February 13, 2019
Hard-knock hominid skeletons tell harsh tales
The Pleistocene was a hard time for hominids. Homo fossils from this period, when humans evolved and expanded from Africa and across Eurasia, are …
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Human Evolution
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February 4, 2019
"Cradle of Humankind" fossils can now be dated
Robyn Pickering was taught as an undergraduate about a collection of limestone caves in northern South Africa known collectively as the Cradle of …
November 29, 2018
Climate cooling a driver of Neanderthals' extinction
Neanderthals disappeared from Europe roughly 40,000 years ago, and scientists are still trying to figure out why. Did disease, climate change or …
July 3, 2018
Speartips point at south-to-north Clovis dispersal
During the last ice age, long before people first entered North America, much of the Canadian and American Rockies were buried under massive ice …
June 5, 2018
Trio of studies track stone tool technology in Kenya
About 300,000 years ago, East Africa was a hotbed of human evolution and innovation. Sweeping ecological changes contributed to the emergence of …
June 5, 2018
Weedy seeds gathered in once-green Sahara
Today, the vast and arid Sahara Desert seems an unlikely place to find early signs of seed gathering and plant cultivation in Africa, but new …
May 1, 2018
Oldest human remains outside Africa found in Israel
The recent discovery of a jawbone belonging to Homo sapiens, and associated stone tools, in Israel may push back the timing of the earliest human …
May 1, 2018
A new look at Cheddar Man
In 1903, a skeleton was found in a limestone cave in Cheddar Gorge, near Somerset, England. Radiocarbon dating in the 1970s revealed the remains …
February 23, 2018
Drought drove early humans from Africa
Genetics studies have dated the largest migrations of early Homo sapiens out of Africa to between 70,000 and 55,000 years ago, although smaller …
January 5, 2018
Nothing is clear about who left marks on ancient bones
An ongoing debate regarding the origin of scrape marks on ancient animal bones has taken a new turn. The marks were first thought to have been …
December 14, 2017
19th-century discovery now reveals modern human arrival in Sumatra
Modern humans began journeying out of Africa by at least 75,000 years ago, eventually expanding across the planet. Evidence of these early human …
December 11, 2017
Mysterious Miocene bipedal footprints found in Crete
A curious set of 5.7-million-year-old bipedal footprints found in western Crete — far from the cradle of humanity in Africa and dating to the …
June 19, 2017
Bipedalism left its mark on human skull: Kangaroos and upright rodents show same signs
The transition to bipedal walking in our ancestors changed the hominin skeleton in many ways. New research looking at how upright walking …
April 6, 2017
Lucy liked hanging out in trees
Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, is one of the most complete early hominin skeletons ever found. …
April 6, 2017
Geologic Column: Evolution of an ape-man
By the time I was 12, I had identified the greatest writer in the world. His name was Edgar Rice Burroughs and he wrote adventure stories about …
March 29, 2017
Dental plaque reveals later start date for hominin cooking
Ancient teeth have long been a source of information about ancient diets, mainly through analyses of isotopic compositions and wear patterns. In …
February 8, 2017
Early humans dealt with Ethiopian supervolcanoes
About 200,000 years ago, modern humans evolved in East Africa, including in what’s now Ethiopia. They — like earlier hominins who had preceded …
December 20, 2016
Green corridors led humans out of Africa
A trail of fossil, archaeological and genetic clues suggests that modern humans, who first evolved in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, may …
August 17, 2016
The new kid on the block
In 2013, cave explorers discovered a trove of human-like fossils in the Rising Star Cave in South Africa. Since then, more than 1,500 fossils …
August 17, 2016
Hominid vs. hominin
Before genetics came along and revealed just how closely modern humans and chimpanzees are related, humans were classified in their own family, …
August 16, 2016
Redefining Homo: Does our family tree need more branches?
As the sole surviving species of the genus Homo, we Homo sapiens are one of the most taxonomically lonely species living on Earth today. But dig …
August 15, 2016
New dating of 'hobbit' sheds light on when it lived
Since 2004, when scientists first announced the discovery of fossil remains of a new species of hominin from Indonesia — dubbed Homo floresiensis …
July 20, 2016
Teeth hold clues to human success, Neanderthal decline
During the Upper Paleolithic, modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted until about 40,000 years ago, when Neanderthals went extinct for unknown …
July 14, 2016
Denisovan DNA found in modern Pacific Islanders, ancient Spaniards
In the time that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were coexisting — and interbreeding — there was at least one more human species on the landscape, …