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Paleoanthropology
8mins
Human origins once looked like a simple migration story. According to geneticist David Reich, new evidence keeps turning it into a record of contact, disappearance, and surprise.
In “The Secret History of Denisovans,” Silvana Condemi and François Savatier trace the story of our mysterious hominin ancestor.
New research challenges old assumptions about the evolution of the human brain.
Early modern humans interbred with Neanderthals — and scientists recently pinpointed a key site of contact.
They have held our fascination ever since we first identified their remains.
A 1.5-million-year-old hominin bone shows signs that the victim was eaten by lions — and humans.
There were at least eight other human species, some of whom existed for far longer than we have. Who were they?
Was our distant ancestor a biped or not – i.e., human or not human?
Fossils of Australopithecus in a South African cave are one million years older than previously thought. This challenges the consensus that humans first evolved in East Africa.
Was this a moment when humans interbred with Neanderthals?
A new analysis of an ancient hominin fossil sheds light on the "Out of Africa" dispersal events that occurred more than one million years ago.
Dating of volcanic ash suggests the remains are at least 230,000 years old.
Bears, chimps, or humans? A track of five poorly preserved footsteps at Laetoli has puzzled paleontologists for decades. Now, a research paper from Nature claims to have solved the mystery.
Today, every Homo species is extinct besides humans. But one of our close evolutionary relatives still lives on in our DNA.
Fittingly, the skull was found in the Rising Star cave of South Africa, itself located at a site known to UNESCO as the Cradle of Mankind.
The cosmic story of us wasn’t inevitable, but the culmination of many chance events. By the time our planet was four billion years old, the rise of large plants and animals […]