In paleoanthropology, a rare, nearly-complete skeleton can rewrite entire chapters of the human origin story. The “Little ...

Synaptic plasticity allows brains to learn, adapt, and rewire. It’s foundational to memory, problem-solving, and complex ...

If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have evolved testicles of all different sizes. In almost all these separate cases, ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...

A mystery that started with the discovery of a pinkie finger bone in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia may finally have been cracked.

Over a century ago, anthropologist Raymond Dart chipped an ancient skull out of some rock from an ancient quarry — and revealed the face of an ancient human relative.

Analysis of ancient proteins may fill in the gaps of human evolution left by the decomposition of DNA. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it ...

Humans were living in rainforests roughly 150,000 years ago, some 80,000 years earlier than was previously thought—and may have been an important center for early human evolution. This is the ...

Researchers found that ancient hominids—including early humans—were exposed to lead throughout childhood, leaving chemical traces in fossil teeth. Experiments suggest this exposure may have driven ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

A lost chapter in human evolution has been revealed after an analysis of modern DNA found that we come from not one but two ancestral populations—ones that drifted apart and later reconnected long ...