Search Results: Genus

Homo habilis ("handy man") is an extinct species of human that lived in East and South Africa between 2.3 and 1.5 million years ago and plays an interesting role in the discussion surrounding the dawn of our genus of Homo, which is thought...

Homo rudolfensis is an early human species that lived in East Africa between c. 2.5 and 1.8 million years ago. It is known from a handful of skull, jaw and teeth fragments that remind alternatingly of Homo or of Australopithecus and that...

An ice age is a period in which the earth's climate is colder than normal, with ice sheets capping the poles and glaciers dominating higher altitudes. Within an ice age, there are varying pulses of colder and warmer climatic conditions, known...

Hunter-gatherer societies are – true to their astoundingly descriptive name – cultures in which human beings obtain their food by hunting, fishing, scavenging, and gathering wild plants and other edibles. Although there are still...

Cerberus (also spelt Kerberos) is a vicious three-headed dog in Greek mythology, who guards the entrance to the underworld. He allowed the souls of the dead to enter Hades but prevented the living (except for a few exceptions) from entering...

Iris is the goddess of rainbows and an important messenger between the gods and humans in Greek mythology. She was most commonly portrayed as the personal messenger of Hera. Iris was the daughter of the Titans Thaumas and Electra and the...

From the dawn of our species to the present day, stone-made artefacts are the dominant form of material remains that have survived to today concerning human technology. The term “Stone Age” was coined in the late 19th century...

The king’s evil (from the Latin morbus regius meaning royal sickness), more commonly known as scrofula or medically tuberculous lymphadenitis, was a skin disease believed to be cured by the touch of the monarch as part of their inherited...

The appearance of simple stone tools, widely known as Oldowan tools or the Oldowan industry, marked the beginning of our technological revolution. To our knowledge, these artifacts appeared around 2.6 million years ago in the savannahs of...

The woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, is an extinct herbivore related to elephants who trudged across the steppe-tundras of Eurasia and North America from around 300,000 years ago until their numbers seriously dropped from around 11,000...