Researchers have identified a "tipping point" about 2.7 million years ago when global climate conditions switched from being relatively warm and stable to cold and chaotic, as continental ice sheets ...

Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis ...

For decades, the dominant theory in human evolution suggested that modern humans descended from a single ancestral lineage in Africa. However, groundbreaking new research from the University of ...

When a villager in northern Greece broke into a limestone wall and exposed a human skull, he did not just find a fossil, he ...

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 ...

Fossils from a Moroccan cave have been dated with remarkable accuracy to about 773,000 years ago, thanks to a magnetic ...

“For over a hundred years, it was hypothesized that our ancestors lived in grassland savannahs and that this major ecosystem change drove human evolution, including the origins of bipedalism and ...

Early humans : of whom do we speak? / Richard E. Leakey -- Homo habilis - a premature discovery : remembered by one of its founding fathers, 42 years later / Phillip V. Tobias -- Where does the genus ...

In 2009, Yohannes Haile-Selassie and his team were combing the desert landscape of Burtele, a paleontological site in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, when Stephanie Melillo found something remarkable: an ...

The evolution of the human species is marked by an increase in brain size. Now new research suggests that could be partly ...