This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...

The Indigenous peoples of the Bolivian highlands are survivors. For thousands of years they have lived at altitudes of more than two miles, where oxygen is about 35 percent lower than at sea level.

Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to ...

In paleoanthropology, a rare, nearly-complete skeleton can rewrite entire chapters of the human origin story. The “Little ...

A 1.6-million-year-old Ethiopian skull blends ancestor and descendant features, rewriting the origin story of Homo erectus.

Revolutionary fossil evidence from Ethiopia is challenging decades of scientific consensus about human origins. New discoveries suggest that the famous Lucy fossil, long considered a direct ancestor ...

Ten fossil teeth belong to new Australopithecus species Found in Afar Region, they are 2.65 million years old This species coexisted with an early Homo species Fossils underscore complex nature of ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

Human placentas produce exceptionally high hormone levels that may have driven our brain evolution, not male competition as traditionally thought These pregnancy hormones directly influence fetal ...

A newly reconstructed fossil face from Ethiopia reveals surprising complexity in early human evolution. By digitally fitting together teeth and fossilized bone fragments, researchers reconstructed a ...

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 ...