A team of researchers from Brazil, Japan and the US may have solved the mystery regarding how the evolution of verbal language as used by humans got its start, using the connection between ancient cave art and the acoustic properties of the caves that they are found in. The authorsread more
Despite being separated by over 5 million years on our respective evolutionary paths, it appears that nearly 90 percent of the gestures human children use to communicate are shared with those used by chimpanzees. Lacking the capacity for complex verbal speech, the great apes employ a non-verbal language made up of hand and body gestures, whereas humans have well-developed part of the brain called "Broca’s area" that enables us to speak. But before a human child learns to speak a language, they appear to use an ancient gestural language that our ancestors used to communicate with one-another.
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A recent survey of the DNA of over 100,000 of the Earth’s animal species, including modern humans, has yielded a shocking result: 90 percent of all extant species arose at the same time, between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, upending the assumption that most creatures would have reached their modern forms at different point throughout the planet’s history. The survey also found that genetic diversity between different species doesn’t increase over time–meaning modern humans haven’t diverged genetically over the course of our history from other species at all.
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An analysis of 29 prehistoric footprints found on the west coast of Canada have revealed that they are 13,000 years old, making them the oldest known footprints in North America. While older archeological remains have been uncovered elsewhere on the continent, this find adds to the body of evidence that modern humans were present on North America’s west coast well before the end of the last Ice Age, in this case over 2,500 years before the current geological era, the Holocene, began.
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