Challenging a 50-year-old narrative about Hawaiʻi’s native birds, a new study from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa found no scientific evidence that Indigenous People hunted waterbird species to extinction. The research debunks this long-held myth and offers a new, integrated theory to explain the disappearances.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Waterloo found that members of many Indigenous communities who eat certain types of locally harvested waterfowl, especially ducks with mixed or fish-based diets, may have higher levels of both mercury and healthy omega-3 fatty acids in their blood.

The hunting of large whales goes back much further in time than previously thought. New research from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the Department of Prehistory of the UAB reveals that Indigenous communities in southern Brazil were hunting large cetaceans 5,000 years ago, around a thousand years before the earliest documented evidence from Arctic and North Pacific societies.

Hunter-gatherers in southern Africa laced their stone arrow tips with poison roughly 60,000 years ago, a new study finds. The discovery pushes back the timeline for poison weapon use – a cognitively complex hunting strategy – from the mid-Holocene to the Late Pleistocene. Hunting with poison was a gamechanger for hunter-gatherers, making it easier to kill prey animals. The emergence of the practice also represents a defining moment in the human journey; People had to keep a mental encyclopedia of poisonous plants they could use, and they also had to anticipate animals’ behavior as they slowly weakened. Until now, the earliest evidence for poison weapons dated to the mid-Holocene. Here, Sven Isaksson and colleagues have uncovered traces of plant-based poison on 5 of 10 quartz arrow tips in Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The tips came from a stratigraphic layer dated to 60,000 years ago. Analysis revealed alkaloid residue (buphandrine and epibuphanisine) from indigenous members of the Amaryllidaceae family of flowering plants. Hunter-gatherers most likely made this poison from the milky bulb extract of Boophone disticha (locally called poison bulb), Isaksson et al. suggest, because records from the 1700s refer to the plant’s use in historic arrow poisons. Notably, this poison does not work immediately; Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers must have understood its delayed effects and used that knowledge to enhance their persistence hunting. “Because poison is not a physical force, but functions chemically, the hunters must also have relied on advanced planning, abstraction and causal reasoning,” the authors write.

New research shows properly funded Indigenous-led conservation in Canada delivers climate and biodiversity outcomes equal to or better than conventional protected areas. Federally supported Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas and Guardians programs enhance carbon storage and species richness while sustaining cultural stewardship. Government backing strengthens environmental results and Indigenous governance.