We bring you all the latest news and discoveries relating to human origins and evolution. The more fossils that are unearthed, the more researchers admit that there is much that is still unknown about the evolution of humans.
Do you remember those school science posters that depicted human evolution with a primate standing up and becoming a modern human? Of course you do, but you may not have noticed that these posters...
Researchers investigating the date of human settlement in Australia have made an amazing discovery. They analyzed geological data in relation to the oral tradition of local Aboriginal people, and it...
When the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, using DNA collected from ancient bones, it was accompanied by the discovery that modern humans in Asia, Europe and America inherited approximately 2%...
Scientists are claiming current theories “over-simplify” how the Americas were populated. Many of us were once taught that the Americas were void of humans until around 13,000 years ago. Authors like...
An ancient set of footprints commonly known as the ‘ devil footprints ’ on the side of an extinct volcano have long frightened and intrigued people in southern Italy . In reality, it was thought that...
Kseniya Kolobova et al / The Conversation Neanderthal ( Homo neanderthalensis ) fossils were first discovered in western Europe in the mid nineteenth century. That was just the first in a long line...
Saint Louis University Africa is the homeland of our species and harbors greater human genetic diversity than any other part of the planet. Studies of ancient DNA from African archaeological sites...
Almost half a billion years ago Earth was largely inhabited by armored arthropods with segmented bodies and jointed limbs, shelled mollusks, and wobbly unrecognizable fishlike organisms darting about...
Neanderthals are known to have used tools, but the extent to which they were able to exploit coastal resources has been questioned. New research shows they collected clam shells and volcanic rock...
Many societies celebrate the changing of the seasons and harvest time. One of the most elaborate festivals in India is the Lohri, better known as the Pongal. This is a four-day Hindu festival that...
Kristen S. Morrow / The Conversation Human beings used to be defined as “the tool-maker” species. But the uniqueness of this description was challenged in the 1960s when Dr. Jane Goodall discovered...
Nick Longrich / The Conversation Why did we take so long to invent civilization? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilization –...
The scientific cultivation of lost ancient seed crops has yielded much higher than expected growth rates, challenging assumptions about maize (corn) growth in prehistoric North America . According to...
The evolution and spread of Homo sapiens is perhaps one of the greatest mysteries in all of science. Until recently, it was believed that the origins of the species and the ancestors of every person...
Ancient Indian ghee butter has been turned into gold by a Brazilian entrepreneur. Raquel Tavares, who lives in Los Angeles, California , founded the company Fourth & Heart with her life savings...
New research focused on the roasted remnants of rootstalks found in a Lebombo Mountain cave in South Africa suggests early humans brought the plants to the cave to feed to their young and old. A new...
Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have succeeded in extracting a complete human genome from a thousands-of-years old “chewing gum”. According to the researchers, it is a new untapped...
A study on the history of facial expressions has discovered humans developed friendly facial expressions to attract less-aggressive, selected breeding partners, as a result of ‘self-domestication’...
Researchers now believe that they may have established why the Neanderthals became extinct. Expert analysts using population models believe that inbreeding and the internal dynamics of their small...
By Kelly April Tyrrell /University of Wisconsin-Madison Last year, scientists announced that a human jawbone and prehistoric tools found in 2002 in Misliya Cave, on the western edge of Israel, were...
Researchers have found that early humans such as the famous ‘Lucy’ were not as smart as the great apes. Using new methods, they have been able to determine that early humans did not have the same...
Scientists have described an 11.62 million-year-old ape that moved like no other creature on Earth using its human legs and orangutan arms. A team of scientists from Eberhard Karls University of...
Who exactly were the Aurignacians who lived in the Levant 40,000 years ago? They first appeared in Europe some 43,000 years ago, bringing a cultural golden period of the Paleolithic with them. Their...
Nick Longrich / The Conversation Are we alone in the universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke. By definition, probable events...