More than three million years ago, the ancestors of modern humans were still spending a considerable amount of their lives in trees, but something new was happening. David Raichlen, an assistant ...

The oldest distinguishing feature between humans and our ape cousins is our ability to walk on two legs—a trait known as bipedalism. Among mammals, only humans and our ancestors perform this atypical ...

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 ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — During the past 100 years, scientists have tossed around a great many hypotheses about the evolutionary route to bipedalism, to what inspired our prehuman ancestors to stand up ...

New analysis of ancient leg and arm bones found in Chad in 2001 has led researchers to conclude that one of our earliest known ancestors walked upright 7 million years ago. A new study published ...

A blackened, broken leg bone from Earth’s prehistoric past may hold the answer to when early humans diverged from apes and started their own evolutionary path. The fossilized find, first uncovered two ...

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected]. This is an important question because many ...

Fifty years ago, a remarkable fossil was unearthed in the Afar Rift Valley of Ethiopia, forever transforming our understanding of human evolution. Uncovered by a young paleoanthropologist, Donald ...

Bipedalism is a defining trait of the hominin lineage, associated with a transition from a more arboreal to a more terrestrial environment. While there is debate about when modern human-like ...

When and how was walking invented? This is an important question because many anthropologists see bipedalism — which means walking on two legs — as one of the defining characteristics of “hominins,” ...

The first evidence of human relatives walking on two feet comes from about 70 footprints left by at least two Australopithecus afarensis walking across soft volcanic ash about 3.6 million years ago. A ...