested that the advent of stone microblades set the stage for the Indian subcontinent's explosive population growth. The easy-to-manufacture tools - also known as microliths - were a vast improvement over larger stone flake tools used previously, according to Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the study.

July 1st, 2009 LONDON - St Andrews University researchers in Scotland have shown that chimpanzees can be learn how to make their own tools by watching demonstrations on video. For this work, the researchers trained a chimpanzee to make a long pole for prizing out-of-reach fruit from a tree, and then filmed the animal constructing the handy tool from a variety of different parts.

June 24th, 2009 LONDON - The first prosthetic bone material that is made from wood has been developed by Italian scientists. The researchers transformed the building blocks of wood into the material from which bone is made.

June 19th, 2009 LONDON - In a new research, a pair of scientists has suggested that weapons like spears, and a bow and arrow, go back as far back as 100,000 years ago, predating modern humans. According to a report in New Scientist, the research was done by Matthew Sisk and John Shea from Stony Brook University in New York.

June 9th, 2009 LONDON - Chimpanzees have an inherent spatial memory that makes them remember the exact location of all their favourite fruit trees, according to a study. In fact, primatologists have found that their spatial memory is so precise that they can find a single tree among more than 12,000 others within a patch of forest.

June 5th, 2009 LONDON - A new study, based on archaeological records and mathematical simulations, has claimed that lethal warfare drove the evolution of selfless behaviour among ancient humans. If correct, the new model solves a long-standing puzzle in human evolution: how did our species transition from creatures interested in little more than passing down their own genes to societies of law-abiding monogamists? No one knows for sure when these changes happened, but climactic swings that occurred between approximately 10,000 to 150,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene period may have pushed once-isolated bands of hunter-gatherers into more frequent contact with one another, Samuel Bowles, an evolutionary biologist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the University of Siena, Italy, who led the study, told New Scientist.

May 31st, 2009 LONDON - Chimps are so nuts about honey that, even though they've no access to a hardware store, they construct their own brand of toolkits when foraging for snacks from beehives, a new study has found. A research team, which was led by Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, studied chimps living in Loango National Park in Gabon.

May 24th, 2009 LONDON - Studying the teeth of an ancestor of Neanderthals, known as Homo heidelbergensis, a team of Spanish researchers have come to the conclusion that "lefties" have been coping with a right-handed world for more than half a million years. Marina Mosquera, a paleoanthropologist at Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, says that the study seems to suggest that the ancient humans were predominately right-handed.

May 17th, 2009 LONDON - Modern humans were responsible for butchering Neanderthals in the Stone Age, says a leading fossil expert. The controversial comment follows publication of a study in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about a Neanderthal jawbone apparently butchered by modern humans.

May 10th, 2009 LONDON - A group of companies are developing a new kind of tools capable of understanding emotional content of blogs and online comments. These "sentiment analysis" tools form a wider part of computer science attempting to train computers to understand the feelings expressed in written content just like humans.

May 4th, 2009 LONDON - A forensic artist has reconstructed the face of the first anatomically-modern human to live in Europe, who inhabited the ancient forests of the Carpathian Mountains in what is now Romania about 35,000 years ago. According to a report in The Independent, the reconstruction by forensic artist Richard Neave, of a face that could be male or female, is based on the partial skull and jawbone found in a cave where bears were known to hibernate.

April 11th, 2009 LONDON - A recent research on bones from the Roman catacombs has suggested that in ancient Rome, Christians preferred to eat a lot of fish, which indicates that the eating habits of Rome's early Christians were more complex than has traditionally been assumed. According to a report in the Times, the research was conducted by Leonard Rutgers and his colleagues in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

April 2nd, 2009 LONDON - Archaeological excavations in the ancient region of Baktria in Afghanistan have revealed a unique marble slab with the image of Alexander the Great and a passage of an inscription. The slab represents an ancient king on a horse heading Macedonian cavalry and Macedonian phalanx at the background.

March 14th, 2009 LONDON - Katy Perry has peeled off clothes to flaunt her eye-popping curves for US Esquire magazine. Wearing a black corset teamed with matching stockings and suspenders, the I Kissed A Girl hitmaker looked hot in the saucy photoshoot.