From an incredible series of revelations about the ancient humans called Denisovans to surprising discoveries about tool making, this year has given us a clearer picture of how and why humans evolved ...

National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek is retracing the path of human migration. More specifically, the scientific ...

In a first-of-its-kind discovery, a set of remarkable footprints found recently in East Africa has revealed that two species of extinct human ancestor crossed paths within hours of each other some 1.5 ...

Ancient, fossilized teeth, uncovered during a decades-long archaeology project in northeastern Ethiopia, indicate that two different kinds of hominins, or human ancestors, lived in the same place ...

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

The oldest human-crafted bone tools on record are 1.5 million years old, a finding that suggests our ancestors were much smarter than previously thought, a new study reports. The tools, made from ...

Fifty years after a fossil skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis was unearthed in Ethiopia, we know so much more about how this iconic species lived and died. When you purchase through links on our ...

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift—driven not by genes, but by culture. "Human evolution seems to be changing ...

A new Yale study provides a fuller picture of the genetic changes that shaped the evolution of the human brain, and how the process differed from the evolution of chimpanzees. For the study, published ...

Humans, who are classified among the five great apes, are closest genetically, i.e., DNA similarity, to chimpanzees (98.8%-99%) and bonobos (98.8%). [Blueringmedia ...