The chin is one of our most familiar features, yet scientists still debate why we evolved it. Here’s a breakdown of what we ...

“Hundreds of fossils representing over a dozen species of Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, and Homo had been found in the Afar ...

The prehistoric artist likely created the image by spraying ochre mixed with water over a hand flattened on the wall of a ...

A partial skeleton dating back more than two million years is the most complete yet of Homo habilis, one of the earliest ...

A rare Homo habilis skeleton from Kenya reveals how early humans moved, climbed, and adapted more than two million years ago.

Environmental change doesn’t affect evolution in a single, predictable way. In large-scale computer simulations, scientists discovered that some fluctuating conditions help populations evolve higher ...

A palm-sized fragment of elephant bone, shaped and used as a precision tool almost half a million years ago, has been identified as the oldest known elephant-bone implement in Europe. Although the ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to unravel in 2025. Analysis of DNA extracted from the fossil electrified the ...

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. If I tried to recap all the new fossils, new methods and ...

Bears look like textbook mammals, but hidden in their evolutionary history are two dramatic departures from the standard blueprint of growth and adaptation. For the first time, scientists have ...

"Consciousness," although challenging to define, can be thought of as a first-person awareness of one's surroundings and oneself. You sense the world through your eyes, nose, ears and hands, and track ...