New research suggests fire was key to making our bodies successful in evolution – but not in the ways we previously thought.

As The Jungle Book’s King Louie knows all too well, the ability to control fire is what sets humans apart from apes, fueling our cultural and biological evolution and rocketing us into the space age.

If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have ...

Archaeologists have found the oldest known evidence of hafted tools in East Asia, and they challenge a previously held assumption about stone tool use.

A 3.4M-year-old set of foot bones from Ethiopia is forcing paleoanthropologists to redraw one of the most familiar diagrams ...

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 ...

Analysis of ancient proteins may fill in the gaps of human evolution left by the decomposition of DNA. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it ...

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 ...

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 ...

National Research Council (U.S.) Board on Earth Sciences and Resources "The hominin fossil record documents a history of critical evolutionary events that have ultimately shaped and defined what it ...