Discover the latest news, features and articles about the origin of the human species and what makes us different from our ape cousins.

Jawbones and other remains, similar to specimens found in Europe, were dated to 773,000 years and help close a gap in Africa’s fossil record of human origins. By Franz Lidz Researchers on Wednesday ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to unravel in 2025. Analysis of DNA extracted from the fossil electrified the ...

Something about a warm, flickering campfire draws in modern humans. Where did that uniquely human impulse come from? How did our ancestors learn to make fire? How long have they been making it?

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. If I tried to recap all the new fossils, new methods and ...

Free Expression: Speaking on Feb. 26, 2025, two unlikely prophets of a new spirituality—co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, and co-founder of Pinterest, Evan Sharp—entranced an audience of ambitious ...

Renaud Joannes-Boyau receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Manish Arora receives funding from US National Institutes of Health. He is the founder of Linus Biotechnology, a start-up ...

A groundbreaking international study changes the view that exposure to the toxic metal lead is largely a post-industrial phenomenon. The research reveals that our human ancestors were periodically ...

Share on Pinterest Human brain cell evolution may be linked to autism, neurodiversity, according to a new study. Image credit: Lauren Lee/Stocksy A new study concludes that the speed at which the ...

A digital reconstruction of a one-million-year old skull in China called Yunxian 2 suggested that our species started to emerge half a million years earlier than previously believed, according to a ...

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 ...