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 ...

Human evolution is often told as a tidy story of adaptation, yet some of our most familiar body parts still defy straightforward explanation. From the jut of the human chin to the curve of the outer ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

A new Yale study provides a fuller picture of the genetic changes that shaped the evolution of the human brain, and how the process differed from the evolution of chimpanzees. For the study, published ...

Four lifelike reconstructions of prehistoric humans have been unveiled — including a model of a species often dubbed "the hobbit," which, as an adult, was about the same height as a modern 4-year-old.

Humans were living in rainforests roughly 150,000 years ago, some 80,000 years earlier than was previously thought—and may have been an important center for early human evolution. This is the ...

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 ...

Ancient, fossilized teeth, uncovered during a decades-long archaeology project in northeastern Ethiopia, indicate that two different kinds of hominins, or human ancestors, lived in the same place ...

Renaud Joannes-Boyau receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Manish Arora receives funding from US National Institutes of Health. He is the founder of Linus Biotechnology, a start-up ...

Researchers found that ancient hominids—including early humans—were exposed to lead throughout childhood, leaving chemical traces in fossil teeth. Experiments suggest this exposure may have driven ...