Discover the latest news, features and articles about who Neanderthals were, whether they mated with modern humans and when ...

The discovery of ancient human cousins has long stirred wonder and debate. Early Neanderthal remains offered a glimpse into our distant past, prompting questions about how they lived and whether they ...

A complex picture of how Neanderthals died out, and the role that modern humans played in their disappearance, is emerging.

On the slopes of Mount Carmel in northern Israel, a small skull has changed the story of human history. Buried in Skhul Cave roughly 140,000 years ago, the remains of a five-year-old child show that ...

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Modern humans may indeed have wiped out Neanderthals – but not through war or murder alone. A new study suggests that when the two species interbred, a slow-acting genetic incompatibility increased ...

Humans and our ancestors have been exposed to lead for 2 million years, but the toxic metal may have actually helped our species to develop language — giving us a key advantage over our Neanderthal ...

Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were probably interbreeding over a huge area stretching from western Europe into Asia. It was thought that this probably happened in the eastern Mediterranean region, but ...

Deep inside a cave in central Spain, Neanderthals repeatedly carried horned and antlered skulls of large herbivores, stripped them of flesh, and arranged them near fires over what appears to be ...

Fossils offer a detailed record of early human skulls but not the brains inside them. So researchers have been using genetic material taken from those fossils to search for clues about how the human ...

For decades, the Schoningen spears held pride of place as the world's oldest hunting weapons. Eight wooden javelins, pulled from an ancient lakeshore in northern Germany during the 1990s, seemed to ...