From an incredible series of revelations about the ancient humans called Denisovans to surprising discoveries about tool making, this year has given us a clearer picture of how and why humans evolved ...

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.

More than a decade after the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, scientists are still working to understand how ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

For decades, a neat story about human origins has floated through textbooks and documentaries: modern humans emerged in East Africa, then spread south later. It’s clean, familiar, and easy to repeat.