You might be forgiven for thinking of abortion as a particularly modern phenomenon. But there's plenty of evidence to suggest that abortion has been a constant feature of social life for thousands of years. The history of abortion is often told as a legal one, yet abortion has continued regardless of, perhaps even in spite of, legal regulation.

Vandalism has once again marred the ancient Indigenous pictographs nestled within Bon Echo Provincial Park about two hours west of Ottawa and north of Kingston, Ont.

For the Anishinaabe, these pictographs—rock paintings—hold profound cultural significance and meaning. They constitute the largest collection of pictographs in southeastern Ontario, on the shores of Mazinaw Lake, or Mazinaabikinigan-zaaga'igan, in Algonquin meaning "painted-image lake." The Algonquin people, a subgroup of the Anishinaabe, share historical and cultural connections, each with distinct languages, traditions and territories within the broader Algonquian language family.

The evolution of the hominin hand has been widely linked to the use and production of flaked stone tool technologies. After the earliest handheld flake tools emerged, shifts in hominin hand anatomy allowing for greater force during precision gripping and ease when manipulating objects in-hand are observed in the fossil record. Previous research has demonstrated how biometric traits, such as hand and digit lengths and precision grip strength, impact functional performance and ergonomic relationships when using flake and core technologies. These studies are consistent with the idea that evolutionary selective pressures would have favoured individuals better able to efficiently and effectively produce and use flaked stone tools. After the advent of composite technologies during the Middle Stone Age and Middle Palaeolithic, fossil evidence reveals differences in hand anatomy between populations, but there is minimal evidence for an increase in precision gripping capabilities. Furthermore, there is little research investigating the selective pressures, if any, impacting manual anatomy after the introduction of hafted composite stone technologies (‘handles’). Here we investigated the possible influence of tool-user biometric variation on the functional performance of 420 hafted Clovis knife replicas. Our results suggest there to be no statistical relationships between biometric variables and cutting performance. Therefore, we argue that the advent of hafted stone technologies may have acted as a ‘performance equaliser’ within populations and removed (or reduced) selective pressures favouring forceful precision gripping capabilities, which in turn could have increased the relative importance of cultural evolutionary selective pressures in the determination of a stone tool’s performance.

Trying to re-create the scents and smells of the past is a daunting challenge, given the ephemeral nature of these olfactory cues. Now scientists have identified the compounds in the balms used to mummify the organs of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggesting that the recipes were unusually complex and used ingredients not native to the region. The authors also partnered with a perfumer to re-create what co-author Barbara Huber calls "the scent of eternity."

“'The scent of eternity’ represents more than just the aroma of the mummification process,” said Huber, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. “It embodies the rich cultural, historical, and spiritual significance of Ancient Egyptian mortuary practices. Our methods were also able to provide crucial insights into balm ingredients for which there is limited information in contemporary ancient Egyptian textual sources.”

The species lived in the Middle Pleistocene, an era that took place 774,000 to 129,000 years ago. The Homo bodoensis is thought to be the most direct ancestor of humans.

Human ancestors in Africa were pushed to the brink of extinction around 900,000 years ago, a study shows. The work, published in Science, suggests a drastic reduction in the population of our ancestors well before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged. The population of breeding individuals was reduced to just 1,280 and didn’t expand again for another 117,000 years.