A question has puzzled paleoanthropologists for decades. Could Neanderthals produce and understand the equivalent of human speech? Were Neanderthals verbally and linguistically capable, just like...
A study of some of the oldest remains associated with early humans from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania has produced some intriguing results. A microbial study of sediments from 1.7-1.8 million years...
Elephants ranged over Schöningen in Lower Saxony 300,000 years ago. In recent years, remains of at least ten elephants have been found at the Paleolithic sites situated on the edges of the former...
How is our species unique compared to other hominins? What did Late Pleistocene humans have that their neighbors lacked? They obviously interacted, but Homo sapiens survived when others could not. A...
Several years ago, a team of scientists from the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, set out to put a human face to ancient hominid species that once walked the Earth. Using...
In 1924, a 3-year-old child’s skull found in South Africa forever changed how people think about human origins. The Taung Child, our first encounter with an ancient group of proto-humans or hominins...
Fire starting is a skill that many modern humans struggle with in the absence of a lighter or matches. The earliest humans likely harvested fire from natural sources, yet when our ancestors learned...
The golden eagle has had a special place in many human societies for millennia. They have been hunted , used to hunt and also honored. But the Neanderthals also seem to have prized and revered these...
A chance discovery by archaeologists in 2008 of a finger phalanx of an archaic human found in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia has helped change everything we know about...
A team of archaeologists has announced the discovery of over a thousand stone artifacts, with some of them being up to 1.76 million years old. The discovery took place at Wadi Dabsa, in southwest...
New research conducted by scientists at the University of York and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona reveals for the first time that Europe’s earliest humans did not use fire for cooking, but had...
A new study of the genomes of Australasians has revealed sections of DNA that do not match any known hominin species. The dramatic findings mean that a mystery species bred with ancient humans in the...
Rising temperatures approximately 1.4 million years ago might have assisted the migration of hominins out of Africa and into Europe, a new study suggests. Dr. Jordi Agustí and colleagues have...
Lantian Man is the name given to subspecies of Homo erectus of which ancient fossils were found in Lantian County, Shaanxi Province in China in 1963. Lantian Man were originally dated to 1.15 million...
A new analysis of ancient skulls retrieved from a deep bone pit in the Atapuerca Mountains of northern Spain, suggests they belong to an unknown species that has characteristics of Neanderthals, as...