All  

Ancient Origins Tour IRAQ

Ancient Origins Tour IRAQ Mobile

Evolution

The Solid Muldoon was supposedly a prehistoric ‘petrified human body’ unearthed in 1877.

Solid Muldoon: Petrified Prehistoric Man was an Elaborate and Daring Hoax

The Solid Muldoon is the name given to a supposedly petrified prehistoric man that was ‘discovered’ in 1877. This ‘ petrified body’ was unearthed by William Conant at Muldoon Hill, a small hill not...
Penablanca, Cagayan Province, Philippines, near the entrance to the limestone Callao Cave where there is evidence of a new human species. Source: Michael / Adobe. Inset: A foot bone from Homo luzonensis. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali)

How Much Evidence is Enough to Declare a New Species of Human from a Philippines Cave Site?

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...
Cthulhu fossil reconstruction of Sollasina cthulhu. Source: Elissa Martin / Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

'Cthulhu' Fossil Reconstruction Reveals Monstrous Relative of Modern Sea Cucumbers

An exceptionally-preserved fossil from Herefordshire in the UK has given new insights into the early evolution of sea cucumbers, the group that includes the sea pig and its relatives, according to a...
What Peregocetus, the legged ancient whale might have looked like.

Ancient Whale with Four Legs Found Along the Coast of Peru

Cetaceans , the group including whales and dolphins , originated in south Asia more than 50 million years ago from a small, four-legged, hoofed ancestor. Now, researchers reporting the discovery of...
Man walking in a sea cave at sunset, illustration painting. New research on the Denisovans provides more insight on their lives and population spread.

A Trove of New Denisovan Discoveries Revealed At A Recent Anthropological Conference

The annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists held at the end of March in Cleveland, Ohio, was eagerly awaited by those with an interest in human origins as it would be...
The Stoned Ape theory proposes magic mushrooms helped the Homo erectus evolve quickly.

The Stoned Ape Theory and the Dawn of Human Consciousness: Did Our Prehistoric Ancestors Evolve by Getting High?

The origins of behavioral modernity and what exactly makes us human are topics which have fascinated people for hundreds of years. There is a plethora of theories as to which archaic human ancestor...
Homo erectus pekinensis, forensic facial reconstruction.

A Snapshot of Our Mysterious Ancestor Homo erectus

By Ian Moffat / The Conversation If you bumped into a Homo erectus in the street you might not recognize them as being very different from you. You’d see a certain “human-ness” in the stance, and his...
Portrait of three girls of different nationalities.

Genetic Breakthrough Changes the Way We View Skin Color

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...
DNA molecule spiral structure with unique connection.

Study Proves Human Mutation Rate Is Slower Than Believed Posing New Date For Human-Neanderthal Separation

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...
Neanderthal vs human skull.

Artificial Intelligence Has Identified Previously Undetected Hominid in the Human Family Tree

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...
Representational image of human skeletons. The discovery of anomalous skeletons suggests humanity may be older than we think.

Ancient Anomalous Human Skeletons: Humanity Could be Much Older Than We Think

There are many reported human skeletal finds which are in discordance with current evolutionary beliefs dating back to anomalously ancient geological periods in the distant past, way before it is...
West African rain forest during amazing sunset, Liberia, West Africa

Human Evolution: Secrets of Early Ancestors Could Be Unlocked by African Rainforests

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...
Artistic impression of primitive “Stone Age” man

Australian archaeologists dropped the term Stone Age decades ago, and so should you

“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...
This restoration is based on evidence from the Daka Member, Ethiopia. The photo in the background is from a gallery forest on the Kebena River, a tributary of the modern Awash River. The squatting posture is based on femoral anteversion frequent in Homo erectus. The hand ax is African latest early or early middle Acheulean. The cranial shape is based on BOU-VP-2-66, the Daka Calvaria.

Idle Not Innovative? New Study Says Laziness Led to the Extinction of Homo erectus

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...
The original fossils of Java Man, National Museum of Natural History, Leiden, the Netherlands.

Java Man and the Discovery of the ‘Missing Link’ in Evolutionary Theory

The second half of the 19th century was an incredibly exciting and contentious time for exploring the origins of human kind. Darwin’s theory, ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection’...
Eritrean Grand Canyon, East African rift valley.

Rethinking Homo sapiens? The story of our origins gets dizzyingly complicated

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...
Normal liver on the left, liver with cirrhosis on the right.

Study Reveals Hepatitis Virus has been Killing Humans Since the Stone Age

An international team of scientists led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Kiel has successfully reconstructed genomes from Stone Age...
Eyebrows on fleek: Model of a modern human skull next to Kabwe 1.

Why Expressive Brows Might Have Mattered in Human Evolution

Highly mobile eyebrows that can be used to express a wide range of subtle emotions may have played a crucial role in human survival, new research from the University of York suggests. Like the...
Rick Potts, director of the National Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian, surveys an assortment of Early Stone Age hand-axes discovered in the Olorgesailie Basin, Kenya.

New Insights into Rapid Advance in Human Innovative Thinking

The first evidence of human life in the Olorgesailie Basin comes from about 1.2 million years ago. For hundreds of the thousands of years, people living there made and used large stone-cutting tools...
Artists impression of a group of australopith

The Origin of ‘Us’: What We Know So Far About Where We Humans Come From

The question of where we humans come from is one many people ask, and the answer is getting more complicated as new evidence is emerging all the time. For most of recorded history humankind has been...
Adam and Eve (1640s) by Jacob Jordaens.

Do Adam and Eve Fit into the Evolutionary Story?

The common male and female ancestors of human beings are popularly known as “Genetic Adam” and “Genetic Eve.” A study conducted by researchers at the University of Sheffield claims all men can trace...
An illustration depicting the possible path of human evolution.

The Earliest Known Human Ancestor is a What?!

For those that believe human beings were created in God’s own image, the idea that we have monkeys in our evolutionary history is a little hard to swallow, so it is likely to cause even more upset...
“Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf in the forest” (1881) by Carl Larsson.

Humans Traveled Far and Wide Before Little Red Riding Hood Ever Made It Through the Woods

“Little Red Riding Hood” is a fairytale most children have heard. But if you’re not familiar, it tells the story of a young girl who wears a red velvet hood and cape and travels alone through a...
A reconstruction of ‘Lucy’ (public domain). Inset: One of the fossilized teeth discovered at Eppelsheim. Credit: The Museum of Natural History in Mainz

9.7 Million-Year-Old Teeth Found in Germany Belong to Hominin Only Known To Have Existed in Africa 4 Million Years Later

Archaeologists have made a discovery so sensational that they have waited 1 year to announce it as they had to be sure they had the dating correct. A set of teeth belonging to an early hominin...

Pages