Recent fossil finds could mean that "Lucy" wasn't our direct ancestor, some scientists say. Others strongly disagree.

And in a way it is. White and his colleagues assembled it to mark the place where they first found traces, in 1994, of “Ardi,” a female who lived 4.4 million years ago. Her skeleton has been described ...

Most people imagine our early primate ancestors swinging through lush tropical forests. But new research shows that they were braving the cold. As an ecologist who has studied chimpanzees and lemurs ...

This photo provided by the University of Poitiers in August 2022 shows from left, the femur, in posterior and medial view, and the right and left ulnae, in anterior and lateral view of Sahelanthropus ...

We don't just have sex to reproduce—new research suggests that using sex to manage social tension could be a trait that existed in the common ancestor of humans and apes six million years ago. Humans ...

Fossil spore and pollen data reveal our early ancestors evolved in cold, dry environments, with some even colonizing Arctic regions. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

For more than a century, scientists have been piecing together the puzzle of human evolution, examining fossil evidence to understand the transition from our earliest ancestors to modern humans. A new ...

Ethiopian researchers have made a groundbreaking discovery that fundamentally challenges our understanding of human evolution by uncovering fossil evidence of a previously unknown species that ...

This artist rendering shows hands of early human ancestors, called Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi, found in South Africa. The left images show photos of the bones, and the right images show ...

It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it. Anthropologist Nathaniel J. Dominy of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has advanced the investigation of the diet of early human ancestors by ...