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.
By Eleanor Scerri / The Conversation Think of African rainforests and the picture is inevitably one of a dark and forbidding realm where life is abundant, yet alarmingly cryptic. Rather than the...
Climate change may have played a more important role in the extinction of Neanderthals than previously believed, according to a new study published in the journal, Proceedings of the Natural Academy...
“Stone Age” is a term often used to refer to early periods in human cultural evolution, when deliberately manufactured sharp stone flakes were the main cutting tool. But it’s also used to describe...
Together with their sister group the Neanderthals, Denisovans are the closest extinct relatives of currently living humans. "We knew from previous studies that Neanderthals and Denisovans must have...
The path of least resistence may not be the best to take. New archaeological research from The Australian National University (ANU) has found that Homo erectus , a species of primitive humans, went...
Archaeologists in Spain have made a number of discoveries inside an ancient cave in Catalonia which suggest that Neanderthals had hot water and separate living quarters around 60,000 years ago. The...
Michael Westaway & Francis David Bulbeck / The Conversation Humans are diverse in size and shape – but some populations are of relatively low average height, and historically described using the...
Our species' ability to occupy diverse and 'extreme' settings around the world in the Middle and Late Pleistocene (300-12 thousand years ago) stands in stark contrast to the ecological adaptations of...
Chinese scientists are saying an early human ancestor, Peking Man, set up fireplaces and cooked food about 600,000 years ago—the earliest evidence for fire use by a human species yet. They found...
By Darren Curnoe / The Conversation You might say it’s the ultimate prize of science, to discover when, where and why humans evolved. For a long time, the evidence has been overwhelming that Homo...
In 2015, scientists announced an earlier time frame than previously estimated for the lifetime of an early proto-human dubbed Little Foot – as much as 3.67 million years ago. The nearly complete...
Ancient tools and bones have been discovered in China by archaeologists that suggest early humans left Africa and arrived in Asia earlier than previously thought. The artifacts show that our earliest...
This month marks the golden jubilee of a watershed event in the history of this nation that should cause all Australians to pause and reflect. On July 15, 1968, while searching for clues to past...
More than 3 million years ago, our ancient human ancestors, including their toddler-aged children, were standing on two feet and walking upright, according to a new study published in Science...
Charles Stanish / The Conversation “ The Epic of Gilgamesh ” is one of the earliest texts known in the world. It’s the story of a god-king, Gilgamesh, who ruled the city of Uruk in Mesopotamia in the...
If you’re from the British Isles, do you ever wonder if you’re a descendant of the marauding Vikings known sometimes to rape and pillage far from home and other times to set up settlements and...
Starting about 7,000 years ago, something weird seems to have happened to men: Over the next two millennia, recent studies suggest, their genetic diversity - specifically, the diversity of their Y...
A case study of the inhabitants of Easter Island served in part as the basis for a mathematical model showing the ways a technologically advanced population and its planet might develop or collapse...
The first ancient human fossil found in Taiwan may indicate the presence of an unknown archaic species of humans who lived in Asia during the Pleistocene era, possibly hundreds of thousands of years...
When and how did the first people come to the Americas? The conventional story says that the earliest settlers came via Siberia, crossing the now-defunct Bering land bridge on foot and trekking...
The largest pre-Hispanic civilization in the Americas was the Inca Empire and from their capital city of Cusco, rulers known as Sapa Inka (Quechua for "the only Inca”) controlled a vast territory...
A Triceratops brow horn discovered in Dawson County, Montana, has been controversially dated to around 33,500 years, challenging the view that dinosaurs died out around 65 million years ago. The...
Mauricio Gonzalez Forero / The Conversation Most animals have brains in proportion to their body size – species with larger bodies often have larger brains. But the human brain is almost six times...
Critically endangered South American forests thought to be the result of climate change were actually spread by ancient communities, archaeologists have found. Huge swathes of land in Chile, Brazil...