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.
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...
A new Tel Aviv University study suggests that the genetic profiles of two extinct mammals with African ancestry - woolly mammoths, elephant-like animals that evolved in the arctic peninsula of...
In 2014, a fresh analysis on a set of human remains dating back 13,000 years, which were found on the east bank of the Nile in northern Sudan , suggested the individuals were victims of an intergroup...
The Guanches were the white-skinned and fair-haired aboriginal people of the Canary Islands. With their location so near to North Africa, their origins have long presented a mystery for researchers...
A study has made a startling claim. It argues that an extinct species of humans, the Denisovans , may have mated with modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) as late as 15,000 years ago. This claim is based...
Researchers from the University of Huddersfield, with colleagues from the University of Cambridge and the University of Minho in Braga, have been using a genetic approach to tackle one of the most...
Detailed data and minute details have both fed into an exhibition taking place In the English city of Brighton, that offers people a chance to see not only physical cultural items, but their ancient...
University College London / Science Daily Skin color is one of the most visible and variable traits among humans and scientists have always been curious about how this variation evolved. Now, a study...
By Christina Troelsen / Science Daily Researchers from Aarhus University, Denmark, and Copenhagen Zoo have discovered that the human mutation rate is significantly slower than for our closest primate...
In recent years there have been a series of finds that have revolutionized our understanding of the Neanderthals and their extinction in Eurasia. It is widely held in academic circles that...
The question of what makes us human is one that is fascinating to most of us, and for many the answer lies in looking back to our roots as a species. 2018 was a fantastic year for learning new and...
By combining deep learning algorithms and statistical methods, investigators from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG) of the Centre for...
By Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg / Science Advances A relative of modern humans that lived at least 104,000 years ago in northern China showed evidence of dental growth and development very similar to...