Big questions abound regarding the protracted childhood of Homo sapiens, but there’s a growing argument that it’s an adaptation to the increased complexity of our social environment and the need to learn longer and harder in order to handle the ever-raising bar of adulthood. (Just look to the explosion . . .   Read More

Archaeologist Stefani Crabtree writes about her work to reconstruct Indigenous food and use networks for the National Park Service. . .   Read More

Gizmodo asks half a dozen natural historians to speculate on who is going to be doing what jobs on Earth after the people disappear. One of the streams that runs wide and deep through this series of fun thought experiments is how so many niches stay the same through catastrophic changes . . .   Read More

Michelle Swanson, an Oregon-based educator and educational consultant, has written a blog post on the Internet Archive on the increased importance of digital librarians during the pandemic: With public library buildings closed due to the global pandemic, teachers, students, and lovers of books everywhere have increasingly turned to online resources for access to . . .   Read More

Living in a world with multiple spatiotemporal scales, the very small and fast can often drive the future of the very large and slow: Microscopic genetic mutations change macroscopic anatomy. Undetectably small variations in local climate change global weather patterns (the infamous “butterfly effect”). And now, one more . . .   Read More

Human history in the Americas may be twice long as long as previously believed — at least 26,500 years — according to authors of a new study at Mexico’s Chiquihuite cave and other sites throughout Central Mexico. According to the study’s lead author Ciprian Ardelean: “This site alone can’t be considered . . .   Read More

For everyone who cannot see the Comet Neowise with their own eyes this week — or just wants to see it from a higher perch — this video by artist Seán Doran combines 550 NASA images from the International Space Station into a real-time view of the comet from 250 miles above Earth’. . .   Read More

Pleistocene dormouse Leithia melitensis was the size of a house cat. New computer-aided reconstructions show a skull as long as an entire modern dormouse. It’s a textbook example of “island gigantism,” in which, biologists hypothesize, fewer terrestrial predators and more pressure from predatory birds selects for a much larger . . .   Read More