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Evolution & Human Origins

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.

Study Shows Humans and Neanderthals Interbred Primarily in the Near East

Study Shows Humans and Neanderthals Interbred Primarily in the Near East

Multiple research projects have proven that Neanderthal DNA can be found in the genome of modern humans. This likely happened as a result of many interbreeding events that took place in the various...
Farmer milking cow. Source: peopleimages.com / Adobe Stock

Ancient People Drank Milk Even Though They Were All Lactose Intolerant

A team of international scientists has just completed a comprehensive study of ancient European milk drinking habits. They wanted to see if there was a connection between increased milk consumption...
Study has found that human herpes was spread by kissing throughout history. Source: boyloso / Adobe Stock

Human Herpes Linked to Emergence of Kissing in the Bronze Age

It is generally accepted among historians that kissing had no one point of origin, but the habit began as a human trend in different regions. The earliest known written record of romantic saliva...
The reproduced portrait of the Red Deer Cave People or Mengziren. Source: Xueping Ji / CC BY-SA

Pleistocene Fossil DNA Suggests Native Americans’ East Asian Roots

Genome sequencing of a human Late Pleistocene Fossil in southwest China dating back around 14,000 years is helping shed light on the ancestry of the very first Americans . The mystery surrounding the...
Part of the earliest European face, a 1.4-million-year-old jawbone recently excavated from Sima de Elefante cave, Spain. Source: Atapuerca Foundation

Breakthrough: Excavators Find the Oldest European Face Ever Discovered

The discovery of a 1.4-million-year-old human ancestor in Spain was in itself a history changing moment. But to discover it looked like us, “forces us to rewrite the books on human evolution,” claims...
Wood burning, human fire use could date back a million years. Source: nikkytok/Adobe Stock

Human Fire Use Over A Million Years Ago Seems More Likely

There is no smoke without a fire, or so they say, and a group of scientists are applying this thinking to develop new methods to seek out when and where the earliest fire use was. And they have come...
Two of the four different Australopithecus crania that were found in the Sterkfontein caves, South Africa. Source: Jason Heaton and Ronald Clarke, in cooperation with the Ditsong Museum of Natural History / Wits University

Sterkfontein Hominin Fossils Redated To A Million Years Older

Researchers at the Sterkfontein Caves in South Africa, famous for the discovery of ‘Little Foot’ and a ream of other ancient hominin remains, have yielded dating results that could overturn the...
Britain’s Earliest Humans Found In the Suburbs of Canterbury

Britain’s Earliest Humans Found In the Suburbs of Canterbury

Hunter's tools excavated in England over a century ago have been dated to, wait for it, between 560,000 and 620,000 years ago! These latest discoveries made on the outskirts of Canterbury confirm the...
Cave art depicting two figures copulating from Jabbaren, Algeria. Source: Trust for African Rock Art / Fair Use

Neanderthal-Human Sex Caused a Million Covid Deaths

About 60,000 years ago, a human had a sexual encounter with a Neanderthal. Now, a genetic scientist has claimed that this single sexual act caused the deaths of up to a million people during the...
Fossilized bones of the largest pterosaur or flying reptile ever found in South America, about the size of a yellow school bus, have been found in the western mountains of Argentina.		Source: warpaintcobra / Abobe Stock

Argentina’s ‘Dragon of Death:’ South America’s Largest Pterosaur!

A team of paleontologists have discovered the fossilized remains of a new species of airborne reptile in the Andes Mountains of western Argentina. Dubbed the “Dragon of Death” by its discoverers,...
Evidence of Denisovans in Southeast Asia is growing one tooth at a time based on the recent find in Laos. The molar attributed to a young female individual of the extinct human species called the Denisovans was found in cave Tam Ngu Hao 2 in northeastern Laos.	Source: Fabrice Demeter / Handout via Reuters

Denisovan Girl’s Tooth Is First Physical Evidence of Denisovans in Southeast Asia!

A team of archaeologists and anthropologists recovered an exceptionally rare molar tooth fossil from a cave in northern Laos. While the fossil bears some resemblance to the teeth of modern humans, a...
Dolmen of Poloutin in a cornfield, representing the origins of farming.	Source: aluxum/Adobe Stock

Ice Age Hunters’ DNA Reveals The Origins Of Farming

What were the origins of the first farmers? Where did they come from and where did they go? This question was recently asked by a team of scientists studying the genomes of Europe's first farmers...
Ancient Uruguayan DNA is being used to understand the migrations of indigenous peoples to South America. This image shows a scientist working in bio-archaeology lab.                        		    Source: Microgen / Adobe Stock

Indigenous Uruguayan DNA Reveals Ancestry New To South America

A new study presents the first whole genome sequences of Uruguayan indigenous peoples, whose last remnants were wiped out in the 18th century through a series of targeted European military campaigns...
A facial reconstruction of Homo floresiensis, which Forth’s book views as a transitional species between primates and hominins. Source: Cicero Moraes et alii / CC BY 4.0

Is Ancient Human Species Homo Floresiensis Still Alive in Indonesia?

In his newly published book Between Ape and Human , retired anthropologist Gregory Forth breaks the taboo that normally separates traditional anthropological and zoological research from...
Evolution of Europeans. Source: Gorodenkoff / Adobe Stock

Neolithic Revolution Spurred Mental and Physical Growth of Europeans

New research just published in the journal Frontiers in Genetics reveals fascinating details about the evolution of Europeans, the humans living in Europe during the Neolithic period (10,000 BC to 4,...
A monkey drinks from a can of beer, representing the study finding that human alcohol consumption relates to a primal draw to the ethanol in fruits.	 Source: michalcbf6 / Adobe Stock

It’s Monkey Business! Human Desire For Alcohol Consumption Is Hardwired

When Dr. Robert Dudley of the University of California, Berkeley, proposed a hypothesis in 2000, and then published a book called ‘ The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol’ on the same...
Representation of a prehistoric hunter-gatherer group.	Source: Gorodenkoff / Adobe Stock

Computer Science Helps Explain Distribution of Hunter-Gatherer Groups

Using the way computers function as a source for analogy, a new study has discovered common patterns of social and cultural organization that unite hunter-gatherer cultures around the world and...
Study shows prehistoric man used hand gestures to communicate. Source: Zemler / Adobe Stock

Prehistoric Humans Didn’t Grunt Their Ideas - They Used Hand Gestures

A new study has shown that the origins of human communication began with hand gestures, and not sounds. The research team discovered this after tasking volunteers to describe words using grunts and...
Researchers over the last decade have narrowed in on the cause of Neanderthal extinction in prehistoric Spain and the answer is that they were unable to trap or capture smaller prey, especially rabbits.		Source: Akkharat J. / Adobe Stock

How Rabbits Led to Neanderthal Extinction in Iberia and Elsewhere

There were undoubtedly many reasons why the Neanderthals finally went extinct in Europe 40,000 years ago. One hypothesis states that the inability of the species to adapt to hunting small animals...
The evidence found in north China from roughly 40,000 years ago, including advanced stone tools and ochre processing knowledge, was created by ancient humans. However, archaeologists are still trying to figure out who these ancient hominins were, and the choices are Neanderthals, Denisovans or Homo sapiens.		Source: Gorodenkoff / Adobe Stock

40,000-year-old Tools Used by Ancient Humans Unearthed In North China

Archaeologists in China have unearthed a hoard of intricately crafted stone blades and ochre processing activities attributed to ancient humans living less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of...
Neanderthal spine (bottom) and post-industrial modern human spines (top) depicting differences in wedging and curvature of the lower back. Source: Scott Williams / NYU’s Department of Anthropology

Neanderthals and Modern Humans Had Similar Posture, New Study Finds

It had long been believed that the now-extinct Neanderthals walked differently and had a different posture than modern humans. This was based on comparative anatomical studies between ancient...
Representational image of an Egyptian Cobra.	 Source: Ghorayr / CC BY-SA 4.0

Oldest Fossils of Egyptian Cobra Ancestors Found in Fayoum Depression

A team from Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center (MUVP) has found the oldest fossils of Egyptian cobra ancestors dating back 37 million years to the Eocene Epoch. The team, which...
Oxford University's Big Data Institute has used ancient and modern DNA to create the world's "largest family tree" spanning 100,000 years! 		Source: milankubicka / Adobe Stock

“Largest Family Tree” Is Helping Trace the Entirety of Human History

Researchers from Oxford University’s Big Data Institute have engaged in the most Herculean of tasks and combined ancient and modern DNA to record the largest family tree ever made , dating back a...
African genetic research has gone to a new level by looking at what happened in Africa after the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens migrated into Eurasia. Rock painting of humans and antelopes from the Drakensberg mountains, South Africa by the San bushman tribe. 		Source: EcoView / Adobe Stock

Genetic Research Untangles Africa’s Human Evolutionary History

An international team of anthropologists, archaeologists, and genetic researchers that included 44 scientists from 12 countries has completed a new African genetic research study that reveals more...

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