In this video segment adapted from NOVA, see how paleoanthropologists—including Don Johanson, with his famous discovery of the Australopithecus afarensis "Lucy"—have used the fossil record to identify ...

Human bipedalism may have evolved to protect babies too heavy to hang on our increasingly hairless bodies, says Brazilian physicist Lia Amaral. Apart from Homo sapiens, primate babies cling to the fur ...

Human childbirth is commonly viewed as uniquely difficult and dangerous. The reason: The combination of bipedalism and large ...

Few attributes of being human have attracted more intense thought than the simple fact that, unlike all other living mammals, we walk upright on two legs. Human bipedalism represents a major ...

A male western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo. The origin of human bipedalism has long been a hot topic among paleoanthropologists. At the very least it is seen as something ...

Near a lake in Kenya, researchers have found ancient footprints of large birds, horse and antelope relatives, and they've also found evidence of two distinct human ancestors. As NPR's Jessica Yung ...

Scientists have now identified two innovations that occurred long ago in the human evolutionary lineage that helped facilitate this defining characteristic. Bipedal locomotion - walking upright on two ...

Carl Sagan famously said, “We are made of star stuff.” For modern humans, this may be true in a very unexpected way. Research published Tuesday in The Journal of Geology suggests that stars are what ...