Archaeology Aids Adolescents

They were once considered our inferior, brutish relatives, but now researchers are using the story behind early humans to help teenagers understand their emotions.

A new web resource, developed by researchers at the University of York, is providing schools with the tools to allow young people to see what challenges the earliest human ancestors, or later relatives like the Neanderthals, would have faced in keeping their community healthy and fully functioning.

Dr. Penny Spikins, from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology, said: “The web resource challenges our perceptions of the past as competitive, populated only by the strong and invulnerable, towards a more realistic version of prehistory in which individuals genuinely cared for each other, and where the support of differences and vulnerabilities made humans successful.”

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