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...
A study on the history of facial expressions has discovered humans developed friendly facial expressions to attract less-aggressive, selected breeding partners, as a result of ‘self-domestication’...
Nick Longrich / The Conversation 300,000 years ago, nine human species walked the Earth. Now there’s just one. The Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis , were stocky hunters adapted to Europe’s cold...
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...
Just one week after it was announced that the inhabitants of the Qesem Cave, located 12 kilometers east of Tel Aviv in Israel, perhaps practiced swan shamanism as much as 420,000 years ago, comes...
Fossil animal droppings, charcoal from ancient fires and bone fragments litter the ground of one of the world's most important human evolution sites, new research reveals. The latest evidence from...
They walked and perhaps played along the beach in a prehistoric world; we know this as archaeologists have discovered hundreds of Neanderthal footprints in France— with most of them left by children...
The Stone Age is the longest period of human history, lasting from 2.6 million years ago to about 5,000 years ago. It is also the period of human history that is the least well known relative to...
A Denisovan finger fossil is revealing secrets about this extinct Stone Age race. A decade ago, scientists excavating Denisova Cave , an ancient archaeological site in southern Siberia, discovered...
Stone tools uncovered in Mongolia by an international team of archaeologists indicate that modern humans traveled across the Eurasian steppe about 45,000 years ago, about 10,000 years earlier than...
A new study suggests that Neanderthals commonly suffered from “swimmer's ear” or “surfer’s ear” - dense bony growths that protrude into the ear canal. This is usually caused by a habitual exposure to...
The Epic of Gilgamesh is regarded as one of mankind’s greatest literary and historical works. Many authors have studied the text in an effort to explain the nature of Gilgamesh’s tyranny and his...
For a people from whom one 41,000 year old finger bone fossil from a nine year old girl, along with a bracelet she wore, were (until recently) the only authenticated known artifacts, the mysterious...
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...
Current evidence suggests that Neanderthals and humans shared a last common ancestor sometime between 765,000 and 550,000 years ago. We speculate that this ancestor was H. heidelbergensis . The story...
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...