Human evolution is not a straight line but a complex branching tree shared with other great apes. This overview explains the distinction between hominids and hominins and traces the evolutionary ...

If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have ...

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 ...

In 1758, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus gave humans a scientific name: Homo sapiens, which means "wise human" in Latin. Although Linnaeus grouped humans with other apes, it was English biologist ...

John Gowlett receives funding from PAST Africa and Wenner-Gren Foundation, and his work has previously been supported by The Leverhulme Trust. He is associated with a new series of podcasts on human ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. "Lucy," our 3.2 million-year-old hominin relative, couldn't run very fast, according to a new ...

Australopithecus is an extinct group of ape-like modern human relatives—or potentially ancestors—that walked upright and ...

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift—driven not by genes, but by culture. "Human evolution seems to be changing ...

A paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution finds that the relatively high rate of autism-spectrum disorders in humans is likely due to how humans evolved in the past. The paper is titled "A general ...