Scientists have pieced together how a cave lion died some 48,000 years ago at the hands of Neanderthals, and the picture they’ve painted is pretty grisly.Lions loomed large in the psyche of Stone Age hominins, who painted them on cave walls and carved their likenesses into bone and ivory ornaments. Neanderthals competed with them for food, but evidence of their direct interaction has remained scarce.Neanderthal Hunting Techniques DiscoveredIn present-day Germany, a group of the early hominins ...read more

Europe is a continent of coasts. Indented and irregular, its serpentine shores stretch almost 24,000 miles, though they’re shrinking, and shrinking quickly. Across Europe, seas are rising at an average rate of around 2 to 4 millimeters per year. And though that may sound small, that rate is far from insignificant, threatening to swallow up Europe's low-lying costal cities, like Venice and Amsterdam. Though the current threat to the coastal communities of Europe is unprecedented — and undenia ...read more

For most of history, humans had no idea what happens when you die. Death was, as Hamlet put it, an “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” But with the advent of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), people are returning, at least from the borders of that country, with tales to tell. What Do People See When They Die?The accounts of people who have had what are popularly known as neath death experiences (NDE) are remarkably similar: the presence of a glowing white figure, ...read more

Mammalian evolution didn’t happen in a straight line. For 320 million years, it has surged forward and crashed back down again amid successive mass extinctions, such as the one that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.After each extinction, a population of small, generalist, insect-eating animals that could hide in the cracks of the world, led a new radiation of species to evolve. Or so biologists have tended to believe.But is this true? A new study that constructed a massive family tree ...read more

The woolly rhinoceros — known to scientists as any species of rhinos under the genus Coelodonta — roamed the planet up till 12,000 years ago, spreading all over Asia, Europe, and North Africa. “It had a huge geographical range,” says Pierre-Olivier Antoine, a specialist in Cenozoic megamammals at the Université de Montpellier, in France. It was clad in a thick, shabby coat of rust-colored fur to weather winter storms of the Ice Ages. As such, the hairy beasts earned the nickname “wool ...read more

You know when you see someone yawn, and suddenly, you find yourself yawning seconds later? It's possible that, just like a contagious yawn, stress works similarly. Think about how many times you've felt stressed out when a partner, family member, or even coworker around you was exhibiting symptoms of stress. So, is stress contagious? Krystal Lewis, clinical psychologist and board member of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, explains if stress can be deemed emotionally contagious ...read more

Maybe you’re sprawled on the sofa, clutching the armrest in terror — yet still unable to tear your eyes away — as Freddy Kruger slices his way across the screen in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Or perhaps you’re tiptoeing through a haunted house at a local amusement park, bubbling with nervous anticipation as you walk around every corner. You might even be sitting in the dark of a movie theater, gasping and shrieking at Hollywood’s latest horror flick in unison with dozens of strangers. ...read more

In folklore, animals are depicted as messengers, symbols, or omens. Many of these stories are similar in cultures throughout millennia and feature folk beliefs brought on by fear of death, illness, and the unexplained. The animals mostly related to symbols or omens of death are scavengers, nocturnal, or associated with negative events. "So generally, in folklore, animals that are associated with death are the ones that are omens of death," says Sabina Magliocco, a folklorist and professor of an ...read more

Ancient Greeks knew that death was the final door they had to cross. After a burial in the Earth, water carried deceased mortals into Hades, the realm of the Underworld. They spent the rest of their existence there until they were ultimately forgotten.The Greeks’ idea of Hades and what it looked like constantly evolved over time, but one thing was certain: Once you were dead, you could not cross back into the living (and vice versa). The guardian of these barriers between life and the afterlif ...read more

While wooden stakes, sunlight that burns and bats come to mind when you think of vampires, you probably wouldn't think of a padlock and scythe. But the findings of an alleged "vampire" in Poland shows there was some paranoia around the paranormal. The remains of a 17th-century woman with a scythe across her neck and a padlock clamped on her toe indicate she may have been accused of being a witch or a vampire. She was buried with these precautions to ensure that she, the ghost or spirit of this ...read more