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.
A team of researchers from Germany and the United States recently published a study that suggests Neanderthals might have had far more creative intelligence than previously believed. The study,...
A brilliant and comprehensive new study has analyzed the DNA of almost 10,000 people from ancient and pre-modern societies, and found 6 cases of Down syndrome in past or ancient human populations...
A new study has unraveled a mystery that is key to understanding the course of human and animal evolution. A team of genetic researchers from Altos Labs at the Cambridge Institute of Science in the...
Lund University Following the arrival of the first farmers in Scandinavia 5,900 years ago, the hunter-gatherer population was wiped out within a few generations, according to a new study from Lund...
85 human footprints dating to 90,000-years-ago have been found on a beach in Morocco. But how did they get there, and what were the people doing? In 1964, when Margaret Fishback Powers wrote the...
Between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, the lands of present-day Europe and Asia experienced a population exchange between Homo sapiens (modern humans) and Neanderthals , with the former steadily...
New York University Humans and our closest relatives, living apes, display a remarkable diversity of types of locomotion—from walking upright on two legs to climbing in trees and walking using all...
A new study of human remains found at two archaeological sites in the mountains of Peru calls into question the primacy of hunting in ancient South American hunting-gathering cultures. While there is...
A new study presents evidence showing that Homo sapiens (modern humans) arrived in China approximately 45,000 years ago, or several thousand years earlier than previously suspected. The original...
Jeff Richardson /University of Alaska Fairbanks Researchers have linked the travels of a 14,000-year-old woolly mammoth with the oldest known human settlements in Alaska, providing clues about the...
Surveyors in Brazil were appraising a site identified for the building of a new apartment complex. However, they downed tools, and called in archaeologists when they started finding bones and shards...
Researchers have created the world's largest ancient human gene bank by analyzing the bones and teeth of almost 5,000 humans who lived across Western Europe and Asia up to 34,000 years ago. By...
Giants once roamed the karst plains of southern China, three-meter-tall apes weighing in at 550 pounds (250 kilograms). These very distant human ancestors - Gigantopithcus blacki - went extinct...
The analysis of human teeth recovered during archaeological excavations has remained a standard means of investigating ancient migration patterns for the last five decades. In fact, this tried-and-...
By Liza Lester/AGU One of the hottest debates in archaeology is how and when humans first arrived in North America. Archaeologists have traditionally argued that people walked through an ice-free...
Are you a morning person? You might have Neanderthals to thank for that! In a revelatory study, scientists have unearthed a fascinating genetic link between modern humans and our Neanderthal...
There is an assumption even today that height is determined almost exclusively by genetics. But this is based on a type of genetic determinism that underestimates the role of culture and environment...
Mike W. Morley et al. / The Conversation In June, researchers led by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger published sensational claims about an extinct human species called Homo naledi online and in the...
Evidence has emerged from Germany dated to 125,000 years ago showing Neanderthals hunted elephants twice the size of contemporaneous ones. Building on that information, which provides new insight...
By Eva-Maria Geigl & Thierry Grange/The Conversation How did our species, Homo sapiens , arrive in Western Europe? Published in Nature Ecology & Evolution , our new study analyses two skull...
Homo sapiens represents the last of a long line of hominins that once consisted of five different species spanning four continents. Today, we are the last humans, that is, the last of the genus Homo...
Ancient humans inter-breeding with extinct Denisovans have created a genetic make-up and subsequent adaptations that have left many of us predisposed to certain mental health issues like depression,...
Neanderthals have been recognized as a species distinct from modern humans for quite some time. But if a trio of researchers from universities in Portugal, Italy and Spain get their way, this...
While Neanderthals went extinct approximately 40,000 years ago, they left a legacy hidden inside the genetic codes of humans, in the form of traces of their Neanderthal DNA. Even though Neanderthals...