A new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that serial cohabiters are less likely than single-instance cohabiting unions to result in marriage and, if serial cohabiters do marry, divorce rates are very high.

Scientists in Madagascar, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Vienna Natural History Museum and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst now have a nearly complete skeleton of a rare species of extinct lemur to study thanks to a century-long discovery and reconstruction effort. Laurie R. Godfrey, professor of anthropology at UMass Amherst and lemur expert, played a key role in the process in which contemporary researchers were able to match newly found bones with those discovered in a cave in Madagascar in 1899 to construct much of the skeleton of a rare species of extinct lemur.

Researchers dated remains from four multiple burials discovered in Germany in 2005 and found that the 4,600-year-old graves contained groups of adults and children buried facing each other – an unusual practice in Neolithic culture. One of the graves was found to contain a female, a male and two children. Using DNA analysis, the researchers established that the group consisted of a mother, father and their two sons aged 8-9 and 4-5 years: the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family in the world (so far).

Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey have discovered an Iron Age chiseled stone slab that provides the first written evidence in the region that people believed the soul was separate from the body. University of Chicago researchers will describe the discovery, a testimony created by an Iron Age official that includes an incised image of the man, on Nov. 22-23 at conferences of biblical and Middle Eastern archaeological scholars in Boston.

Even 60,000 years ago men had the wanderlust more than women. Or they left families behind until they knew what they would find.

In a recently conducted study, a multidisciplinary French-American research team reported that Neanderthal extinction was principally a result of competition with Cro-Magnon populations, rather than the consequences of climate change.

The first people to arrive in America traveled as at least two separate groups to arrive in their new home at about the same time, according to new genetic evidence published Current Biology.

Investigators from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and a Bolzano colleague have written another chapter in a murder case over 5,000 years old. New investigations reconstructed the chronology of the injuries that Oetzi, the glacier man preserved as a frozen mummy, received in his last days.

A team of forensic scientists at the University of Copenhagen has studied human remains found in two ancient Danish burial grounds dating back to the iron age, and discovered a man who appears to be of Arabian origin.

When it comes to the original migration to the Islands of Southeast Asia (ISEA - namely, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysian Borneo), the prevailing theory has been the "out of Taiwan" model - a Neolithic expansion from Taiwan driven by rice agriculture about 4,000 years ago.