Fossils discovered at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco represent the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens, dating back around 300,000 years. This episode explores how these finds reshaped ideas about human ...

Newly published research appearing in the journal Nature (Ragsdale, A. P. et al., “A weakly structured stem for human origins in Africa,” Nature [2023]) proposes a new interpretation regarding the ...

It seems that southern Africa provided an ecological refuge where people adapted successfully for more than 200,000 years – without other hunter-gatherer groups coming in from elsewhere.

Human evolution is not a straight line but a complex branching tree shared with other great apes. This overview explains the ...

Homo sapiens has existed for at least 300,000 years, but its exact origin is still unknown. Some theories say that it evolved in East Africa about 50,000 years ago and expanded southwards, but now a ...

Researchers have virtually reconstructed a crushed and distorted 1 million-year-old human skull discovered in China. The newly restored cranium may have belonged to a relative of the mysterious ...

In testing the genetic material of current populations in Africa and comparing against existing fossil evidence of early Homo sapiens populations there, researchers have uncovered a new model of human ...

Scientists agree that humanity originated in Africa, but we still have a lot to learn about how populations moved and diverged across the continent. It's been suggested that our origins can be ...

That could place the ancestors of Homo sapiens—modern humans—outside Africa, an idea which flips everything palaeontologists ...

Important, previously unrecognized genetic changes common to all ancient and modern Homo sapiens spread in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, a new study finds. After that, the same investigation ...

A sweeping new genetic analysis suggests that humans living in southern Africa spent roughly 100,000 years in isolation, long enough for their DNA to drift far beyond the range of genetic diversity ...

When studying how fossil hominids moved, researchers usually analyze the morphology of bones—which is crucial for ...