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. In a paper published in the Oxford ...

A digital reconstruction of a million-year-old skull suggests humans may have diverged from our ancient ancestors 400,000 years earlier than thought and in Asia, not Africa, a study found. The ...

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 digital reconstruction of a million-year-old skull suggests humans may have diverged from our ancient ancestors 400,000 years earlier than thought and in Asia not Africa, a study said Friday. The ...

One of the biggest mysteries in human evolution has just been solved. In 2010, a groundbreaking genetic analysis revealed that east Asia was once home to a previously unknown group of enigmatic ...

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 ...

Scientists say they have solved the mystery of the Burtele foot, a set of 3.4 million-year-old bones found in Ethiopia in 2009. The fossils, along with others unearthed more recently, have now been ...

The British geneticist Steve Jones has recently given a lecture at University College London entitled “Is human evolution over?” His answer to his own question is in the affirmative. I agree with ...

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 ...

In southern Africa, a group of people lived in partial isolation for hundreds of thousands of years. This is shown in a new study based on analyses of the genomes of 28 people who lived between 10,200 ...

Scientists have reconstructed the head of an ancient human relative from 1.5 million year-old fossilized bones and teeth. But the face staring back is complicating scientists' understanding of early ...

Humans were isolated in southern Africa for about 100,000 years, which caused them to "fall outside the range of genetic variation" seen in modern-day people, a new genetic study reveals. The finding ...