Origins Evidence
What does the material record actually support about the deep past?
Ancient civilizations, archaeology and the documents that outlived their witnesses — read at the level the surviving evidence allows.
16 stories in this cluster.
16 stories
A vanished Cretaceous sea explains the shark fossils. The harder question is what Egypt’s changing landscape can — and cannot — tell us about the missing chapters of human history.
A game played by people not spreadsheets
Is Chicago watching the beginning of the greatest center-field career baseball has ever seen?
Capuchins, chimpanzees and macaques are using tools, passing down traditions and leaving archaeological records behind. What does that tell us about the origins of human intelligence?
Your Apple Watch says you got 1 hour 47 minutes of REM sleep last night. Here's what it actually measured, and why that's a very different thing.
Real hardware is getting better at fixing its own errors, but the gap between a lab milestone and a machine that outperforms your laptop at anything useful remains wide and contested.
Tools, fire, language and culture did not arrive together, and none of them is unique to us. The interesting part is the accumulation.
Astronomy measures the cosmos with absurd precision, then admits roughly 95% of it is something we have never directly detected.
Every time humans send hardware somewhere new, the prevailing model survives about as long as the first data downlink.
An artifact is data. Its meaning is an argument — and archaeology is mostly the discipline of keeping those two things apart.
Monumental construction predates agriculture at some sites. That single fact broke a very tidy story about how civilization began.
Humans revise their stories constantly. Sediment does not, which is exactly why geology keeps ruining comfortable timelines.
The planet is not scenery for human history — it is a machine that feeds, buries and occasionally resets everything living on it.
The evidence describes a branching, messy bush of relatives, most of which are dead. We are a surviving twig, not a summit.
From the '85 Bears to the 2010 Blackhawks — what the great Chicago defenses actually shared.
Toughness is a Chicago cliche. The origin story is more specific — and more interesting — than the cliche.