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.
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...
Just one week after it was announced that the inhabitants of the Qesem Cave, located 12 kilometers east of Tel Aviv in Israel, perhaps practiced swan shamanism as much as 420,000 years ago, comes...
To understand the environmental pressures that shaped human evolution, scientists must first piece together the details of the ancient plant and animal communities that our fossil ancestors lived in...
Scientists have found exceptionally preserved microbial remains in some of Earth's oldest rocks in Western Australia - a major advance in the field, offering clues for how life on Earth originated...
High resolution 3D microscope images have revealed truths about early human development proving human embryos have more muscles than adults! At seven weeks of gestation a human embryo is the size of...
A 21st century nuisance for parents may have proved deadly to early man . It is one of the great unsolved mysteries of anthropology. What killed off the Neanderthals , and why did Homo sapiens thrive...
They walked and perhaps played along the beach in a prehistoric world; we know this as archaeologists have discovered hundreds of Neanderthal footprints in France— with most of them left by children...
Ancient DNA from India’s Rakhigarhi archaeological site is telling volumes about the destiny of the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization. Around 3000 BC, Neolithic hunters in northern Scotland began...
A new study suggests that Neanderthals commonly suffered from “swimmer's ear” or “surfer’s ear” - dense bony growths that protrude into the ear canal. This is usually caused by a habitual exposure to...
A team of American and Spanish scientists relocated to China to jump European laws and they have created the world’s first human-monkey embryo, in the next step in the controversial breeding of...
Genetic analysis has revealed that the ancestors of modern humans interbred with at least five different archaic human groups as they moved out of Africa and across Eurasia. While two of the archaic...
In China a team of archaeologists has made a significant discovery after examining a human bone that may be up to 125,000 years old . They found a small bone that shows signs that it was cut and then...
Meet the ancient bird that had toes longer than its lower legs. Researchers have discovered a bird foot from 99 million years ago preserved in amber that had a hyper-elongated third toe. The study,...
The Denisovan story keeps evolving. This group of ancient hominins has been something of a mystery ever since they were first discovered in 2010 as an extinct sister group to the Neanderthals. Bits...
In 1976 paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey and other scientists reported that they’d found ancient hominin footprints at a site in Laetoli, northeastern Tanzania. The footprints were frozen in volcanic...
Blame junk food or a lack of exercise. But long before the modern obesity epidemic, evolution made us fat too. "We're the fat primates," said Devi Swain-Lenz, a postdoctoral associate in biology at...
The current thinking on the origins of the Japanese population holds that the original inhabitants, the Jomon people , were met about 2,500 years ago by a separate group coming mainly from the Korean...
Conditions on Mars are harsh. Its atmosphere is made up mostly of carbon dioxide and is 100 times thinner than Earth’s. Temperatures on the surface can plummet to minus-126 degrees Celsius. But the...
For at least the last century archaeologists and anthropologists have generally agreed that the first humans arrived in North America having struggled across the icy wastes of Beringia, a vast land...
In China, paleontologists have announced a very important discovery of human fossils and artifacts. They have uncovered a large number of fossils of early relatives of modern humans in a cave. The...
The first humans who settled in Scandinavia more than 10,000 years ago left their DNA behind in ancient chewing gums, which are masticated lumps made from birch bark pitch. This is shown in a new...
One of the great issues in all of science is the search for the direct ancestor of modern humans. Many species of hominin have been put forward down the years and a recently uncovered species...
The announcement of a new species of ancient human (more correctly hominin) from the Philippines , reported today in Nature , will cause a lot of head-shaking among anthropologists and archaeologists...
By sequencing the ancient genomes of 15 individuals from different parts of Africa, researchers reporting in the journal Cell in September 2017 reconstructed the prehistory of humans on the continent...