When domesticated agriculture was invented, it took off and revolutionized human expansion but a study of ceramic pots from 15 sites dating to around 4,000 B.C. shows humans may have undergone a gradual rather than an abrupt transition from fishing, hunting and gathering to farming. The researchers analyzed the cooking residues preserved in 133 ceramic vessels from the Western Baltic regions of Northern Europe to establish whether these residues were from terrestrial, marine or freshwater organisms. 

The research team found that fish and other aquatic resources continued to be exploited after the advent of farming and domestication, with pots from coastal locations containing residues enriched in a form of carbon found in marine organisms.

Fossil evidence indicates that approximately 30,000 years ago, humans captured, tamed, and bred gray wolves (Canis lupus), ultimately producing Canis familiarus: the domestic dog. Centuries of breeding to reduce aggression and fear have yielded animals that are not only comfortable in the presence of humans, but may also be overtly friendly, eager to please, and even helpful.

In claims about math performance among females, and the sociological implication that unknown  cultural pressure in schools made the mentally malleable fairer sex believe they couldn't do math even if they could, there was always one inconvenient truth  - in America, over 70% of teachers are women, so if there was sexism women were doing it.

A study at the University of the Basque Country finds a more pervasive link between the sexist attitudes of mothers and that of children - and gender and the family's socio-economic and cultural level to sexism. Mothers teach more gender than discrimination than fathers.

Researchers have sequenced the genome of a man who was an Aboriginal Australian and used that to show that modern day Aboriginal Australians are the direct descendants of the first people who arrived on the continent some 50,000 years ago and that those ancestors left Africa earlier than their European and Asian counterparts. 

Even in our modern world, where transportation and communication technologies can lead to cultural homogenization by making it easy to share ideas and objects, it's still possible to see distinct regional differences. In the US, for instance, adobe houses are primarily found in the Southwest, while brightly painted clapboard houses have a distinctly New England feel. Differences like these are driven partly by culture: Inhabitants of these areas build, or built, houses like those of their ancestors, who built houses like those of their ancestors, and so on. But local ecology also plays a role: Builders are more likely to use materials that are abundant nearby, and will produce homes specifically tailored for comfort in local weather and temperatures.

People communicate in bursts. In communication, our behavior does not happen in a homogenous way over time, but rather there is universal behavior in which there is no communication, followed by short intervals, says a new study.

A new study analyzed around 9,000 million calls throughout a nearly one year period and identified  features of the communication process and attempted to quantify their impact in the diffusion of information.  

Haute couture through history?  It is when St. Pölten takes the Catwalk!

Cooking is not a modern invention, concludes new research.   It likely originated 1.9 million years ago, according to results they determined using statistical analysis and evolutionary trees.

How so? They estimated,  in their analysis, how long we should spend feeding every day, based on our body sizes throughout evolutionary history.   Sure, it might seem at first glance like cooking would add more time than directly eating but their results say we would need to spend almost half of our time in the 'feeding' process given our current sizes - cooking basically made food easier to chew and digest and as a result we got more caloric benefit and a smaller digestive tract.
 

Francis Thackeray, a South African anthropologist and the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, has asked permission from the Church of England to exhume the remains of William Shakespeare. This would allow a team of researchers to study the cause of death of the Bard of Avon, as well as look for evidence of drug use, which depends on the presence of hair and finger or toe nails.