Did modern humans erase Neanderthals, or did our close cousins fade away for reasons that had little to do with us? A pair of major papers in Science and Nature on Dec. 12, 2024, sharpen that question ...

Building the human story based on a few artefacts is tricky – particularly for wooden tools that don’t preserve well, or cave ...

Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis occurred, where life emerged from non-life. Imagine a hot, watery mix of ...

Humans are fundamentally technological creatures. We depend on the manufacture and use of tools for our survival to a degree qualitatively greater than any other species. Therefore, an understanding ...

Human evolution has long been tied to growing brain size, and new research suggests prenatal hormones may have played a surprising role. By studying the relative lengths of index and ring fingers — a ...

New clues about our earliest ancestors suggest they may have reached Eurasia sooner than scientists once thought. Fossils found in Romania hint that hominins left Africa nearly two million years ...

A new analysis argues that this daily work of processing and cooking food helped reshape human bodies and social life. It explores how fire, tools, and cooperation driven by women changed humans’ ...

The first major evolutionary change in the human diet was the incorporation of meat and marrow from large animals, which occurred by at least 2.6 million years ago. The diet of the earliest hominins ...

Learn how the chin became an evolutionary byproduct that's unique to humans.

The evolution of the human species is marked by an increase in brain size. Now new research suggests that could be partly ...

Researchers discovered evidence for human habitation of rainforests 150,000 years ago. This pushes back the oldest known evidence of humans in rainforests by more than double the previously known ...

Stone tools like this one, excavated at the Anyama site, reveal that humans were present at the rainforested site roughly 150,000 years ago. Credit: Jimbob Blinkhorn, MPG Stone tools like this one, ...